Old Misconceptions

It used to be thought that learning two languages was detrimental to a child's cognitive abilities. This was due to the idea that the two languages were learned independantly and the knowledge of learning one did not transfer into the other. It was thought that as more was learned in one language, less could be learned in the other. This gives the idea of there being a total amount of language aquision, and so the pieces learned in each language together have to add up to this total. For this reason parents and teachers tried to force children to only learn one language instead of cultivating the ability to learn both.

Looking at this theory today, it clearly does not make sense. The idea that knowledge in the two languages would be kept seperate instead of influencing each other isn't logical. Take for example a child who learns the concept of adding and subtracting in one language, would they have to relearn the concept in another language. By that same token, a child who learns to recognize that spoken language can be broken up into words, which can be represented in writing in one language is not going to need to be re-taught the idea of writing representing spoken language.

With a more sophisticated understanding of the brain we are now able to move past the idea that a person's language ability in one language is stunted by a second language ability. Today reasearch is being done to better understand all the advantages to being bilingual.

Enhancing Effects in Children

When a child is fluent in two languages, they know more than one word for the same object or concept. Current research leads to the belief that this can add to the cognitive flexibility of the child. The different connotations and ideas around a word has in the different languages the child knows allows the child to build a more complex understanding of the word at a younger age.

In the book "In Other Words" by Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta the authors talk about the idea that "the knowledge of two languages is greater than the sum of its parts." Basically the idea they are striving towards is that the benefits from being bilingual go much further than simply knowing two languages. Due to the fact that the structures and ideas of the two languages are so different it forces the child to think in more complicated ways than if they were learning only one language.

Inhibitory Control

A study done by Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin, Attention and Inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort, showed that bilingual children have better inhibitory control for ignoring perceptual information. The theory is that children who are bilingual are constantly sorting out extra perceptual information. For every object and action they have two words, one in each language, they could use. However, they need to choose which one to use based on the context they are in and the rules that apply to that context. This ability enhances the ability of bilinguals to selectively pay attention to appropriate information and inhibit focusing on other information. Through a card sort task, this research showed that this does seem to be the case.

This ability lends itself to application in other areas of education also. For example, in mathematical problem solving, many times the first part of the problem is understanding what the question is asking and figuring out what information helps in answering that question and what other information must be found.

Impact on Learning to Read

A study done by Ellen Bialystok, Gigi Luk and Ernest Kwan, Bilingualism, Biliteracy, and Learning to Read: Interactions Among Languages and Writing Systems showed the impact of knowing one language and writing system on learning another. They compared a group of monolinguals and three groups of bilinguals, with different relationships between English and the second language: for Spanish-English bilinguals the languages are similar and they are both written alphabetically in the same script, for Hebrew-English bilinguals the languages are different but they are both written alphabetically (phonetic Hebrew) in different scripts, for Chinese-English bilinguals both the language and the writing system are different.

The results showed that Spanish-English and Hebrew-English biliterates had the highest levels of literacy. Their interpretation of the results is that bilingualism has two affects on early aquisition of literacy: (1) a general understanding of reading and its basis in a print system and (2) the potential for transfer of reading principles across languages. All bilinguals showed an advantage in these areas over monolinguals, but the more similar that two languages the larger the advantage.