Work

Testing Bilingual Educational Methods: A Plea to End the Language‐Mixing Taboo

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that one subject should be taught in only one language and one person should stick to one language in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and monolingual functioning on memory performance in immediate recall as a proxy for comprehension and attention during learning. In Experiment 1, nonbalanced bilingual youngsters were provided with definition pairs introducing familiar objects in a single‐language context (SLC) or in a mixed‐language context (MLC). After each definition block, participants were asked to identify previously introduced objects presented among a stream of Old and New items. In Experiment 2, the same speaker produced the two definitions in the mixed‐language context, thus violating the second principle introduced above. In both experiments we found no advantage for the SLC over the MLC of exposure.

Source: Language Learning

DOI: 10.1111/lang.12173

Authors: Eneko Antón, Guillaume Thierry, Alexander Goborov, Jon Anasagasti, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia

Institutions: Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Bangor University, University of the Basque Country

Language: English

Topic: Multilingual Education and Policy

Subfield: Linguistics and Language

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funders: European Commission, Eusko Jaurlaritza, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad