Bilingualism and achievement in school

• Autores: Jean Ure
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 1, Nº. 3, 1980, págs. 253-260
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although there are many educationalists today who feel that bilingualism ought to be an advantage to pupils in school, failures are better documented. There is need for a theory, powerful enough to predict success for bilinguals, specifying the conditions under which such success may be achieved, but which will at the same time account for the reported failures.

    In many communities outside Europe and in some European regions bilingualism is an established norm, with regular language transitions and double disponibilité. Any method of teaching that sets prohibitions on one set of associated languages is likely to be destructive in its effects.

    These transitions need to be taken account of in foreign‐language teaching at secondary level; they are central to the problems of children who are being educated in a second language, since they encounter such transitions all the time.

    Most important is the effect of bilingualism on cognitive development, the ability to decentre and the acquisition of disembedded thought; this widening of the intellectual horizon is achieved to a large extent, it is claimed, by the perception of ambivalences and their disambiguation by means of synonymous expressions. If this is so, then socialization through two languages should promise the greatest benefits ‐ but only if the two languages are seen as complementary, working together as parts of a single system.

    These arguments suggest the importance, for bilingual pupils, of the use of their first language in school in a complementary relation to that of the second language, particularly for problem‐solving and the formulation of questions; it argues for the employment in schools with a bilingual intake of adult bilinguals who can help in the formulation of questions. For all pupils, L2 and FL, the target of language work today needs to be the building up of a single bilingual system, with special importance given to the skills of language transition.