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Misunderstanding bilingualism
- 1. MIS UNDERSTANDING BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN COLOMBIA Beatriz Peña Dix Universidad de los Andes [email_address]
- 29. Some Facts
- 40. Thank you very much!!!!
Hinweis der Redaktion
- There is no link between bilingualism and general ‘ intelligence ’ . Early research in the 60s suggested that bilinguals have a cognitive handicap, while subsequent studies in the 70s seemed to find that bilinguals are more intelligent than monolinguals. More recently, however, both conclusions have been found to be marred by failing to take important sociological and cultural effects into account (Grosjean 1982). The fact appears to be that bilingual children are neither more nor less intelligent than their monolingual peers. The idea that learning two languages from birth represents a burden is based on the assumption that the brain is naturally predisposed to deal only with one language. However, research in psychology and neuroscience research indicates that there are no foundations to the belief that monolingualism is somehow the biological norm. While is it true that the onset of speech in bilinguals may be slightly later than average, both monolingual and bilingual children go through the same major milestones in language development at approximately the same time. If the brain were set up to acquire only one language, bilinguals would be at a disadvantage: they might be expected to reach the milestones later, or at different times in their two languages. The fact that they follow the same developmental timetable as monolinguals points to the brain ’ s capacity to deal with multiple types of language input.
- Bilinguals can ‘distance themselves’ from language, so to speak, and talk about the form of language separately from its meaning. Many parents also report that bilingual children have more precocious reading skills, and this has recently been confirmed experimentally Bilinguals seem to have an advantage with respect to some aspects of reading that are related to metalinguistic awareness. A further spin-off of bilingualism is higher awareness of language and greater ability to think about it and talk about it. Bilingual children have a greater ability to focus on the form of language, abstracting away from meaning. Parents of bilingual children often report that their children engage in ‘ language play ’ that may take the form of ‘ funny accents ’ or impossible literal translations between one language and another.
- bilingual children do not mix the grammars; their errors are to a large extent predictable by the characteristics of the languages and those of particular structures. Language mixing (or code-switching) is not a sign of linguistic confusion (competent bilingual adults do it all the time for a variety of very good reasons). Many parents think that it is better to wait to introduce one of the languages until the other one is ‘well established’: this is wrong and deprives the child of input in the most crucial years. Early research on bilingual children actually seemed to show that children are unable to distinguish between the two languages to which they are exposed. The result – it was claimed – is a single unitary system in which both the vocabularies and the grammars of the two languages are fused. Language mixing – it was believed – was a telling sign of this lack of differentiation. Another sign was the fact that in some bilingual children the early words often involve a mix of words taken from both languages, with many referents named by only one word. So for example a German-Italian bilingual child might have either Apfel or mela for ‘ apple ’ , but not both. This led to the hypothesis that there was a unitary lexicon, which could not contain two words, one from Language A and one from Language B, for the same referent. More recent research has completely discredited the idea of the unitary system. First, there are new techniques for studying whether babies can tell the difference between one outside stimulus and another. If you show a child a picture of a ball it will eventually get bored and look away, but if you then show it a picture of a car it will look again. There are now experimental techniques that let us present pictures or sounds to a child until it gets bored, then present it with something subtly different and see if the child notices the difference (Jusczyk 1997). Using techniques like these, we have learned that monolingual babies ’ perceptual abilities are remarkably fine-tuned very early on: they know a lot about what their language sounds like long before they start producing their first words, and even at the age of a few months will notice when someone who was speaking English switches to speaking, say, Japanese. This makes it very implausible that bilingual children do not realize that they are hearing two languages. research on ‘ code-switching ’ – swapping back and forth between languages – shows that bilingual children, like bilingual adults, often switch from one language to another in order to achieve particular communicative effects. code-switching is not random but generally obeys a remarkably strict grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingual child is much more likely to say ‘ La house ’ than ‘ The casa ’ (Spanish article + English noun, rather than ‘ English article + Spanish noun), The most interesting counter-evidence to the confusion hypothesis comes from research that compares the order of acquisition of grammatical structures in monolingual and bilingual children. There is little evidence that the bilinguals ’ languages affect each other – they neither speed up nor delay normal acquisition processes.
- input is necessary, some effort and consistency too, that’s why acquiring four+ languages at the same time is not normally possible. So many people just assume that children will grow up bilingual if the parents speak two different languages and this is just not true. All typically developing children will learn one language, to learn two they need the opportunity and the motivation. Importance of input> give children as many opportunities as possible to realize that language X is not just mummy’s or daddy’s language but the language of a whole community of speakers (children included!). Do tell them about when Marco realized that all children in Italy spoke Italian!
- not true, apparently an early start is necessary to attain the same results as monolinguals, especially for phonetic/phonology (accent & pronunciation) but also for aspects of grammar. There are qualitative changes that seem to happen significantly earlier than is generally assumed, approximately between 3 and 4 years of age. So the best ‘ window of opportunity ’ is in the first 2-3 years of life. This does NOT mean that it ’ s a waste of time to introduce languages after age 3, though. Later childhood is still a privileged time for acquiring languages in a naturalistic way, and the results are often very good.
- not true, there are lots of non-linguistic advantages resulting from bilingualism, regardless of WHICH languages are involved, possibly over the whole lifespan. Bilinguals are better at coordinating different types of information and at ignoring irrelevant information, paying attention only to relevant cues. Evidence suggests that bilinguals are somewhat protected against the deterioration of cognitive abilities in old age. , the experience of dealing with two languages does seem to give bilingual children some cognitive advantages in several domains. Such advantages are particularly evident in tasks that involve cognitive flexibility and the control of attention (Bialystok 1991; 2001): bilinguals seem to be better at selectively paying attention, at inhibiting irrelevant information, and at switching between alternative solution to a problem. Bilingual speakers must develop a powerful mechanism for keeping the two languages separate, so that fluency in one language can be achieved without intrusions from the unwanted language. Therefore, the bilingual child ’ s constant experience of having two languages available and inhibiting one when the other is activated (Green 1986; 1998) enhances their ability to multitask in other domains.
- wrong, children are very sensitive to these issues and know whether a language is considered ‘ unimportant ’ , either by parents or by the community. Perhaps equally important, depriving children of exposure to one of the family languages may have other, more sociological, consequences. Children in this situation may feel that the second language is ‘ less important ’ than the first, and not really worth speaking. Children need to feel that the minority language is not just Mummy ’ s or Daddy ’ s language, but that it works exactly like the other language (anectode on Marco) Children do not know about the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, but they are exquisitely sensitive to the status and prestige of each language within the family and in the outside world. Even if the cognitive windows are still open, closed attitudes may put bilingualism out of reach.
- monolingual and bilingual children do not differ substantially in their linguistic behaviour, they tend to make the same developmental mistakes