![]() To run an experiment, one would ideally assign individuals to be in the bilingual or monolingual groups at random to make sure that the groups differed systematically only with respect to language but were in other regards likely to be the same. Ī major difficulty in comparing bilinguals and monolinguals is that there is no ‘random allocation to condition’. ![]() So these children showed a specific advantage for conflict, when attending to one thing and ignoring another. ![]() Another group found that bilingual English-Spanish kindergarten children in America outperformed their English monolingual peers when they had to select one thing and ignore another, but not on impulse control when they had to wait for things. Five to fourteen year old bilinguals were found to respond faster in another, but only in those who had learned two languages before the age of 3, suggesting that an advantage in executive control relies on having to flip between languages as you first acquire language. Eight to eleven year old bilinguals were shown to be better at ignoring irrelevant distracting information in one study. Many studies have found support for the bilingual advantage using this task. Those who find it hard to ignore the flanking arrows will be quicker when all the arrows point the same way, and slower when they don’t. One such task is the Attention Network Test ( ), in which you have to press one of two keys as quickly as possible to show which way a central arrow is facing the arrow may be flanked with arrows facing the same way (which should help), arrows facing the opposite way (which should hinder unless you can ignore them), or by no arrows. The kind of tasks that researchers use to test the bilingual advantage typically involve responding to something while ignoring something else. Bilingual children do sometime outperform their monolingual peers on some tasks In the classroom this should mean that children who speak more than one language are able to focus better on what they’re doing while ignoring distractions, and flip between activities more easily. The bilingual advantage theory says that having this linguistic flexibility also results in better control in non-linguistic tasks. It’s thought that bi- (or multi-) lingual children are better equipped for this as a result of experience with two things: firstly, flipping between languages as they speak to different individuals and secondly, using a word in one language while simultaneously ignoring the corresponding word in their other language (or languages). Executive control refers to our ability to manipulate and control our attention: to inhibit responses, ignore irrelevant stimuli, and flip between tasks. The idea here is that children who speak more than one language find a type of thinking known as executive control easier than those who only speak one language this difference is known as the ‘bilingual advantage’. Below, we explore where the idea of the ‘bilingual advantage’ came from and why we must be cautious in interpreting evidence supposedly demonstrating this. Bi- and multi-lingual learners are a diverse group who differ from not only pupils who speak one language but also one another in many ways. ![]() So, it seems that the answer is not as simple as the headline would lead you to believe. By contrast, pupils who are not fluent in English when they start school or enter into English schooling during late primary or secondary school are more likely to experience academic difficulties, probably due to the language barrier. When they narrow down to just pupils classified as “competent” or “fluent” in English, they find that pupils who are bi- or multi-lingual have higher attainment than pupils who only speak English. However, their definition includes both pupils who are exposed to multiple languages from infancy and those who learn English when they get to school. Routinely collected data from Department for Education shows that, on average, pupils who speak more than one language achieve similarly in school to children who only speak English. ![]()
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