Bilingual Children: Language and Cognitive Development

Introduction: The Bilingual Education Debate

Much of the debate on bilingual education is wasteful, ironic, hypocritical, and regressive. It is wasteful because, instead of directing attention to sound educational practices, it has led to advocating specific "models" based solely on what language should be used for what purpose. It is ironic because most attacks on bilingual education arise from an unfounded apprehension that English will be abandoned in the United Kingdom, whereas the rest of the world fears the opposite: the lure of English and dominance of European traditions are seen by non-English-speaking countries as a danger to their own languages and cultures. It is hypocritical because most challengers of teaching in languages other than English simultaneously want to endorse foreign language requirements for high school graduation. Additionally, it is regressive and xenophobic, given that the rest of the world regards ability in at least two languages as a mark of good education.

The political struggle to defend bilingual education in schools has wasted much energy in the search for a "perfect" model. The recent history of bilingual education is replete with various models, all posing as panaceas. Overreliance on particular models often detracts from scrutiny of what really happens in schools. When proponents of bilingual education allow themselves to be drawn into battles over language choice, they too often lose sight of what should be their central goal: providing quality education to language minority students in ways that integrate them into both their own and the majority culture.

If educators could set aside their biases about language use, they would find sufficient evidence to guide them toward providing effective education in any language. They would recognize that the mission of schools is to educate students so that they have real choices when they graduate. Educating bilingual students must go beyond merely teaching them English or merely maintaining their native language. The professional world expects graduates to have not only high-level literacy in English and familiarity with other languages, but also critical thinking ability and the aptitude to engage with new situations and concepts. Bilingual students have not just the ability but also the right to be prepared to face the challenges of contemporary society.

Criticism of bilingual education is not entirely groundless (Bialystok, 2001). Some bilingual programs are unsuitable for delivering quality education even if they have produced a few successful students — much of that credit belonging to the heroic efforts of individual teachers (Brisk, 1990, 1994). Advocates must acknowledge that many bilingual programs are substandard. Rather than offering blanket approval to programs on the basis of whether they use the children's mother tongue, supporters of bilingual education should be selective, backing only those programs and schools that adhere to the principles of high-quality education for bilingual students.

Bilingual education too frequently falls victim to political, financial, and social obstacles that feed on hostile attitudes toward bilingual programs, teachers, students, their families, languages, and traditions. Such attitudes shape a school culture that restricts good education for language minority students. Research on effective schools demonstrates that schools can stimulate academic achievement for students regardless of how external factors affect them. Thoughtful attention to language and culture can support English language development without sacrificing the native language or the capacity to function in a cross-cultural world.

Assessment of bilingual education programs requires moving beyond compensatory agendas. All learners, but particularly bilinguals, deserve quality programs that counter harmful stereotypes. The school characteristics in Table 1 (Source: Snow & Ferguson, 2007) illustrate the factors that either promote or limit quality bilingual education.

TABLE 1. School Characteristics (Source: Snow & Ferguson, 2007).

Promote Quality Bilingual Education

Raising Children Bilingually

1. Administration, in cooperation with faculty and community, develops clear goals.
2. School creates a bilingual and bicultural environment.
3. Bilingual program is integrated with the whole school.
4. Bilingual students are known by all staff.
5. Administration provides leadership and supports the program.
6. School staff sets high expectations and supports bilingual students.
7. School hires quality personnel willing to work with bilingual students.
8. School enjoys a productive relationship with parents and communities.
9. School curricula make use of students' languages and cultures to promote learning.
10. Bilingual students participate in a comprehensive curriculum that incorporates current educational innovations.
11. Materials are of high quality, varied, and available in the students' language as well as English.
12. Assessment is fair and authentic, with the purpose of improving teaching and learning.
13. Instructional practices are consistent with goals of promoting language development, cultural adjustment, and academic achievement.

Limit Quality of Bilingual Education Programs

1. There are no clear goals, leaving interpretation open to ideological tendencies.
2. Personnel and students outside the bilingual program hold poor attitudes toward the program's languages and cultures; there is no explicit instruction on American culture.
3. Bilingual program is segregated from the rest of the school.
4. Only bilingual staff knows bilingual students.
5. Administration is unsupportive, ambivalent, or indifferent.
6. Staff believes ability to function is related to English language proficiency or ethnic background.
7. Students are taught by personnel with limited understanding or skills.
8. Parents are perceived as indifferent or uninterested; no effort is made to accommodate parents' language and culture.
9. Use of students' languages and cultures is limited and only within the bilingual program.
10. Bilingual program curriculum does not cover all the same areas as the general school curriculum; bilingual students do not benefit from special programs introduced for the whole school.
11. Materials in the students' language are limited and of poor quality.
12. Assessment consists mostly of standardized tests in English, with the main purpose being to place students into or remove them from the bilingual program.
13. Instructional practices are inconsistent, depending on individual teachers' beliefs and knowledge.

Many bilingual programs survive only because school districts must meet legislative and court requirements. They persist in segregation within uncooperative schools where the attitude toward the program is unenthusiastic and the potential of students is underestimated. Students reject their identity in schools that do not recognize their culture, yet cannot fully adopt a new one (Commins, 2009). Such students repeatedly become frustrated and disruptive (Brisk, 1991; McCollum, 1993). As Heath (2003) observed, "One thinks what the achievements of such students would be if their energies were openly encouraged by an environment in which they no longer had to trade traditions for school learning." Overworked and undervalued teachers burn out, leading to turnover and instability in programs.

Schools without clear goals depend on individual educators for program quality and are more susceptible to ideological pressure. Without unambiguous goals for bilingual education, confusion and dissatisfaction among staff and community are likely outcomes. Studies in California and the Midwest underscore the importance of clear goals (Hakuta, 2009). When English-speaking and bilingual staff do not share common goals, a significant communication gap develops among teachers, affecting instruction, students, and overall program coherence (Watahomigie & McCarty, 2004).

Although many teachers are well qualified, increasing burdens on personnel have led to the appointment of poorly qualified teachers or the redeployment of mainstream teachers with no training in bilingual education. Districts experience greater satisfaction and stability when they develop bilingual programs gradually and maintain strict quality control in hiring. Districts that expand quickly and haphazardly without careful recruitment experience excessive staff turnover, often losing their best teachers, who burn out while supporting less-prepared colleagues (Hakuta, 2009). Because such programs are frequently perceived as remedial, the curriculum is thin, materials are lacking, and assessment is narrowly limited to English language growth.

Such bilingual education programs should not be supported. The kind of bilingual education characterized in this paper should be supported not merely because it benefits bilingual students, but also because its implementation can improve schools as a whole.

How advisable is it to raise children bilingually, and what are the consequences of bilingual upbringing? Saer (1923) reported that his son Louis showed only positive consequences from having been raised in a bilingual, French-German home environment. According to his father, Louis learned to speak both languages as a native-speaking child would — showing very few signs of interference between the languages, and no detrimental effect on his cognitive development. His development appears to have been quite normal, and it has been reported that by the age of 15 he had equal fluency in both languages (Weinreich, 1953), preferring French for technology and German for literature. There was no evidence that the extreme nationalism and anti-German sentiment in France at the time of the First World War had any effect on his bilingualism.

Many researchers after Ronjat have reached the same conclusion: that early bilingualism has positive consequences for linguistic and cognitive development. A number of investigators (Volterra & Taeschner, 1978) have suggested that early bilingualism can accelerate the separation of sound and meaning and can focus the child's attention on particular aspects of language. Snow & Ferguson (2007) argued that being able to express the same thought in different languages allows the child to "observe his language as one particular system among several, to examine its phenomena under more universal categories, and this leads to an awareness of his linguistic processes" (p. 110).

These positive consequences are not, however, the inevitable results of childhood bilingualism. Macnamara (2009), describing the experience of immigrant Finnish children in Sweden, reported that many of these children knew neither Finnish nor Swedish well. Their Finnish pronunciation was often heavily influenced by Swedish, leaving them unable to differentiate between long and short phonemes — a crucial distinction in Finnish. Their Swedish was also limited, especially in vocabulary. Macnamara described these children as "semilingual," in the sense of not knowing either of their languages at the same level as monolingual speakers of the same age.

She characterized one such child, a five-year-old Finnish boy living in Sweden, as follows:

Linguistic Consequences of Early Bilingualism

He couldn't count to more than three in any language; after that he said "many." He didn't know the names of any colours in any language. He didn't know the names of most of the things around him, either at the day-care centre or outside — in any language. In Finnish he used only the present tense; in Swedish, present and past (p. 226).

Saer (1923) argued that this child is not a rare exception and that many immigrant children are similarly unable to use either of their languages at a level appropriate for their age. There has been considerable controversy about the notion of semilingualism, the central issue being whether a bilingual's combined abilities across two languages is equivalent to those of a monolingual. It may be that the performance of some bilingual children in either language lags behind that of monolingual speakers of that language; nonetheless, the bilingual child may have a full vocabulary and overall linguistic repertory that is broadly comparable to that of a monolingual speaker (Saer, 1923). This is not to say, however, that the phenomenon Saer (1923) and others describe is not real. The notion of semilingualism is a useful way of characterizing cases where, through social deprivation, children fail to function well in their second language and simultaneously fail to develop their first language fully.

What accounts for the differences between the experience of Ronjat's child and the immigrant children Weinreich (1953) described? Why is it that for some children a bilingual experience is positive or "additive" (Macnamara, 2009), while for others it is a negative or "subtractive" experience? Two major areas of research concern have emerged: (1) the effects of early bilingualism on linguistic development, and (2) the effects of early bilingualism on cognitive and intellectual development. Both areas involve important methodological issues, as well as theoretical implications arising from the research findings. These methodological and theoretical questions are discussed in some detail, because research can only provide useful answers to parents and educators if it is well grounded both methodologically and theoretically.

What does the literature tell us about the effects of early bilingualism on the language development of the child? Does learning two languages simultaneously influence the development of either one? For example, if an American parent speaks both English and Spanish to her child, how will the child's English be affected? Is it better for language development to speak only English than to use both languages? Early research on this question dealt with the so-called "bilingual handicap." More recent research has addressed more specific issues, especially regarding lexical and syntactic development.

It appears to be difficult for an individual to maintain two languages in perfect balance. The environment is rarely perfectly bilingual, and the individual will usually need to use one language more than the other in daily life. Does this mean that one language inevitably suffers? In a review of early research on this question, Weinreich (1953) reported that some authors concluded that the bilingual child encounters many problems in language development. According to these authors, the child's active and passive vocabulary is smaller because the child must learn two words for each referent. Even the total number of terms was seen to be lower than for the monolingual child. Bilingual children were found to use fewer different words and to develop a confused, mixed vocabulary due to lexical borrowings and a tendency to hyphenate words. They were seen to use shorter and more incomplete sentences, fewer compound and complex sentences, and fewer interrogative but more exclamatory sentences than monolingual children. Confused structural patterns, unusual word order, and errors in agreement and grammatical dependency were said to characterize the speech of bilingual children, along with many errors in the use of verbs and tenses, connectives, prepositions, nouns, pronouns, and articles (especially indefinite articles).

To a large extent these conclusions were based on research by Weinreich (1953), who studied preschool children in non-American families in Hawaii. A major confounding factor is that pidgin English was quite common in Hawaiian communities at that time, and the children's apparently poor performance may have been primarily a result of using this variant of English as their standard. Other research pointed to the conclusion that bilingualism is in fact beneficial for language development. Some authors argued that bilingualism makes individuals more sensitive to the nuances of language, aids first language development, enables more effective manipulation of language, and facilitates the learning of additional languages. Saer (1923) found that a group of bilingual Puerto Rican preschool children in New York City actually outperformed a comparable group of monolingual children in mean sentence length and maturity of sentence structure in English. Snow & Ferguson (2007) reported observations suggesting that vocabulary is actually increased in the bilingual child. Totten (1960) concluded that at the college level, bilingual students had no significant language handicap and even possessed certain advantages.

The early literature varies so greatly in quality that almost all general statements are suspect. The typical procedure was to identify two groups of children — one monolingual and one bilingual — test them in their common language, and compare results. Socioeconomic status and intelligence were very rarely controlled. Furthermore, the measures of language development used in these early studies were crude and yielded only rough estimates of linguistic ability. With advances in the field of language acquisition, researchers have been able to focus more specifically on lexical and syntactic development.

In contrast to the monolingual child, the bilingual child must learn two words for a single meaning. Some authors argue that this involves no particular difficulties. Weinreich (1953), for example, contended that bilingual children face no additional challenges in acquiring meaning, since they simply extend to the corresponding word in the second language the meaning they have already associated with a real-world object in the first language. Her Georgian-Russian bilingual subject used the Georgian word for "ball" to denote a toy, a radish, and stone spheres at a park entrance, and then transferred the same set of denotations to the Russian equivalent. In this early stage, Macnamara (2009) remarked, "differences in shades of meaning of corresponding words do not play an essential role" (p. 3).

Conclusion

For the most part, the cognitive and linguistic differences between bilingual and monolingual children who are otherwise similar turn out to be small. Some may consider the differences that have been established to be arcane and trivial — but that would be to miss the point. The development of two languages in childhood turns out to be a profound event that ripples throughout the life of the individual. Most notable is the possibility that an essential cognitive process underlying much of our intellectual life — namely, the control of attention and inhibition — may develop differently and more advantageously in bilingual children.