Internet: a Multicultural Space to Express in Second Language's GLOSSARY - Maguie

1. Balanced Bilingual: a person who is able to use the languages (the native and second one) more or less with the same level of proficiency. 

2. Bicultural person: in this text we consider that a bicultural person is someone who has learned or acquired two or more cultures that co-exist or not in a place or region. This person should be able to cope in the different cultures as a native.   

3. Bilingual Education: a curriculum in which two or more languages are used as a medium of instruction. 

4. Bilingual Person: there are several theories concerning the level of proficiency a person needs in order to be bilingual. In this paper we agree with the theory of someone who is proficient in two or more languages in a balanced level. 

5. First or Native Language, L1: the language a person has acquired the first in his or her childhood without studying it. For example, a child of Portuguese speaking parents living in Colombia; his first language is that of his parents, Portuguese, because is the language he has acquired before Spanish. 

6. Foreign Language: a language used in a country other than one's own. A language that is not official in a country or geographic space. For example, a person who is learning mandarin in Colombia can say he or she is learning a foreign language because in Colombia that language is not official in any place of the country. 

7. Language Skills: in this article we refer to the four macro-skills concerning language: listening and reading (input) and speaking and writing (output). The expressive skills are those in which a person is asked to produce in the target language, that is to say, in the output language skills. 

8. Monolingual Environment or Community: a place, institution, society, etc. where only one language is spoken as officially. For example, in the Colombian Government, Spanish is the official language through which press communications and every sort of documents are written or spoken. 

9. Proficiency: to be proficient, which is to say, well advanced in an art, occupation, or branch of knowledge. A person who is very good at doing something, especially through practice. 

10. Second Language, L2: any language learned or acquired after the first language or mother tongue.  For example, a person who is Spanish native speaker and who learned, in her or his childhood or adolescence, the English language. English is his or her second language because it was learned after Spanish.