2. Essential Questions
What does research say about bilingualism?
What challenges do emergent bilinguals face when
living and attending school in a monolingual
environment?
What can school stakeholders do to encourage ELL
students to become more balanced bilinguals (and in
turn, achieve higher levels of academic success)?
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3. • Cognitive
• Health
• Economic
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Research on the
Bilingual Mind:
Benefits
4. Cognitive and Health Benefits
1. enhanced cognitive performance (verbal and nonverbal!)
2. more executive control across the life span
3. improved metalinguistic awareness
4. better memory, visual-spatial skills, and even creativity.
5. delay in onset of dementia (Alzheimer’s)
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5. Economic Benefits
Balanced bilingual students earn significantly more as
adults at the beginning of their career than those linguistic
minorities who were dominantly proficient in English only.
Bilingual students are more likely to gain admission to
prestigious universities, higher-status employment, access
to certain government positions, and a wider variety of
employment options (Abu-Rabia, 1999; Wee, 2003).
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7. Benefits to Society
Bilingualism facilitates cross-cultural
communication in a global society
Bilingual immigrant students are more
academically successful and socially well-
adapted in the long term (Mora, 16)
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9. Research on Academic Achievement for ELLs
2015 TESOL Convention March 26, 2015 Toronto, ON, Canada 9
Bilingual education actually
can provide advantages, such
as enhancing cognitive
thinking skills
Bilingual education
programs have been shown
to be effective for ELL and
native English speakers
(Center for Research on Education)
ELLs who attended
English-only programs
showed large decreases in
math and reading
achievement
(Honigsfeld 80)
ELLs who attended English-
only programs had the
largest number of dropouts
(Honigsfeld 80)
11. US Politics Surrounding Bilingualism
English-only
movement
31 US States have
Official English Laws
Harshest
Immigration Law
HB56 Passed in
2011 in Alabama
Fails
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U.S. English. Official English. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.us-english.org/view/13
Coke Ad
12. School Factors
Impossible to offer bilingual education for all
Shortage of bilingual certified teachers
Lack of funding
Myths surrounding L2 acquisition
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13. Socioeconomic Factors
Poverty
Issues of Language Power
Parents with Low Literacy
in L1
Lack of reading materials
at the home in L1 and L2
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14. 2015 TESOL Convention March 26, 2015 Toronto, ON, Canada 14
Westerlund, R. Language is Never Neutral [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/rawesterlund/language-is-never-neutral
15. Encouraging Students
to Become
More Balanced
Bilinguals
• School
• Home
• Community
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16. Focus on Schools:
Fostering a School Culture Where Multiculturalism
and Bilingualism Are Valued and Accepted
Bilingual Signs
Bilingual Communications (oral / written)
Special Events (Hispanic Heritage Month / Author Visit / Multicultural Events)
Read Across America Week (Bilingual Readers)
Bilingual books for the classroom and school library
Morning Forecast - Word of the Day
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17. Focus on the Home:
Parents Actively Strengthen L1 at Home
Parents of young children get
involved in the educational process
Parents read with their children
every night in L1
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18. Focus on the Community:
Community Stakeholders Strengthen L1 and L2
Church-sponsored L1 literacy programs
Literacy Programs at the Public Library
Multi-Cultural Events in the Community
Sports Youth Leagues
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19. “Although structured
English immersion
approaches can succeed,
bilingual programs offer
a bonus : bilingual and
biliterate citizens.”
Timothy Boals, Director, WIDA
Learning English is Not Enough, 2013
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20. Sources:
Bialystok, Ellen (2011). Reshaping the mind: The benefits of bilingualism. Canadian Journal of
Experimental Psychology , 65 (4), 229-235.
Lo Bianco, J., A. J. Liddicoat and C. Crozet. (eds) (1999). Striving for the third place:
Intercultural competence through language education. Melbourne: Language Australia.
Marian, V., & Shook, A. (2012, September). The cognitive benefits of being bilingual. In
Cerebrum: the Dana forum on brain science (Vol. 2012). Dana Foundation.
Mora, J. K. (2009). From the Ballot Box to the Classroom. Educational Leadership, 66(7), 14-19.
Parmon, P. (2011). Educating immigrant children: Bilingualism in America’s schools. Social
Sciences Journal, 10(1), 14.
Serdyukov, P. (2010). Can Balanced Bilingualism Be Achieved in a Multicultural Society?
Second and First Language Implications. Publication of National University, 125.
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/news/coverStories/2013/learning_english_isnt_enough.php
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Editor's Notes
Researchers have shown that the bilingual brain can have better attention and task-switching capacities than the monolingual brain, thanks to its developed ability to inhibit one language while using another. In addition, bilingualism has positive effects at both ends of the age spectrum: Bilingual children as young as seven months can better adjust to environmental changes, while bilingual seniors can experience less cognitive decline.
Research found that both languages of a bilingual speaker are constantly active to some degree, even in strongly monolingual contexts where there is no
reason to expect to use one of the languages. The explanation proposed for the enhanced executive control found in these studies is that bilinguals use this system to manage attention to jointly activated competing languages. Therefore, not only do bilinguals typically perform these executive control tasks
more effectively than monolinguals but they also recruit different brain networks in those performances
Bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop task, people see a word and are asked to name the color of the word’s font. When the color and the word match (i.e., the word “red” printed in red), people correctly name the color more quickly than when the color and the word don’t match (i.e., the word “red” printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself (“red”) and its font color (blue) conflict. The cognitive system must employ additional resources to ignore the irrelevant word and focus on the relevant color. The ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input is called inhibitory control. Bilingual people often perform better than monolingual people at tasks that tap into inhibitory control ability. Bilingual people are also better than monolingual people at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by color (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more rapidly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when changing strategies on the fly.
Bilingual adults learn a third language better than monolingual adults learn a second language.22 The bilingual language-learning advantage may be rooted in the ability to focus on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.2
Hanson, D. A. (2011). Reinventing the melting pot: The new immigrants and what it
means to be American. Journal of American Folklore 124.491: 112+. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 17 Apr. 2011.
2. Portes (Sociology) and Rumbaut (Education) Students who retain their bilingual skills and their ties to their parents’ culture of origin are more academically successful and socially well-adapted in the long term than their peers who become monolingual in English.
Mora, Jill Kerper. “From the Ballot Box to the Classroom.” Educational Leadership 66.7 (2009): 14-19.
2 key findings:
90/10 and 50/50 Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Programs helped students score above 50 percent of the other test takers in their own language and in English in all subject areas. The 90/10 Program allows students to receive 90 percent of instruction in their native language, which is then gradually reduced to 50 percent. In the 50/50 model the students are taught in both their native language and English for equal amounts of time.
2. English language learners who attended English-only programs showed large decreases in math and reading achievement, and the largest number of dropouts came from this group (Honigsfeld 80).
3 and 4. Honigsfeld, Andrea. “ELL Programs: Not ‘One Size Fits All.’” Kappa Delta Pi Record 45.4 (2009): 166-171.
1. Landlords were banned from renting homes to undocumented immigrants
2. Schools had to check students’ legal status
3. Police were required to arrest suspected immigration violators.
4. Even giving unauthorized immigrants a ride became a crime.
Undocumented immigrants appeared to flee Alabama en masse. Unconstitutional, unworkable, or politically unsustainable
Westerlund, R. Language is Never Neutral [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/rawesterlund/language-is-never-neutral
