Came across this article on an expat blog today that I thought was pretty interesting. Since Tom and I will be learning a difficult language, Polish, this gives us some additional encouragement.
On some level, even if they don’t immerse themselves in two languages but are merely exposed to a second, half of the world’s population conducts life in more than just their mother tongue.
Research indicates that babies as young as four months who live in bilingual environments can distinguish between two languages, by reading lip movement and facial expressions, and they show a strong preference for the language their mother spoke during pregnancy.
We all understand that speaking more than one language is a good thing – and not simply so that we can order two beers and a pizza in Italian, French or Spanish.
We know that speaking more than one language is good for the brain. But are the advantages broader than that? Most of us encourage our children to learn a second, and even a third, language at school, but do we know why we’re doing it? My youngest daughter is learning Spanish, French and German and has dabbled in Mandarin. She enjoys them, but will they really extend long-term value?
The partnering of language with cultural skills is a novel approach. I was taught French in a classroom. No immersion, no exposure, and certainly no opportunity to actually speak French to anybody from France. It meant that the learning lost relevance. What was I doing this for? My daughter, on the other hand, knows why she is doing French: she has to host a French child for a week next term, and then she has to go to France and be hosted. She’ll need to know what she’s talking about.
But is she at an advantage, given that she is 13 and began learning a second language at nine, over the school leavers who might have missed out so far, but who are advised by Ofsted to try and learn another language to make finding a job easier?
Do younger children learn languages faster? No, that’s a myth, says Dr Virginia Rojas, a language consultant based in the US. “After all these years in the field of bilingualism, language acquisition, and language education, what strikes me is how - despite the research showing the absolute advantages to individuals and society alike - most people rely on ideological myths as their knowledge and opinion base.”
Younger learners are often able to pronounce a new language with little or no accent, she says. They benefit from a lack of inhibition which means they’re prepared to “have a go” - and those characteristics mean they are good language acquirers. But older students are more efficient language learners “because they are cognitively mature in their own language”.
(All is not lost: I will learn how to order two beers and a pizza in Italian).
Indeed, a lack of maturity in their mother tongue left Sandra Lawrence frustrated by her children as they grew up in France. Her daughters refused, for a time, to speak English to her – even though she is English and head of English at an international school in Provence.
“As an English mother living in France, I wanted my children to speak English so that they could communicate with their family in England, as well as the fact that English would be useful later on in life. I spoke English with my first-born and she coped very well with the bilingual aspect, and understood that not everybody understood what she was saying in English.
“When her sister was born, she never spoke to her in English, probably because she communicated with all other children in French.
“Both children refused to speak in English with me when they started French primary school. Fortunately, they go to a bilingual school now, and the eldest has regained her ease in English. But my youngest daughter does not have the same ease, even though I still spoke to her in English – but I was the only person doing so.”
Sandra agrees with Rojas, though, that younger children take to a second language less self-consciously than older children. She concludes: “In my opinion, and in my role as a teacher, the younger children learn to speak another language, the better.”
But Dr Narly Golestani, who works at the
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at
University College London, and who has a special interest in language, says there are probably two time windows when language learning is easier: “One around the age of five (when learning to write often starts) and one around the age of 12. Learning languages later than these periods will be much more difficult.”
But could learning a second, third and even fourth language do more than promote post-school prospects? Absolutely, insists the
UK Subject Centre for Languages (SCL), which has identified 700 reasons to study a foreign language.
As recently as the Fifties, it was believed that raising children to be bilingual could inhibit their language development.
Today’s thinking could not be more different. The SCL, which forms part of
Southampton University, believes that an additional language brings into context many other subjects: history, politics, and geography, and opens doors to foreign literature.
Dr Golestani agrees. “There’s some evidence that learning several languages, in childhood, has advantages in other domains: it can lead to better 'executive’ skills more generally, and to better working memory skills.”
However, language learning could be a problem for some. “It can be bad for children who are dyslexic," says Dr Golestani. “It can tax them, and make it hard for them to do well even in their native language, and also for children who are at the low end of a continuum in terms of potential for language learning.”
The UCL team concluded that learning a second language “boosts” brain-power, altering grey matter – the area of the brain which processes information – in the same way that physical exercise builds muscles.
And people who learned a second language at a young age were more likely to have more advanced grey matter than people who learned one later.
The build-up of cerebral muscle could help protect the brain from the effects of ageing.
Research at
York University in Toronto found that bilingual people are much better at retaining their mental abilities into old age than those who speak only one language. Dr Ellen Bialystok, who wrote the study, said: “Bilingualism appears to offer widespread benefits across a range of complex cognitive tasks.”
So it would appear that the benefits of a second – and third or even fourth – language are manifest throughout life: they support academic study, enhance career opportunities, make travelling fun, and sustain us into old age.
Now where’s that waiter: “Per favore potrei avere due birre e una pizza?”
FASCINATING LANGUAGE FACTS
- There are 13 languages spoken by more than 100 million people. These are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu. Of these, the most widely spoken are Mandarin, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi.
- There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese.
- We are all designed to acquire language, but we are built to learn and accommodate more than just one: monolinguals are effectively under utilizing abilities by not tapping that potential.
- The most prolific language speaker on record was recorded as Emil Krebs (1867–1930), a German who mastered 68 languages and studied a further 120.
- Bilinguals do not necessarily “think” in any language. While performing tasks and chores such as walking or taking a bus, thought, says Francois Grosjean, author of Bilingual Life and Reality can be “visual-spatial and non-linguistic, it is only when planning to speak that individual languages intervene”.
