Not Just Bilingual—Biliterate!

If you live in the United States, you might not guess that most people in the world are bilingual, able to speak more than one language with reasonable fluency. In Europe, bilinguals are a little more than half of the population. In many countries, multilingualism is the norm, even encoded legally in the form of several official languages. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages, including English, Afrikaans, and nine Bantu languages, and most citizens speak several of them. Even in the U.S., the percentage of people who speak a language besides English hovers between 20 percent and 25 percent. Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of these bilinguals view themselves as speaking English reasonably well. Contrary to popular belief, they generally do.

Internationally, the proportion of the population that is bilingual is increasing. U.N. studies find that migration is on the rise globally. With migration comes the need to learn a second language. The United States is no exception to this trend. We are part of an increasingly interconnected and turbulent world, and our linguistic patterns reflect that.

Is this increase in bilingualism a problem or a blessing? It is hard to imagine how bilingualism by itself can be a problem, assuming that people learn to speak and read in at least one language fairly well. In our view, it is a blessing, particularly if one also becomes biliterate. Ideally, we should find ways to encourage bilinguals to learn to read and write successfully in both languages.

Readers of this blog already know that we are concerned about issues impacting reading skills. So, what impact does bilingualism have on learning to read?

Most children who will become fully functionally bilingual receive input in both languages from birth. These children show a distinctive brain organization for languages compared to children who acquire a second language later. Early acquisition of a second language helps with learning to read. Kovelman, Baker, and Petitto (2008) found that elementary school children who had acquired two languages prior to age three had reading performance similar to their monolingual counterparts. Further, these children’s abilities in both languages kept growing because both typically remained important for their daily lives.

Most bilingual children only begin to learn their second language as they enter school. Unfortunately, these children can be at a disadvantage in terms of later literacy. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, our only real national test, only 3 percent of fourth-grade English language learners scored as Proficient in reading, compared to 46 percent of non-bilingual children, and this trend carried over to middle school. Of course, these lower scores may not be solely the result of bilingualism per se. In the U.S., bilingual children are also more likely to live in economically struggling families, so they tend to have fewer family literacy resources and activities related to reading in their homes. Their problems with literacy, thus, seem likely partly environmental, partly linguistic in nature.

Unfortunately, this lower level of literacy among bilingual students is often accompanied by a subtractive bilingualism pattern wherein the second language is added at the expense of the first. In fact, Restrepo et al. (2010) documented how development in their first language of pretty much stalled in four-year-olds after attending a year-long, all-English preschool program. Since the language skills of four-year-olds should still be growing, this arrested development in their home language was alarming. If four-year-olds stopped growing in height or weight, we would quickly demand an explanation! Language should be no different.

So, what would it take for children to become fully biliterate, able to read, write, and speak formally in two languages or more, rather than just merely bilingual (which is difficult enough)? Unfortunately, we know considerably less about this topic. There are hardly any early childhood interventions that have evaluated their effects on children’s emergent literacy in both languages. We do know that having high levels of some emergent literacy skills in one language-- such as phonological awareness, vocabulary, and alphabet knowledge--seems to help children learn to read in both languages (Durgunoglu & Oney, 1999).

According to Delbridge and Helman (2016), there are several effective classroom practices that parents and teachers can use to move young bilingual children towards biliteracy. Allowing children to move fluidly from one language to the next during the school day in reading and writing is one thing that teachers can do. Having a bilingual vocabulary focus is important too. This can be as simple as providing the home language words for the English ones children are learning. Using books that portray cross-cultural characters in a positive light is important. From our experience, finding such books that children can read by themselves is surprisingly difficult. Luckily, there are various awards and lists such as the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Award list for Latino books parents and teachers to select from.

We also know that parental attitudes toward biliteracy matters too. Engaging families through bilingual programming during Family Literacy Nights can help. Children’s parents and other relatives can help by volunteering to fill the gaps in the classroom when the teacher herself is not bilingual. These kinds of practices help young children understand that learning to read and write in both languages is important and valued by the home.

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Good biliteracy is important in the same ways that good literacy is, but biliteracy is special. On an economic level, biliteracy can translate into employment benefits and differential pay in the right settings. On a global level, being biliterate can increase multi-cultural understanding. On a personal level, it can increase children’s ability to communicate with family members, both in spoken and written language. On a neurological level, bilinguals may actually have better brains. Because they have to constantly attend to which language is being used, neurological studies show constant strengthening of bilingual’s executive functions such as planning, attending, and blocking out irrelevant information (Marian & Shook, 2012). As one result, bilinguals may have greater protection against cognitive decline as they age.

An increasing number of states are offering a Seal of Biliteracy to high school students who attain high levels of mastery of reading and writing in two languages. We think this is a good idea, for our society and for the teenagers themselves.

Sources

Delbridge, A., & Helman, L. A. (2016). Evidence-Based Strategies for Fostering Biliteracy in Any Classroom. Early Childhood Education Journal, 1-10.

Durgunoğlu, A. Y., & Öney, B. (1999). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing, 11(4), 281-299.

Kovelman, I., Baker, S. A., & Petitto, L. A. (2008). Age of first bilingual language exposure as a new window into bilingual reading development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(2), 203-223.

Marian, V., & Shook, A. (2012). The cognitive benefits of being bilingual. In Cerebrum: the Dana forum on brain science (Vol. 2012). Dana Foundation.

Restrepo, M. A., Castilla, A. P., Schwanenflugel, P. J., Neuharth-Pritchett, S., Hamilton, C. E., & Arboleda, A. (2010). Effects of a supplemental Spanish oral language program on sentence length, complexity, and grammaticality in Spanish-speaking children attending English-only preschools. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 41(1), 3-13.