Does Bilingualism Help Children Learn to Read?
Learning and using another language have been linked to all kinds of benefits for children and adults. This is particularly true for young children's expanding cognitive abilities. According to Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto of Dartmouth College, children who have been exposed early to a second language possess an overall "cognitive edge." Numerous studies have also linked language education to higher scores on many standardized tests. But can knowing another language also help children learn to read? A study from Canada's York University suggests that bilingualism may in fact impact the development of literacy in a number of significant ways.
Dr. Ellen Bialystok, one of the world's foremost experts on bilingualism among children, led a group of researchers from York University in analyzing the effects of bilingualism on a group of over 100 children learning to read. Summarizing the results, Dr. Bialystok commented, "Our research has shown that reading progress amongst all bilingual children is improved" over monolingual children. In a separate statement, she said, "I think there's a lot of worry out there about other languages conflicting with a child's ability to learn to read in English, but that's absolutely not the case. Parents should not hesitate to share their native tongue with their children—it's a gift."
More particularly, Dr. Bialystok and her team found the advantage in literacy bilingual children possessed was due to two specific effects of bilingualism, effects—a greater "metalinguistic awareness" and an ability to transfer reading skills and principles from one language to another.
The sum of two languages is greater than the parts
In the York University team's report, titled "Bilingualism, Biliteracy, and Learning to Read: Interactions among Languages and Writing Systems," the first advantage bilingual students possessed is described as "a general understanding of reading and its basis in a symbolic system of print. This general understanding can be acquired in any writing system and gives children an essential basis for learning how the system works and how the forms can be decoded into meaningful language."
In other words, because bilingual kids are used to thinking of more than one word relating to a given object (for instance, "árbol" and "tree" both describing or representing the same object), they are more sensitive to language as a system made up of distinct sounds. This sensitivity can be transferred to reading as the child learns to associate the letters in print with sounds. As Dr. Bialystok says, "Really, it's all about decoding ability. These children can more quickly grasp the concept that letters make sounds. They realize that this same concept can be applied to both languages, and suddenly a light goes on. It's a transferable set of strategies and expertise."
The general sensitivity to language is often called "metalinguistic awareness." This greater awareness or sensitivity can come as a result of exposure over time to more than one language, regardless of the language—it can be French or Farsi or Finnish! The important part is the added awareness of language itself, an effect which Dr. Bialystok sums up as "the knowledge of two languages is greater than the sum of its parts."
Bilingual kids don't have to reinvent the alphabet
The second advantage the York University team found was "the potential for transfer of reading principles across the languages," or the likely possibility that children will take the methods and insights they've built up in one language and apply them to advance much more rapidly in the other language. In other words, they don't have to relearn the concept of an alphabet in English if they've been taught it already in French.
In the study, the bilingual children were all learning to read in both languages at the same time, and Dr. Bialystok and her team thought it might be the additional practice of learning to read that accounted for the bilingual children's advantage. But the results surprisingly showed that the bilingual kids' advantage was independent of instruction time in the other language. The key was not so much how many hours were spent practicing as the ability the other language gave them to combine their insights and strategies. The York University team credited this as "the additional advantage of applying the concepts of reading that they learn to their two languages, enhancing both and boosting their passage into literacy."
Learning a new language teaches you more about your own
A child just setting out to learn a new language also learns many new things about how languages work. For many older kids, knowledge of English grammar is commonly solidified by learning a foreign language. English grammar may seem natural to us and we hardly think about it—that is, until we encounter the grammar of another language. The quirks and oddities of our own language pass by without our notice until we see something different that heightens our awareness of how our first language works and requires at least a moment of reflection.
At a young age, these insightful discoveries happen quickly, as a child's speech and thoughts evolve from simple expressions of needs to colorful and dramatic retellings of events overflowing with new and descriptive vocabulary. Learning another language brings a new dimension to these insightful discoveries of childhood, broadening your child's experiences and encouraging him to take hold of language in a new way.
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