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"Proust and the Squid", The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, 2007, pages 105 - 106
The possible Effects of Bilingual Environment on Learning to Read
“Reading in a Bilingual Environment”
“Reading in a Bilingual Environment”
A much more difficult issue involves the effects of having to learn English at the same moment you enter the school door.
Learning two or more languages is an extraordinary, complicated cognitive investment for children, that represents a growing reality for huge number of students. Some up-front costs, such as transfer errors and substitutions from one language to the next, are less important than the advantages, if (a very important “if”) the child learn each language well.
The plasticity of the young brain enables young children to attain - with less effort than at any other time - proficiency in more than one language. After puberty, students bring certain advantages to learning language, but the younger child’s brain is superior in several important ways when it comes to learning to speak accent-free languages.
Examining the many issues swirling around bilingualism and learning is dizzying, but three principles dominate:
First, English-language learners who know a concept or word in their first language learn to use it more easily in English, their second, “school” language. In other words, language enrichment at home provides an essential cognitive and linguistic foundation for all learning, and it does not need to be in the school language to be of help to the child. Children who have an impoverished environment in this home language, on the other hand, have no cognitive or linguistic foundation for either the first or the second, school language.
The second principle is similar to the first. Little is more important to learning to read English than the quality of language development in English. Thousand of children enter school with varying degrees of knowledge of English. Systematic efforts to instill both the “new” phonemes of the English language and the new vocabulary of school (and books) need to happen in each classroom for each learner. Connie Juel points out an essential linguistic issue easily missed by teachers in the US: Children who come to school either new to the English language or new to the standard American English dialect spoken in school do not know the very phonemes they are expected to sound out (or induce) in reading. For five years, they “learned to ignore them and listen largely to their own”.
The third principle concerns the age when children become bilingual: the earlier the better for oral and written language development. The neuroscientist Laura-Ann Petitto of Darmouth and her colleagues found that early bilingual exposure (before age three) had a positive effect, with language and reading comparable to those of monolinguals. Further, in imaging studies of adults who had been early bilingual, Petitto’s group found that subjects’ brains processed both languages in overlapping regions, like the brain of monolinguals. By contrast, bilingual adults who had been exposed later to a second language showed a different, more bilateral pattern of brain activation.
Reading never just happens. Not a word, a concept, or a social routine is wasted in the 2000 days that prepared the very young brain to use all the developing parts that go into reading acquisition. It is all there from the start - or not – with consequences for the rest of children’s reading development, and for the rest of their lives.
Learning two or more languages is an extraordinary, complicated cognitive investment for children, that represents a growing reality for huge number of students. Some up-front costs, such as transfer errors and substitutions from one language to the next, are less important than the advantages, if (a very important “if”) the child learn each language well.
The plasticity of the young brain enables young children to attain - with less effort than at any other time - proficiency in more than one language. After puberty, students bring certain advantages to learning language, but the younger child’s brain is superior in several important ways when it comes to learning to speak accent-free languages.Examining the many issues swirling around bilingualism and learning is dizzying, but three principles dominate:
First, English-language learners who know a concept or word in their first language learn to use it more easily in English, their second, “school” language. In other words, language enrichment at home provides an essential cognitive and linguistic foundation for all learning, and it does not need to be in the school language to be of help to the child. Children who have an impoverished environment in this home language, on the other hand, have no cognitive or linguistic foundation for either the first or the second, school language.
The second principle is similar to the first. Little is more important to learning to read English than the quality of language development in English. Thousand of children enter school with varying degrees of knowledge of English. Systematic efforts to instill both the “new” phonemes of the English language and the new vocabulary of school (and books) need to happen in each classroom for each learner. Connie Juel points out an essential linguistic issue easily missed by teachers in the US: Children who come to school either new to the English language or new to the standard American English dialect spoken in school do not know the very phonemes they are expected to sound out (or induce) in reading. For five years, they “learned to ignore them and listen largely to their own”.
The third principle concerns the age when children become bilingual: the earlier the better for oral and written language development. The neuroscientist Laura-Ann Petitto of Darmouth and her colleagues found that early bilingual exposure (before age three) had a positive effect, with language and reading comparable to those of monolinguals. Further, in imaging studies of adults who had been early bilingual, Petitto’s group found that subjects’ brains processed both languages in overlapping regions, like the brain of monolinguals. By contrast, bilingual adults who had been exposed later to a second language showed a different, more bilateral pattern of brain activation.
Reading never just happens. Not a word, a concept, or a social routine is wasted in the 2000 days that prepared the very young brain to use all the developing parts that go into reading acquisition. It is all there from the start - or not – with consequences for the rest of children’s reading development, and for the rest of their lives.
"Proust and the Squid", The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, 2007, pages 105 - 106
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