How Does the Use of Cognates Help You in Both Spanish and English - Assignment Example

A cognate, in language, is a word genetically related to a word in another language with practically the same meaning. For instance, the Spanish word“banco” and the English word “bank” are cognates, both referring to a business offering financial services. Cognates are especially helpful to young students learning a new language because it connects a language they have already mastered the new language.

This bridge-structured strategy to learning a new language comes naturally to students who seek out bits of information they can already understand in the new linguistic context. For example, if an English-speaking student learning Spanish is assigned to independently read a story written in the new language, the student will struggle to try to comprehend the many complex rules of grammar that exist in the Spanish language. However, if the student instead decides to focus on recognizable cognates in the story, the student will be able to comprehend more of the story and perform better on evaluation and in practice.

While grammatical structures are useful in comprehending the content written in the new language, these structures work well for students who are advanced in their language learning. So long as a student can grasp the basic logical/grammatical functions of “not” (the negation), “and” (the conjunction), “or” (the disjunction), and a few other operators, what is important for learning comprehension in language-learning is vocabulary. Utilizing cognates helps students feel more comfortable in the new language knowing there are always clues in the text to fall back on if he or she begins to struggle.

This is especially true if the cognates one notices are essential to the themes or message of the text or assignment.