The cognitive benefits of bilingualism
Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Educational Studies, The University of British Columbia
[Permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Until I read the government’s press release, I did not
know that February 3-9 is French Immersion Celebration Week. French Immersion
Week was proclaimed in Dec 2019 by the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia,
Janet Austin, as an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of French
immersion.
French Immersion has grown
dramatically over the last 50 years. French immersion began as modest
initiative of the mid-1960s responding to parents from St. Lambert (Quebec).
Today French immersion enrolls more than 50,00 students in British Columbia and
nearly 400,000 students across Canada.
There is indeed much to celebrate
about the faith that the parents of St. Lambert had in the benefits that
bilingualism would confer on their children. In 2010, colleagues and I set out
to examine the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and the magnitude of those
benefits. While individual studies have shown that bilingualism confers
benefits, we wanted to look at the pattern across studies to gain a clear
understanding of the extent and diversity of those benefits.
Beginning with a pool of more
than 5,000 articles, we applied rigorous standards to identify publicly
available research that used an experimental group of bilingual
(or multilingual) participants and a control group of monolingual participants,
and reported measurable outcomes with sufficient data for computing the
magnitude of the effect of bilingualism. Just more than 60 studies (from 39
articles) survived the application of these standards.
Our results, published in the Review of Educational Research, confirmed that
the process of acquiring two languages and of simultaneously managing those
languages by inhibiting one so the second can be used without interference allows
bilinguals to develop skills that extend into other domains.
These skills appear to give
bilingual speakers insight into the abstract features of language and into
their own learning processes; to give bilingual speakers an enhanced capacity
to appropriately control and distribute their attention, to develop abstract
thinking and use symbols, and to solve problems.
When judged in terms of the probability
that the skills of a randomly selected student from the bilingual group will be
greater than the skills of a randomly sampled student of the monolingual group,
the overall magnitude of the impact of bilingualism is in the range of 65%. In
other words, approximately three out of five times the score of a randomly
selected student from the bilingual group will be greater than the score of a
randomly sampled student of the monolingual group.
The celebration of French
immersion in BC includes acting workshops, film festivals, and skating. There
will be lots of fun, and I will also be celebrating the enduring, cognitive
benefits of bilingualism.