Reply to Language immersion/lessons

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Language immersion/lessons"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The above article in a serious psychological journal referencing a meta-analytical review of the effects of bilingualism on executive functioning in adults, should give the parents who go for years and years of half-baked language immersion in DC public schools pause.

I'm raising my children fully bilingual to shore up their ethnic identity, to help them communicate well with immigrant relatives whose English is weak, and to increase their employability, knock on wood, as adults.  I'm not raising them bilingual in the vain hope of making them smarter than monolingual peers in this country.

The findings of the study, summarized in the abstract at the link above, are hard to ignore.

[b]Because of enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals.[/b] Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage. Here we synthesized comparisons of bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ performance in six executive domains using 891 effect sizes from 152 studies on adults. We also included unpublished data, and considered the potential influence of a number of study-, task-, and participant-related variables. Before correcting estimates for observed publication bias, our analyses revealed a very small bilingual advantage for inhibition, shifting, and working memory, but not for monitoring or attention. No evidence for a bilingual advantage remained after correcting for bias. For verbal fluency, our analyses indicated a small bilingual disadvantage, possibly reflecting less exposure for each individual language when using two languages in a balanced manner. Moreover, moderator analyses did not support theoretical presuppositions concerning the bilingual advantage. [b]We conclude that the available evidence does not provide systematic support for the widely held notion that bilingualism is associated with benefits in cognitive control functions in adults. [/b](PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).[/quote]

What?

“Executive control functions” are not the only kind of intelligence.

This study is showing that eating well as a kid doesn’t make someone a better tennis player and you’re arguing there are zero benefits of eating well as a kid.

We should invest more in teaching Americans how to interpret science.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics