Empowering Teens Through Language Education and Cultural Awareness

Today’s teens are tomorrow’s future, and there’s no doubt that we need to invest all our efforts into helping them strive. Empowering teens benefits the entire society but also makes their individual life stories richer and more fulfilled.

While there are dozens of ways in which you could help your teen children or students become the best version of themselves, language education and cultural awareness aren’t always the first thing that pops into your mind.

But learning new languages and familiarizing oneself with different cultures can be a life-changing experience. Below, we’ll discuss how languages and culture empower teens and why we should motivate them to engage in language learning more.

Let’s take a look.

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source: Pexels 

Discovering the World

If we want our teens to be citizens of the world, we need to show them just how big and diverse that world is. Keeping them shelved inside their home countries and native languages isn’t going to do them any good.

Instead, they should be learning about all the sides of this planet and how people live fascinatingly different lives across the globe.

Language education gives them a chance to learn all this, become open-minded about the world, rethink their own life situations, and make smarter decisions in the future.

Improving Cognition

Did you know that language learning is a great exercise for your brain? In 90% of cases, students who speak or are learning another language excel academically over those who don’t.

This is because language learning helps improve:

  • brain function
  • memory
  • focus
  • problem-solving

So, teens who are engaged in language learning are also working on improving their overall brain activity. This benefit is helpful for all other tasks they’re performing, especially in school. So, they would soon realize they find it easier to complete their academic tasks, study, stay focused, and even pass exams.

Seizing Education Opportunities

Speaking another language can often be the gateway to studying abroad and seizing different educational opportunities. Students who speak more than one language can enroll in student exchange programs, summer schools, or even regularly attend college in another country.

This means that language learning helps teens find the best education for themselves. It also removes the barriers and limitations in terms of what schools they can choose. In case you need assistance with your application, these document translation services can be a huge help.

Language

Next, teens who speak more than one language are typically more interested in traveling abroad. But when we say travel, we don’t mean the basic tourist experience. In this case, teens are motivated to experience the culture through immersive traveling.

That means they’re more likely to:

  • get to know the locals
  • eat the local cuisine
  • stay in non-tourist locations
  • trying homestays
  • visit local events and festivals
  • volunteering and charity work

This way, teens are not just learning about other cultures but living them, too. Their cultural awareness is thus boosted, and they’re learning more about the world around them.

As a result, teens become more tolerant, liberal, and broad-minded in terms of the expectations they’ve set for themselves or the society and their families have set. It empowers them to make their own decisions and live more freely.

Professional Opportunities

Finally, both language learning and cultural awareness are a huge bonus in the process of applying for a job. Once these teens start looking for professional opportunities, they’ll find themselves in the pool of other candidates with similar qualifications. But language can set them apart.

Here’s how language helps you with professional opportunities:

  • more jobs are available to you
  • you can do networking with more people
  • your salary might be higher for speaking another language
  • you are a better communicator
  • you are more adaptable to diverse teams
  • you may be sent to international business assignments

Languages and cultural awareness can only benefit teens when the time comes for them to start searching the job market. There are best translation services online that can help overcome language barriers at the beginning while you’re still learning. 

Final Thoughts

As you can see, empowering teens through language education and cultural awareness is important, if not crucial, for their personal, social, and professional development. Languages teach them to look outside the box and step out of their comfort zone from the earliest age.

So, inspire the teens around you to seize language learning opportunities. Motivate them to embrace it and make the most out of that experience.

Mat Woods

Author Information

Mat Woods is the lead writer at TeenWire.org. He works tirelessly alongside the rest of the team to create useful, well-researched, trustworthy articles to help parents and their teens.