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EDUCATING: THE NEXT GENERATION

MultiLingual Education

"The Naughty Lion" performed by the Academy of Chinese Performing Artists, 1998.

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 Multilingual Education

Clearly the transcultural perspective calls for bilingual, trilingual, or even multilingual education. Language is a portal to culture. Generally, everyone should learn the language of their root culture and a "diversity" language of a culture very different from the root culture. As a rough generalization, the root and diversity languages should originate from different continents. This will provide two diverse perspectives to play off each other.

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Common Language

To facilitate interculture communciations, it is helpful to have a common or "official" language for a society. The common language should be studied as either a primary or secondary language. If the common language is sufficiently diverse from the root language, the common language can be the diversity language. If the root and common language are similar, then a diversity language can be chosen as a tertiary language.

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 Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Languages

For those for whom the common language is a root language, choosing a secondary language is simply finding a language from a culture very different from the root culture. English speaking Americans might choose an Asian or African language. For those for whom the root language is very different from the common language, either can be selected as the primary language and the other selected as the secondary language. For those with a root language similar to the common language, a diversity language can be selected as a tertiary language.

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 When are they learned.

Any language is best learned as early as possible. However, as a rough guide, the root language should be started in infancy, the secondary language should be learned in childhood, and the tertiary language learned in adolescence.

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Multilingual Education