Bitesize Research: Key Findings About Bilingualism

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week so far - and no doubt are looking forward to some well earned rest coming shortly! Earlier this academic year, we had a powerful keynote from the Bell Foundation about EAL learners, which has connected to our ongoing work on literacy, communication and vocabulary. As such, I was interested to see a recent Edutopia article about bilingualism  

Objectives: To bring together key findings about bilingualism. 

Summary: 

• The author highlights some of the recent key findings about bilingualism as follows:

1. Bilingualism strengthens executing functioning: As bilingual people are constantly changing between languages, they are better at multitasking and significantly more ‘grey matter’ in their brains which improves decision making, motivation and emotional regulation.  

2. Bilingualism can increase English and maths performance: There are lots of studies that show bilingual children outperform their peers in English and maths performance.

3. Bilingualism can increase earning potential and job opportunities: Bilingual employees, on average, earn 5-20% more than their monolingual counterparts. 

4. Bilingualism can prevent the negative impacts of disease and brain injury: Studies have shown that bilinguals have a better ability to recover from cognitive impairments caused by injury and that dementia had a later onset in bilingual people.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• How do I celebrate bilingualism with my students currently?

• How do I bolster the confidence of bilingual students in my classes or tutor group?

• What more would I like to know about bilingual students?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!