![]() Young children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn't begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. " can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another," says Sorace.ĭo these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don't yet know. People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executive function. Saying "Goodbye" to mom and then " Guten tag" to your teacher, or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a red crayon, requires skills called "inhibition" and "task switching." These skills are subsets of an ability called executive function. It turns out that, in many ways, the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of those languages at a given moment - which is fundamentally a feat of paying attention. 8, largely reversed that decision, paving the way for a huge expansion of bilingual education in the state that has the largest population of English-language learners. Proposition 58, passed by California voters on Nov. It was intended to sharply reduce the amount of time that English-language learners spent in bilingual settings. Most famously, California passed Proposition 227 in 1998. The trend flies in the face of some of the culture wars of two decades ago, when advocates insisted on "English first" education. New York City, North Carolina, Delaware, Utah, Oregon and Washington state are among the places expanding dual-language classrooms. The goal is functional bilingualism and biliteracy for all students by middle school. Dual-language classrooms, by contrast, provide instruction across subjects to both English natives and English learners, in both English and in a target language. Traditional programs for English-language learners, or ELLs, focus on assimilating students into English as quickly as possible. The findings inform theories of language and brain development during the key periods of neural reorganization for learning to read by illuminating experience-based plasticity in linguistically diverse learners.NPR Ed How We Teach English Learners: 3 Basic Approaches The common bilingual effects shared by the two groups were that in both bilingual groups, increased home language proficiency was associated with stronger left superior temporal gyrus (STG) activation when processing the English word structures that are most dissimilar from the home language. The language-specific effects were that Chinese and Spanish bilinguals showed principled differences in their neural organization for English lexical morphology. The findings revealed both language-specific and shared bilingual effects. Children completed an English morphological word processing task during fNIRS neuroimaging. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English speakers of Chinese or Spanish, and English monolinguals, all raised in the US (N = 152, ages 5-10). How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing.
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