increased opportunities for global exchange and trade. . Now the Legislature just has to pass AB 1127 to put the program in motion. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule theyd learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule.24 This suggests that even for very young children, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer beyond language. The Global California Initiative 2030 recognizes that preparing students for a global economy is essential, but the state has lagged in its efforts to build the ranks of bilingual teachers needed to reach the goal. 'Invisible' Children: Raised In The U.S., Now Struggling In Mexico. Diaz, R., & Klingler, C. (1991). The measure is sponsored by the California Assn. About 10 percent of students in the Portland, Ore., public schools are assigned by lottery to dual-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, alongside English. Packing for Boarding School: Tips & Tricks. According to New York Daily News, schools chancellor Carmen Farina will "open 38 bilingual programs at city schools starting in September.". It operates separately from the newsroom. Prior, A., & MacWhinney, B. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. With the creation of their unique language system, the bilingual is also making sense of his or her relationship to both of the cultures to which the linguistic code has given access. Paraprofessionals & school-related personnel, Standing in Solidarity with Our AAPI Community, Standing united to protect immigrant rights, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Safe and welcoming public schools for all, AFT resources for organizing and back to school programs, www.aft.org/ae/fall2015/goldenberg_wagner, www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/what-should-morphology-i, https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2019144. To that end, reading tip sheets in 13 languages are available here. Surprisingly, the brains of bilingual people showed a significantly higher degree of physical atrophy in regions commonly associated with Alzheimers disease.27 In other words, the bilingual people had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, yet performed on par behaviorally, even though their degree of brain atrophy suggested that their symptoms should be much worse. This bilingual advantage in executive functioning is also confirmed by neuroimaging studies. Chinese, for example, has a very productive compound morphology (i.e., it has lots of compound words, such as , hibn, black-board, blackboard) but, due to its small number of derivational morphemes, a somewhat improvised derivational morphology (e.g., , xuzh, study-person, scholar). However, it is also important to acknowledge that there have been studies documenting the lack of coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive functioning;14 others have found that the magnitude (and therefore practical significance) of the differences varies depending on the tasks used, language pairs, and socioeconomic status.15 For instance, a study16 with bilingual and monolingual groups of children who were comparable ethnically, socially, and economically found no difference between the two groups of children on executive functioning. Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Teachers with a strong understanding of multicultural learning environments are in high demand, which makes the Master of Science in Curriculum and Instruction with a Specialization in Bilingual Education online program at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) an exciting opportunity for individuals who want to lead their schools' efforts in this area. Now What? Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year, randomized trial and found that these dual-language students outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year's worth of learning by the end of middle school. Furthermore, Chinese has no inflected words. (return to article), For more on the history of bilingual education in the United States, see Bilingual Education in the Fall 2015 issue of American Educator, available at www.aft.org/ae/fall2015/goldenberg_wagner. All rights reserved. In this case, teachers deploy the integrative EAL (for English) or DaZ (for German) programme where support is provided by an additional teacher within the normal classroom following the standard lessons. The bilingual manages and manipulates attention to one language or the other, actively but often subconsciously. (Eds.). Research indicates that instead of bilingual people having two language systems in their minds, they actually have a shared semantic system and shared semantic/conceptual representation for translation equivalents.40 In the case of conceptual equivalence or near equivalence (e.g., fraction vs. fraccin), vocabulary learning in a second language involves linking a word form in the second language to an already established lexical concept.41 Additionally, vocabulary knowledge itself is a manifestation of ones background knowledge;42 by the same token, stronger academic vocabulary indicates childrens stronger academic background knowledge, which has a significant impact on their academic performance.43 Therefore, encouraging students to learn as much academic vocabulary knowledge as they can in their home language will helpnot hindertheir academic learning in English. In the classic Stroop task, people see a word and are asked to name the color of the words font. Some community college grads can outearn elite university peers, Human remains found in Mt. Their engagement with the world and the human society we inhabit is rich; their minds are agile. The second challenge is that writing systems vary in transparencythat is, in how consistent their spelling-sound correspondences are. 1. 116 (University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, November 1995).23. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, the bilingual listeners neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sounds fundamental frequency,17 a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception. Being bilingual could keep our minds working longer and better into old age, which could have a massive impact on how we school our children and treat older people. Thomas and Collier have advised many school systems on how to expand their dual-language programs, and Sorace runs "Bilingualism Matters," an international network of researchers who promote bilingual education projects. J. F. Kroll and A. M. de Groot (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2005): 251267.41. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. Whats another engaging activity for children to practice their literacy skills? Now, they just need the vehicle to follow it. Brains, brains, brains. Bilingual people often perform better than monolingual people at tasks that tap into inhibitory control ability. Krizman, J., Marian, V., Shook, A., Skoe, E., & Kraus, N. (2012). Looking at the full body of evidence, it seems that metalinguistic awareness is powerful in language and literacy learning, and bilingual children enjoy the benefits of transferred metalinguistic awareness between the two languages. L.A. should let it be a lake again. The Los Angeles Times editorial board determines the positions of The Times as an institution. Understanding what -able indicates will greatly help students understand the meaning of teachable, but also enable them to infer the meanings of other words like drinkable, walkable, or doable. These benefits exist across different pairs of alphabetic languages (e.g., Spanish-English, Korean-English) and orthographically contrasting languages (such as Chinese-English). For anyone learning to read, understanding how print maps onto spoken language is fundamental. But when researchers looked at the two groups' brains, they found evidence of brain atrophy that was five to seven years more advanced in the bilingual group. Several of the researchers I talked with also pointed out that, in bilingual education, non-English-dominant students and their families tend to feel that their home language is heard and valued, compared with a classroom where the home language is left at the door in favor of English. "Earlier research looked at socially disadvantaged groups," agrees Antonella Sorace at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. "[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another," says Sorace. At the same time as managing their attention to this code, its vocabulary and its syntax, the bilingual will be paying attention to the cultural variants between the languages. Some people see bilingual education as requiring Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Luk, G. (2012). Each grade has a combination of students who speak English natively & students who speak Spanish natively. See, for example, K. Lindholm-Leary, Students Perceptions of Bilingualism in Spanish and Mandarin Dual Language Programs, International Multilingual Research Journal 10, no. While it might seem silly to point out that a bilingual teacher can help students become proficient in multiple languages, that's actually quite powerful. Childrens strong home language background can give them a boost for learning English, as the research evidence above shows. 3 (1993): 453465.28. For example, when Chinese-English bilingual people judge how alike two English words are in meaning, their brain responses are affected by whether or not the Chinese translations of those words are written similarly.6 Even though the task does not require the bilingual people to engage their Chinese, they do so anyway. One of the grant recipients was the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which, in conjunction with Loyola Marymount Universitys Center for Equity of English Learners, enrolled about 150 people from 10 districts to train to become certified bilingual teachers. Just like Ella, teachers that speak the students' language can almost predict the words that learners will choose to communicate, allowing them to identify and address those errors from the start. Being bilingual strengthens many life skills. Cross-language lexical processes and inhibitory control. The cognitive system must employ additional resources to ignore the irrelevant word and focus on the relevant color. Please contact us. Bilingual experience may contribute to this reserve by keeping the cognitive mechanisms sharp and helping to recruit alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during aging. Not to mention one obvious, outstanding fact underlined by many of these researchers: "Bilingual children can speak two languages! For example, for younger children, phoneme alliteration can be made into a game easily played at home in a non-English language; the goal would be to strengthen childrens phonemic awareness in the home language. You can read more about the boards mission and its members at About The Times Editorial Board. Your students can develop proficiency in multiple languages. N. Ferjan Ramrez et al., Speech Discrimination in 11-Month-Old Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: A Magnetoencephalography Study, Developmental Science 20, no. Ideal School is a dual language immersion school (grades K-8). But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. J. McFarland et al., The Condition of Education 2019, National Center of Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2019144.3. "Eight million student records later, we're convinced," Wayne Thomas chimes in. One theme that was striking in speaking to all these researchers was just how strongly they advocated for dual-language classrooms. Some of the corporate benefits of hiring bilingual employees include: Because the unique skill set associated with bilingualism is so advantageous to corporations, students exposed to bilingual education will have a wide array of professional opportunities available to them. Baker and Wright, Foundations of Bilingual Education.7. For instance, a study examined whether childrens phonemic awareness in their native language influenced English word recognition skills.27 The children were first-grade Spanish speakers in a transitional bilingual education program who were identified by their teachers as nonfluent English readers. Gollan, T. H., & Acenas, L. A. Dual-language classrooms, by contrast, provide instruction across subjects to both English natives and English learners, in both English and in a target language. Or they can continue their bilingual studies at the Bilingual Secondary School while assessing where their ambitions might take them. Abutalebi, J., Pasquale, A. D. R., Green, D. W., Hernandez, M., Scifo, P., Keim, R., Cappa, S. F., & Costa, A. On top of the functional benefits of language learning, bilingualism is about understanding cultures. M.S. The result is a space between, like the habitat of Third Culture Kids. Higher proficiency in a second language, as well as earlier acquisition of that language, correlates with higher gray matter volume in the left inferior parietal cortex.18 Researchers have associated damage to this area with uncontrolled language switching,19 suggesting that it may play an important role in managing the balance between two languages. Being bilingual is a valuable skill that can enhance your job opportunities, increase your earning potential and expose you to new cultures and ideas. Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English. R. Ruz , Orientations in Language Planning, NABE Journal 8 (1984): 1534.5. The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf, http://articles.cnn.com/2001-06-19/us/language.glance_1_languages-origin-tongues?_s=PM:US, European Commission Special Eurobarometer. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. Peer interaction in the bilingual classroom takes on a special importance. File this away as a very, very long-range payoff. A common practice is . So bilingual brains look and work differently than monolingual brains. The ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input is called inhibitory control. in Special Education in Education Diagnostics, M.S. As for myself, I am very proud of myself because I am a bilingual person. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. This enhances their ability to handle nonlinguistic tasks too,12 like identifying shapes, recognizing patterns, and homing in on important features of a picture or diagram while ignoring distractors. People might feel anxious about an innovation such asbilingual education and will have a lot of questions, forexample, whether all learners will have sufficient L2proficiency to cope. In alphabetic languages such as English and Spanish, a letter is the smallest unit of the written language that represents a phoneme (phonemes are the smallest units of spoken language); therefore, children need to figure out the letter-sound correspondence at the phonemic level. For instance, Italian and Spanish are highly consistent: one letter makes only one sound. The American Federation of Teachers is a union of professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. The cognitive, neural, and social advantages observed in bilingual people highlight the need to consider how bilingualism shapes the activity and the architecture of the brain, and ultimately how language is represented in the human mind, especially since the majority of speakers in the world experience life through more than one language. Such a large effect in a study this size is unusual, and Steele is currently conducting a flurry of follow-up studies to tease out the causality: Is this about a special program that attracted families who were more engaged? At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what's often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs. 5 (2016): 389400.30. the two languages a bilingual person speaks are separate and distinct systems, as if bilingual students were two monolinguals in one; languages can be simply added or subtracted from the minds of bilingual speakers; restricting the use of the home language or only using it temporarily will transition students as quickly as possible to the dominant school language; and. They will find that employment prospects open and social horizons expand. In addition to staving off the decline that often comes with aging, bilingualism can also protect against illnesses that hasten this decline, like Alzheimers disease. (2011). Some facts about the worlds 6,800 tongues. NPR Ed called up seven researchers in three countries Sorace, Bialystok, Luk, Kroll, Jennifer Steele, and the team of Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier to find out. For instance, the syllable sh can refer to more than 10 characters representing different meanings (morphemes), such as city, persimmon, issue, style, surname, decoration, power, to demonstrate, scholar, vision, test, to be, and world.25 A beginning Chinese reader must holistically learn and memorize the spoken syllable, the corresponding character, and its meaning. Likewise, researchers have found white matter volume changes in bilingual children20 and older adults.21 It appears that bilingual experience not only changes the way neurological structures process information, but also may alter the neurological structures themselves. Encouraging students to become multilingual is a major goal of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. important skill in our increasingly diverse society. The first is that they need to know what linguistic element is represented by printed symbols in each language. W. E. Nagy, V. Berninger, and A. D. Abbott, Contributions of Morphology beyond Phonology to Literacy Outcomes of Upper Elementary and Middle-School Students, Journal of Educational Psychology 98 (2006): 134147.34. There is a wealth of advantages, both mental and professional, to implementing bilingual education in schools. Seeing one of the languages and its culture as the dominant one is counter-productive to the cultural harmony the bilingual classroom seeks to promote, even when the curriculum followed belongs to one of the languages. Bilingual education helps students effectively connect with people of different cultures and backgrounds, increasing their ability to empathize with others and promoting emotional intelligence. Bilingual children are able to focus more intently on the topics at hand and avoid distractions from academic pursuits. Given the multiple benefits of speaking more than one language fluently,* we should actually celebrate this diversityand we can. There is a wealth of advantages, both mental and professional, to implementing bilingual education in schools. 2 (1988): 141162.20. In addition to facilitating cross-cultural communication, this trend also positively affects cognitive abilities. Tanenhaus, M. K., Magnuson, J. S., Dahan, D., & Chambers, C. (2000). Dual-language programs can be an exception. Fall 2015 Bilingual Education Reviving an American Tradition By Claude Goldenberg, Kirstin Wagner In the United States, bilingual education continues to provoke fierce debate. (return to article), For examples of methodology instruction in English, visit www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/what-should-morphology-i. Fishman made that claim more than five decades ago, but it still rings trueif not quite as loudlytoday. 5044 (1992): 556559.9. The researchers suggest that enhanced executive functioning in young bilingual children has to do with children actively using two languages and switching between the languages.18 Therefore, the bilingual advantage in cognition appears to be tied to specific conditions of bilingualism. Retrieved October 1, 2012, from, United States Census Bureau. Bilingual job applicants are more attractive to hiring managers, and employers are less inclined to lay off workers who speak multiple languages. in Bilingual Education in Curriculum & Instruction, M.S. Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in language difficulties.
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