During the past century, and especially over the last ten years, bilingual education has been the subject of intense political debate. In California, where 25% of K-12 students speak a language other than English as their native language, the debate has been particularly contentious; in 1998, a state proposition passed mandating English-only instruction for English language learners.
"Over the years, fear coupled with ignorance has caused educators to imagine a long list of harms induced by bilingualism."
Unfortunately, the political battles concerning bilingual education have obscured important research demonstrating a link between balanced bilingualism, which involves becoming equally proficient in both languages, and cognitive gains—especially in terms of increased metalinguistic awareness. Before examining this link further, we review long-held misconceptions regarding the cognitive effects of bilingual education.
Myths about Raising Children To Be Bilingual
Over the years, fear coupled with ignorance has caused educators and citizens alike to imagine a long list of harms induced by bilingualism. According to Colin Baker, author of Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, these include everything from "cerebral confusion" and "split personality" to spiritual deprivation. In many countries, children have had their mouths washed out with soap and have been beaten with canes simply for speaking in their native languages.
What "scientific" theories led to such myths? A once-popular theory of second language acquisition depicted the brain as restricted in its capacity to take on more than one language. Using the analogy of a weighing scale, some "experts" insisted that the more a person learns of one language, the less knowledge he or she can hold of another. Juggling two languages could throw one or both languages "off-balance." Also associated with this theory is the image of two balloons in the mind, one holding an individual's first language, the other containing the second—with no overlap or communication between them. This suggests that the two languages are necessarily isolated from one another and that knowledge acquired in one does not transfer, or generalize, to knowledge in the other. But this model makes little sense. It implies, for instance, that if a child were to learn how to multiply in Spanish, she would have to re-learn multiplication in English or simply confine multiplying to the part of her brain that knows Spanish. Baker, among many others, demolishes this model. He claims that "language attributes are not apart in the cognitive system, but transfer readily and are interactive."
"Recent research has demonstrated that positive cognitive gains are associated with learning a second language in childhood."
Based on a crude misconception of the brain, the balloon and scale models fed into the notion that learning two languages results in inefficiency and confusion. Instead of doubling intellectual growth, one professor at Cambridge University asserted in 1890, second language acquisition halved spiritual and intellectual growth (Baker 1993). Early research on bilingualism did claim to find a verbal IQ difference between monolinguals and bilinguals, with monolinguals scoring higher. But the studies were so fraught with methodological weaknesses and flat-out flaws that they were eventually dismissed and replaced by more complex and responsible studies on the cognitive effects of bilingualism.
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