Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

The Bilingual Brain: What is Right and What is Left?

by Jyotsna Vaid. Chapter 6 in the 2008 book: An Introduction to Bilingualism

http://books.google.com/books?id=87snuOaE7DwC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=bilingualism+brain+mapping&source=bl&ots=zw8VnSFYRn&sig=csX6fsI5nqrvM14F7qM0FOLn0bY&hl=en&ei=wRteSszjOI7SMonw6L8C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

There is no consensus.

High spatial resolution is crucial in bilingual neuroimaging studies.

Mechelli et al 2004: bilinguals had greater grey matter density than monolinguals.

The bilingual brain: Cerebral representation of languages

Franco Fabbro 2001

"When a second language is learned formally and mainly used
at school, it apparently tends to be more widely represented in the cerebral cortex
than the first language, whereas if it is acquired informally, as usually happens with
the first language, it is more likely to involve subcortical structures (basal ganglia
and cerebellum) (cf. Paradis, 1994; Fabbro & Paradis, 1995; Fabbro et al., 1997;
Fabbro, 2000)."

Right hemisphere is associated with pragmatics (Chantraine et al 1998)

L2 language processes (phonology, morphology, syntax) are not in the right hemisphere (Paradis 1994, 1998)

Klein et al. 1995 performed the first neuroimaging study on bilinguals

Translation and comprehension are subserved by different processes.

Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition

Patricia Kuhl and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola

Neuroimaging is being used with infants. "The goal on experiments on infants has been to determine whether the initial state and the learning mechanisms are speech specific and species specific."

"The combination of computational and social abilities may be exclusive to humans (Kuhl 2007)."

"The studies suggest that exposure to language in the first year of life begins to set the neural architecture in a way that vaults the infant forward in the acquisition of language."

EEG/ERP is inexpensive, noiseless, "excellent temporal resolution"

At birth infants are capable of distinguishing between all phonemes that are possible in human languages, but with exposure to the native language, infants learn to "tune out" the phonemes that are not distinguished in their native language.

"By the end of the first year, the infant brain is no longer universally prepared for all languages, but instead primed to acquire the language(s) to which the infant brain has been exposed."

So adults truly cannot learn a second language the same way infants learn their first.

In a study (Kuhl et al 2003), a group of infants exposed to a live person speaking Mandarin were able to distinguish Mandarin sounds, while groups exposed to television and audio Mandarin tested the same as groups that were never exposed to Mandarin at all. So social interaction is very important to infant language acquisition. This could be due to the ways humans learned language for centuries--we could be evolutionary accustomed NOT to learn language from computers.

"A sudden increase in vocabulary typically occurs between 18 and 24 months of age--a "vocabulary explosion" (Granger & Brent 2004, Fernald et al. 2006)--but word learning begins much earlier. Infants show recognition of their own name at four and a half months (Mandel et al. 1995)." p. 520

"new words may be encoded in the same neural regions as previously learned words."

""Newborns tested by Imada et ak showed no activation in motor speech areas for any signals, whereas auditory areas responded robustly to all signals, suggesting that perception-action linkages for speech develop by three months of age as infants produce vowel-like sounds."

"Studies across languages showed that by one year of age infants do not accept mispronunciations of common words, words in stressed syllables, or monosyllabic words, indicating that their representations of these words are well-specified by that age." references omitted

Researchers are "strongly interested" in which comes first: phonemes or words, or if learning is bidirectional.

Data on bilingual infants has conflicting results.

Some believe that it may take bilingual infants longer to accumulate a normal vocabulary in their native languages because of decreased input. There have not been many studies on bilingual infants.

Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty

Katja Francesca Cantone and Natascha Muller

MacSwan (1999,2000) postulated that the grammars of each language in a bilingual mind are differentiated.

The authors examined the speech of bilingual German and Italian children from ages 1-5. In this paper, the children's DPs (determiner phrases?) were examined, particularly when the children used a noun from one language in an utterance that was primarily in the other language. Genders were sometimes switched along with the noun. The authors propose that this means that "gender is an abstract lexical feature of nouns which is stored in the lexicon and thus reject the view that gender is a functional head in syntax."

MacSwan (1999, 2000) argued that bilinguals have 2 seperate lexicons but "one and the same Computational System"

"it is not the noun endings -o and -a which carry gender"

They say that in one phase of growth, bilingual children mix up gendres between the two semi-autonomous systems.

Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared:

Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared: A
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation
of Syntactic Processing and a Possible ‘‘ Neural
Signature’’ of Bilingualism

Ioulia Kovelman1,2, Stephanie A. Baker1, and Laura-Ann Petitto

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2008

"Eleven Spanish-English right-handed bilinguals...and 10 English right-handed monolinguals" were asked to judge the plausibility of sentences containing relative clauses while in the fmri. OS and SO sentences were both used. Bilinguals judged twice as many sentences as monolinguals. Results indicate that bilinguals have differentiated language systems and use more left brain gray matter than monolinguals.

Because English is an analytic language and Spanish is syntactic, there was no difference in brain functioning when bilinguals were judging OS and SO in Spanish; English monolinguals showed more activity when processing SO ("difficult") than OS ("easy").

A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism: Neuroimaging studies of the Bilingual Brain

Michael Paradis

Chapter 6

Neuroimaging studies have neglected to replicate other studies; therefore, all findings from this field are not proved.

Surely the left-brain is associated with most aspects of language and the right brain kicks in when pragmatics is needed to understand--usually, when the L2 left-brain knowledge is insufficient.

Also, declarative and procedural memory is surely processed in different areas. If the left brain is damaged in early life, the right brain will take on language-learning tasks.

"...a natural (ecological) task such as the comprehension of a short story..."

Don't use single-word recognition, because this is not "language."

"The majority of studies to date (28) have used single words as stimuli (173)."

Paradis looks for converging evidence in the truly linguistic (e.g. ecological) tasks from published studies: procedural memory for language = perisylvian area

"declarative memory and hence metalinguistic knowledge"= parahippocampal gyri, mesial temporal lobes, anterior cingulate

pragmatics=areas of the right hemisphere

Paradis 2000a: "Comprehension is easier than production"

It is almost impossible to fully control for all areas of processing the task. :-(

I think my dissertation should test and retest and retest subjects to ensure validity.