Speech for Dutch community
1. Thank you for inviting me to speak this morning. Can I just say that I am
acutely aware of the irony of a representative of the world’s most
monolingual country - the UK- talking about bilingualism in English to
the Dutch Community in Singapore.
2. I should, in fact, come clean and say that I am actually quite a poor
linguist. When I speak French I can usually see the pained look on my
wife’s face. However I have a research interest in the development of
bilingualism, which started when I was head of one of the three campuses
of the International School of Geneva, a bilingual school in Switzerland
and continues to this day. My PhD studies are in effective bilingual
education.
3. This morning I will talk about two things : what research says about
bilingual education and what that means for you as parents of children
who speak one language at home and another language at school.
4. It might be helpful first to try to define what I mean by bilingualism
Academic definitions of bilingualism vary from limited and narrow
definitions that stress native-like control of two languages, to more
flexible descriptions that highlight the ability to perform in two
languages. The term bilingual is often used as a ‘catch all’ and if we
consider the term to refer to an individual who uses two or more
languages or dialects in his or her everyday life then more than half the
world can be considered bilingual. That half, of course, does not include
where I was born.
5. Despite multilingual education dating back to the ancient world in a
variety of different cultures, multilingualism has been seen by many
education researchers until relatively recently as an exceptional even
hazardous phenomenon. Trying to learn through a language other than
the language spoken at home was cited as the root of a number of
difficulties: cognitive overload, semi-lingualism and language confusion to
name but three. Learning through more than one language was,
essentially, bad for you.
6. This point of view obviously has profound implications for a city such as
Singapore or for a community like yours in which a large proportion of
the community is operating on a daily basis in a language other than their
home language. Thankfully modern educational research now sees
multilingualism quite differently and there is a growing body of research
that suggests that learning through more than one language is far from
dangerous.
7. The largest source of data comes from North America and Canada as a
result of immersion. People like Fred Genesee and Ellan Bialystock are
probably the biggest names in this area and their studies show that :
8. Children in immersion programs attain native-like receptive skills and
develop much higher levels of language proficiency than non-immersion
students.
 Children perform at a satisfactory level in the subject matter taught in the
second language, assimilating this knowledge at the same level as the
mono- lingual control groups.
 The development of the mother tongue language is not affected, and
students do not demonstrate significant problems in their first language.
 There seem to be cognitive advantages for learners and that this is
independent of which languages are involved
9. Interestingly, late immersion students have been found to attain the
same level of second language proficiency as early immersion students,
despite having received significantly less exposure to the second
language, perhaps due to their greater cognitive maturity and learning
efficiency.
10. Research in education in Europe now seems to be centering on a
particular approach known as CLIL – Content and Language Integrated
Learning. In this students learn the second language while taking part in
their science or history or maths lessons. The teacher or teachers have a
dual focus: subject matter and language. There are a considerable
number of programmes in the Scandinavian countries, Italy, Spain,
France, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
11. Again the research from this is very positive with students showing
advances in language learning without there being any detrimental effect
on the subject of study. As one might perhaps expect, speakers of
multiple languages also learn further languages more easily – they seem
have a higher metalinguistic awareness (in other words, they show a
better understanding of the nature of linguistic structures).
12. What is interesting, however, as more data is gathered is that, according
to Laurent Gajo, a professor at the University of Geneva, research is
suggesting that a ‘uniqueness’ exists in the development of multilingual
students when compared to their monolingual peers.. In Gajo’s view of
learning, the different languages interact and combine to generate, not the
simple addition of distinct competences (i.e. not just two monolingual
halves welded together), but rather an original, individual, complex
competence on which the user may draw.
13. Advances in imaging technology have allowed researchers to look for
differences in the neuro-circuitry of the monolingual and multilingual
minds. Coggins, in 2004, for example found that ‘monolingual and
bilingual groups exhibited significant differences in the corpus callosum
midsagittal anterior mid-body regional area’ and went on to suggest that
‘with respect to second language education, the results of this study could
suggest that bilingual learning could have a profound affect on brain
structures in general and the corpus callosum in particular’. Osterhout in
2008 also reported preliminary results from three studies indicating that
classroom based 2nd language instruction can result in changes in the
brain’s electrical activity, in the location of this activity within the brain,
and in the structure of the learners’ brains.
14. Of course it is not necessarily the case that changes in the structure of the
brain or in the location of activity bring about superior performance. The
two may well be unconnected. Be that as it may, there are a number of
research articles that suggest that there are differences in ability and that
a plurilingual person is not a monolingual with two (or more) languages.
Indeed Cook said ‘These subtle differences consistently suggest that
people with multicompetence are not simply equivalent to two
monolinguals but are a unique combination so the multicompetence state
yields more than the sum of its parts.
15. One study found that when monolingual and plurilingual subjects were
presented with complex tasks, plurilinguals had the advantage: ‘The
distracting influences confuse monolinguals, whereas the bilinguals were
more able to resist the distractions of the irrelevant information. This
was not the case when the groups handled relatively less demanding
tasks and one might suggest that it is not that plurilinguals have a clear
overall advantage but that they are better at handling the cognitive
demands involved. They are, perhaps, simply more able to handle
multiple tasks.
16. It is important to say that learning through a language other than your
home language is not an easy option or one that will yield instant results.
Though many children attain basic communicative competence in a
language relatively quickly, the more specific language demanded in an
educational setting takes longer to acquire and most students initially see
a drop in their overall performance as they try to adjust. Much will
depend on personal factors such as motivation, the child’s communicative
needs and levels of anxiety, however, in the medium term, the drop is
usually compensated for. Over time a multilingual child usually regains
their age-appropriate progress, often times surpassing their monolingual
peers.
17. The language barrier remains one of the great worries of being a parent
overseas: how will your children cope with learning (and living) in a
context in which the language you speak with them at home is a ‘minority
language’? It is not at all unusual for me to talk to concerned parents who
are worried that speaking their home language with their children will at
best slow down their progress in the language spoken at school or at
worst confuse them so that they end up speaking no first language at all.
Should they, they ask, speak English at home? Is it wrong to speak
Japanese?
18. No. For a child learning in a second language there is considerable
research on the vital important of maintaining their mother tongue. Skills
acquired in the first language can be transferred to the second language
so, for example, if your child has developed good reading skills in Dutch ,
she is likely to be able to apply these skills when reading English. (One
useful reading skill is the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words
from context). For this reason it helps if you can encourage your child to
read good fiction and non-fiction in her own language. Similarly, the skills
of being able to plan out a piece of writing or develop an argument in a
persuasive essay can be applied in the second language once they have
been learned in the first
19. Many children in international schools also plan to return to their home
country at some point to continue their education there. Students who
turn against or otherwise neglect their mother tongue can often suffer
from problems of identity loss or distance from their parents, and from
their grandparents or other family members in their home country. Both
of these are strong reasons to make sure they do not have gaps in their
mother tongue.
20. Educational research has generated more than its fair share of false
conclusions – playing Bach to your children and having pot plants in the
classroom does not necessarily make them better at mathematics. It is
important to recognize that the range of factors that go together to
generate the positive consequences of multilingualism are not as yet fully
understood; the choices of the institution (for instance, its language
curricula and its teaching methodology will also have a critical influence
on a learners’ willingness, or reluctance, to transfer resources from one
context into another.
21. What is clear, however, is the importance of the strategic and transferable
skills that multilingualism can bring and the extraordinary opportunity
that living in such a linguistically diverse city as Singapore presents to our
children as they face an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.