Abstract Summary
Now that the bilingual advantage debate has reached an impasse, one way forward could be to assess to what extent language education and different instructional contexts may play a role in the manifestation of bilingual effects on cognition. If children learn a foreign language at school, can they still be classified as monolinguals? And if foreign language learning is compulsory, then does it make any sense to look for bilingual advantages given the absence of a comparison group? Using a longitudinal design, we tracked the cognitive development of monolingual children before and after the introduction of foreign language classes and compared their performance to bilinguals from birth. Even though both groups showed equal performance at the two time points, the progress in the monolingual group was significantly higher than in the bilingual group. This finding suggests that monolinguals may catch up with their bilingual peers in cognitive performance after the introduction of foreign language education.
Abstract :
"Now that the bilingual advantage debate has reached an impasse, one way forward could be to assess to what extent language education and different instructional contexts may play a role in the manifestation of bilingual effects on cognition. If children learn a foreign language at school, can they still be classified as monolinguals? And if foreign language learning is compulsory, then does it make any sense to look for bilingual advantages given the absence of a comparison group? Using a longitudinal design, we tracked the cognitive development of monolingual children before and after the introduction of foreign language classes and compared their performance to bilinguals from birth. Even though both groups showed equal performance at the two time points, the progress in the monolingual group was significantly higher than in the bilingual group. This finding suggests that monolinguals may catch up with their bilingual peers in cognitive performance after the introduction of foreign language education.In addition to foreign language education, many European countries have seen a surge in programmes of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) or immersion, two types of bilingual education, where content is being taught in at least two languages. Research on the relationship between bilingual education and cognitive development is much less extensive than traditional studies on the bilingual advantage. Yet, this research is also less controversial because most studies seem to confirm the finding that bilingual programmes in one way or another enhance cognitive processing. This presentation will provide a systematic review of studies on the impact of bilingual education on cognitive control and show that this type of research is promising because it allows for the usage of longitudinal designs with a higher ecological validity than laboratory studies."
