Bilingualism, Intelligence, and Learning Strategies PDF

Second-language learning Chapter 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies Is it a good idea to become bilingual? Just what is a bilingual? Will learning a second language affect one’s intelligence? Should a young child learn a second language? If so, when should that be? How might learning a second language be affected by the ﬁrst? In this chapter, we shall attempt to provide answers to some often-asked questions, and others as well. 8.1 Varieties of bilingualism Any two languages: speech, sign, or written To begin with, it would be useful to consider just what the term ‘bilingualism’ includes. Most of us, without a second thought, would think of a bilingual as a person who is able to speak and understand two languages (languages like English and Russian, or Chinese and Arabic) and, for the most part, we would be right. Beyond this, though, there might be varieties of bilinguals that would strike many of us as odd at ﬁrst. On second thought we would realize that there are people who, besides an ordinary speech-type lan- guage, also know a sign language, such as British Sign Language or Swedish Sign Language, which are true languages (see Chapter 2). Many deaf per- sons are such bilinguals. Moreover, there are people who can read a second language ﬂuently, even write it well, but who cannot speak or understand its spoken form to any signiﬁcant degree – many Sanskrit bilinguals would fall into this category. These people have not learned reading but they have learned a language in the written mode (see Chapter 3). Because language in all its complexity can be acquired through a variety of modalities – sound (speech), sight (writing), and visual motion (signs) – an adequate concept of a bilingual should allow for any of these realizations. Thus, we may say that a person is bilingual if he or she knows: (1) two languages in the same modality, for example, two speech-based languages 160 AIT_C08.pm5 160 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies such as spoken English and spoken German, or, two sign-based languages such as American Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language, or (2) two languages based on different modalities, e.g. spoken German and American Sign Language, or, spoken French and written Sanskrit. 8.2 Is bilingualism beneficial or detrimental? Most of us consider bilingualism as something good, an advantage. For one thing, knowledge of another language enables people to communicate with members of other cultures in their own language. This, in turn, provides a means for furthering cooperation and understanding among nations and peoples. Knowing another language is also important within countries where there is more than one prevalent or ofﬁcial language, as in Switzerland, which has four ofﬁcial languages: German, French, Italian, Romansh. Or Canada, with its two ofﬁcial languages, English and French. At a personal level, the pleasure and cultural beneﬁts of bilingualism, too, are obvious. Who would not like to be able to travel around the world, to Paris, Moscow, Helsinki, Shanghai, or Tokyo, and be able to talk with the people there in their own language? What lovers of movies and theatre would not like to understand performances in the original language? This being the case, where then is the controversy? First, it must be said that the arguments offered against bilingualism are typically restricted to young children learning a second language. Some people believe that if a second language is learned at an early age, it can be harmful in two main respects: (1) the learning of the second lan- guage would retard or negatively inﬂuence the learning of the native language, or (2) it would intellectually retard the development of thinking and of such cognitive capacities as mathematics and reading. Many states in the USA after the First World War banned the teaching of a foreign language because the knowledge of that language was regarded as poten- tially detrimental to young children’s cultural values (see the Meyer case in Chapter 9). Secondly, it must be said that the criticism that has been levelled against early bilingualism is primarily of another era, the early half of the twentieth century. That was a time when conceptions and experimental methodology involving language and intelligence were at a rather naive level and when the mood in America (where most of the research was done) was one of isolationism and a wariness of foreign inﬂuences. With the advent of the ethnic pride movements in the 1960s, both in America and Europe, along with the increased wealth that allowed ordinary people to travel to foreign lands, attitudes towards foreign languages changed signiﬁcantly to the positive. Still, the questions must be answered scientiﬁcally. 161 AIT_C08.pm5 161 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning 8.3 Effects of early bilingualism on first-language development and intelligence 8.3.1 Effects on first-language development Can learning a second language at an early age, while the child is still in the process of learning the native or ﬁrst language, have a negative effect on the learning of the native language? There is the concern that bilingualism might somehow retard ﬁrst- or even second-language development with the result that, for example, a child raised with two languages might never really learn either language as well as would monolingual speakers of those languages. This is an empirical question and one to which researchers have addressed themselves. Negative reports One well-known and inﬂuential piece of research for its time was that of Smith, back in the 1930s. Smith (1939) gathered comparative data on the language of pre-school children in Iowa, where she did her graduate work, and on children in Hawaii, where she went to teach. The Iowa children were essentially white and monolingually English while the Hawaii children were ethnically diverse, of Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese parentage, and bilingual, with English as one of their languages. Smith recorded sentences uttered by the children and evaluated the sen- tences in terms of standard English usage. The principal ﬁnding was that the bilingual children from Hawaii had many more errors in their English speech than did their Iowa counterparts. This led Smith to conclude that bilingualism caused retardation in language development. However, by deﬁning English errors the way she did, Smith could not help but come up with the results that she did. Because the children in Hawaii in general spoke a dialect of English that was prevalent there, so-called ‘pidgeon’, and was not the standard English spoken by the children from Iowa, the Hawaiian children were penalized. Smith’s bias is reminiscent of the later work of researchers such as Bereiter and Engelman (1966) and Basil Bernstein (1960, 1961) in the 1960s, who claimed that non-standard speakers of English – in particular, inner-city African-Americans in the USA and working-class whites in Britain – had poor language knowledge com- pared to standard English speakers. The brilliant work of Labov (1970) and other linguistic researchers in the 1960s and 1970s, however, conclusively demonstrated that non-standard dialects of English are every bit as complex as standard dialects (as typ- iﬁed by Midwest speech in America, for example) and are linguistically comparable. 162 AIT_C08.pm5 162 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies Positive reports More sophisticated investigations comparing the linguistic skills of mono- linguals and bilinguals have been made by Lambert and his associates in Canada. One long-term study by Bruck et al. (1976) with native English- speaking children in a French immersion programme found that, by the fourth or ﬁfth grade, the second-language French skills, including reading and writing, were almost as good as those of native French-speaking children. Importantly, all of this was achieved at no loss to their English native lan- guage development (as compared to a control group of English monolingual children). In addition, the immersion group did better than the English monolingual group on creativity tests. In many cases, their mathematics and science scores were also higher. However, other research demonstrates that in some aspects these students do not achieve native levels in productive skills such as speaking and writing (Lapkin et al., 1990). This may be because they were only exposed to class- room language. Without a great degree of interaction with native speakers over a long period of time, native-speaker proﬁciency is not easily achiev- able (Tarone and Swain, 1995; Yeoman, 1996). Positive effects with very different languages The studies reviewed above discuss bilingualism in terms of two similar languages, English and French. What about the effects of bilingualism in terms of two languages that are quite different? For example, English and Japanese not only have completely different syntactic structures but they also have completely different writing systems. Regarding syntax, for example, Japanese uses a Subject–Object–Verb ordering and uses a system of postposition particles (as opposed to prepositions as in English) that follow nouns and noun phrases. It also differs from English in that English is a right-branching language where relative clauses follow the noun they modify, e.g. ‘the dog which Mary bought was a happy dog’, while Japanese is a left- branching language where modifying clauses precede the noun. Regarding the writing systems, while English uses a relatively simple Roman type of alphabet, Japanese writing is complex, using Chinese characters along with two different syllabaries (a syllabary being a system in which each sign represents a syllable). In a study of the ﬁrst English immersion programme in Japan, Bostwick (1999) compared two groups of Japanese students in the same elementary school. One group consisted of children learning the elementary school curriculum through the medium of English; this was the experimental immersion group. The other group, the control group, consisted of children learning through the regular medium of Japanese. The results revealed no negative effects on ﬁrst-language acquisition. Furthermore, both groups 163 AIT_C08.pm5 163 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning performed equally well on tests of academic achievement. The results showed that, the immersion students scored better on tests of English. Thus the Japanese–English immersion students equalled their Japanese monolingual peers in ﬁrst-language learning and academic achievement, while at the same time they learned a foreign language. 8.3.2 Effects on intelligence Does learning a second language at an early age, while the child is still in the process of acquiring some aspects of the native or ﬁrst language, have a positive or negative effect on a child’s intelligence, thinking ability, creativity, or cognitive functions such as mathematics? As was the case in considering effects on the development of language, most early research tended to ﬁnd a negative effect. The possibility that learning a second language could in some way have a positive effect on intelligence was not something that was considered tenable until relatively recently. Negative reports Perhaps the earliest study on bilingualism and intelligence was done in America. Goddard (1917) gave the English-language version of the Binet intelligence test to 30 recently arrived adult immigrants at Ellis Island. On the word-ﬂuency portion of the test, it was found that less than half of the adult immigrants could provide 60 words, a ﬁgure much below the 200 words that 11-year-old American children could provide. Based on these results, Goddard classiﬁed 25 of the 30 people as ‘feeble-minded’. Similar results were found in comparisons of monolinguals and bilinguals in Wales (Saer, 1922, 1923). Saer tested the intelligence of 1400 children between the ages of 7 and 14. Based on the higher scores for monolinguals on IQ tests, he concluded that bilinguals’ thinking processes were confused by the use of two languages. What is wrong with these and other similar studies is the fact that know- ledge of the target language itself plays a great role in determining the outcome of scores on the intelligence test. Since language is crucial in order to comprehend questions and to understand the multiple-choice answers, a low level of language knowledge will result in a low score and hence a low level of intelligence. The failure of the test makers and givers of intelligence tests to take into account the role of language in inﬂuencing scores greatly biased the tests. Not surprisingly, immigrants and non-standard English speakers fared especially badly. Positive reports It was only in the 1950s that psychologists seriously began to realize that test items that required knowing language was not a fair measure of intelligence and that the content of items in many widely used intelligence tests was culturally biased. Once these methodological errors began to be taken into 164 AIT_C08.pm5 164 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies account, research studies found no disadvantage for bilinguals. More than that, there was good evidence of a positive effect! One of the ﬁrst studies to ﬁnd positive effects on intelligence for bilingualism was that of Peal and Lambert (1962). They concluded that bilingualism results in greater mental ﬂexibility and abstract thought. Furthermore, they suggested that rather than the two languages causing ‘confused thinking’, bilingualism improved thinking. This idea is supported by an impressive amount of recent studies (see Bialystok, 2004, for a review): if children have more than one language to analyze, they pay more attention to structural patterns and functions of words, which, in turn, has a crucial effect on further reading and academic success. To date, one of the most impressive studies in the ﬁeld has been that of Bain and Yu (1980). They compared monolingual and bilingual young chil- dren in different parts of the world (Alberta, Canada; Alsace, France; and Hong Kong). The tests that Bain and Yu used involved puzzles and having to carry out verbal instructions. Some of the instructions were quite linguist- ically complex for a 4-year-old; for example, the child was told, ‘When the red light goes on, say “squeeze”, and squeeze the ball’. By the time the children were around 4 years old, the results of some cognitive performance tests showed the bilinguals to be superior to the monolinguals, in addition to their having acquired two different languages. Positive results were also found recently by Ellen Bialystok of York Uni- versity in Toronto. She tested the ‘ﬂuid intelligence’ of 154 bilingual and monolingual English and Tamil adult speakers. The participants were given the Simon Test where they were required to focus and respond to rapidly changing tasks. The older bilinguals (ages 60 to 88) did far better than their monolingual counterparts of the same age. In fact, their results were about the same as of younger monolinguals (ages 30 to 59) (Picard, 2004). 8.3.3 Conclusion regarding the effects of early bilingualism on language and intelligence It is unlikely that learning a second language negatively affects intelligence in a permanent or important way. In fact, some research suggests there may even be beneﬁcial effects. Given the advantages of knowing another lan- guage and of young children’s propensity for speedy language acquisition, there is good reason to favour early bilingualism. 8.4 Sequential and simultaneous learning situations There are essentially two conditions according to which a person may be- come bilingual: (1) the two languages can be acquired sequentially, such as 165 AIT_C08.pm5 165 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning the second language being learned later at school, or (2) simultaneously, such as where the young child is exposed to two different languages in the home at the same time. Simultaneous learning, by its very nature, is thus for children only. On the other hand, sequential learning can occur with both children and adults; the second language can be learned during lower-level schooling, e.g. elementary school, or it can be learned after the person has become an adult, e.g. at university or in another country. 8.4.1 Sequential learning of two languages Consider, for example, an immigrant couple who have come to America from China with their 4-year-old daughter. They send their daughter to an English-speaking pre-school but they continue to speak only Chinese at home. By the time the child is 5 years old, she is speaking ﬂuent English with her playmates and teachers while continuing to speak Chinese at home with her parents. Her English is as good as the English of her friends. The child has thus learned two languages, Chinese and English, sequentially; with the second language being introduced after a great deal of the ﬁrst language had been learned. Although the child begins learning English, Chinese continues to be learned from her parents at home. From this point on, the advanced learning of the two languages will be occurring simultane- ously. What is sequential is the different starting time, with a four-year gap before the introduction of the second language. In sequential bilingualism young children are said to pass through four common stages (Tabors and Snow, 1994): (1) Children attempt to use the language learned at home with other children in the wider community where a different language is used. As they come to understand that others do not understand their home language, they give up trying to commun- icate in the home language outside of the home. They are silent. (2) They abandon their home language in favour of communication through gesture. Children at this point are beginning to comprehend some of the second language. (3) The children begin to use the second language in ways similar to children learning a ﬁrst language. They produce abbreviated utterances with- out function words as in the telegraphic speech of ﬁrst-language learners. (4) Finally, they begin to produce grammatical utterances in appropriate situations. 8.4.2 Simultaneous learning One person speaks one language only, or, one person speaks two languages There are two basic situations in which a child may learn two (or more) languages at the same time: (1) Each person speaks one language only to the child: One Person–One Language, or (2) Each person speaks two different languages to the child: One Person–Two Languages. 166 AIT_C08.pm5 166 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies Typical of the ﬁrst case is when the mother speaks one language while the father speaks another. Or it can be a frequent babysitter or other family member who speaks the other language. Each person uses one language exclusively. For example, the mother might speak to the child only in Spanish while the father speaks to the child only in English. This is the one-person- uses-one-language-only situation: 1P–1L, for short. The other learning case is when the same person uses two different languages when speaking to the child. For example, the mother uses both Spanish and English, and the father does the same. The two languages are mixed by each parent. Thus, each person uses two languages: the 1P–2L situation, for short. The 1P–1L situation is better It seems that children are so ﬂexible that they can become ﬂuent in both languages by the age of 3 or 4 years, regardless of the language situation (1P–1L or 1P–2L). Although direct evidence bearing on this issue is not available, it seems more likely to be the case that the child in the 1P–1L situation will learn the two languages faster than the child in the 1P–2L situation and attain a higher level of proﬁciency. This would be due to consistency. In the 1P–1L situation, the child on hearing speech would not have to puzzle over which of the two sets of language knowledge is being referred to. The child would know that the mother will speak one language while the father will speak another. A simultaneous trilingual case (1P–1L) × 3 One interesting and actual (1P–1L) × 3 example is that of friends of the ﬁrst author who lived in an English-speaking community in Honolulu. In the family, from the time of the birth of each of their two sons, who are about three years apart in age, the mother spoke only Japanese and the father spoke only English. To add to the situation, there was a live-in grand- mother who spoke only Russian to the children. The result? By the age of three, each of the boys, in turn, became trilingual in English, Japanese, and Russian! These languages were maintained by the children into adulthood. Developmental stages in bilingual language learning Children learning two ﬁrst languages simultaneously follow the same route as other children learning their ﬁrst language (Lyon, 1996). The 1990s bi- lingual infant research demonstrated that bilingual infants, even those raised in an environment where similar languages are spoken (like English and French, for example), separate the two languages in the ﬁrst months of their lives. They acquire phonological properties of their native languages at the same rate as monolinguals, but gradually they start to prefer one language, which becomes their dominant (Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, 2001). Other than that, bilinguals move through the same stages of one-word utterances, two- and three-word utterances, then increasing complexity with morpheme 167 AIT_C08.pm5 167 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning acquisition and complex sentences (see Chapter 1). In the two- and three- word stages some mixing might occur between the two languages, especially for 1P–2L learners. In the past, theorists postulated that the two different languages were func- tioning as one language for the child. That is, the child was somehow mixing the vocabulary and syntax of the two languages to form one language system. However, the current view is that the child is simply switching between the two languages in the way that adult language learners do. An adult or a child who cannot think of a word in one language might then use a word or phrase while speaking the second language. This is called ‘codeswitching’. Simultaneous bilingual children, it seems, tend not to do this as much. 8.4.3 First-language and second-language relations affect learnability: the transfer effect 8.4.3.1 First language similar to second language What one’s ﬁrst language is will affect one’s learning of the second lan- guage. Thus, not every second language will be learned at the same rate. The nature of the similarity relationship between the ﬁrst and second lan- guages will determine the rate of learning. For example, after having learned English as a ﬁrst language, learning French would not be as difﬁcult as would learning Japanese. There are differences between English and French syntax but these differences are small in comparison to the monumental differences between the syntax of English and Japanese. To the extent that two languages have similarities, such as the position of the article (as in English and French), gender (designation of nouns as mas- culine or feminine, as in French and Italian), obligatory marking of nouns for plurality, and similar syntactic structures (as in English and French), there will be a greater facilitation. There is that much less for the second- language learner to learn. The higher the similarity the faster the learning. There can be signiﬁcant similarities in terms of vocabulary, as well. Just looking over the past few sentences we can note shared vocabulary between English and French such as: vocabulary/vocabularie; similarity/ similarité; difference/différence; monumental/monumentale; and compari- son/comparison. A learner would not be starting at zero as he or she would if learning Japanese. (Although Japanese has many borrowed words from English, the nature of Japanese pronunciation and writing tends to obscure them.) It works the other way as well; the Japanese speaker learning Eng- lish is placed in a comparable position to the English speaker learning Japan- ese. Yet, if the Japanese speaker were to learn Korean, the Japanese person would ﬁnd it relatively easy because the syntax of these two languages is very similar. Pronunciation would be a major learning problem, though, because the sound systems of those two languages are quite different. 168 AIT_C08.pm5 168 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies Studies in Finland provide evidence that it is easier to learn a second language that is similar to the ﬁrst (Ringbom, 1978; Sjoholm, 1979). About 7 per cent of Finns speak Swedish as their ﬁrst language. Research ﬁndings demonstrate that Finns who speak Swedish as a ﬁrst language learn English at a faster rate than those who speak Finnish as a ﬁrst language, i.e. Swedish- to-English is faster than Finnish-to-English. Undoubtedly this is because Swedish is closer to English, with which it shares a Germanic and Indo- European origin, than Finnish, which belongs to an entirely different lan- guage family, the Uralic. Thus, we may conclude that the greater the similarity between two lan- guages in terms of their syntax, vocabulary, and sound system, the more rapid the rate of acquisition in the two languages. If we had to scale the importance of these variables, we would give syntax and then vocabulary the greater weight. Good pronunciation cannot compensate for poor syntax or vocabulary. Good syntax with good vocabulary is a winning combination for second-language success. (California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a good example.) 8.4.3.2 Facilitation occurs even between very different languages It is clear that the knowledge of a prior language will help the learning of a second language even when the two languages are quite different with respect to vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation. The fact that a 5-year-old child in a foreign environment (a New York child moving to Tokyo) can often learn a second language in less than a year, which is much faster than the child’s learning of its ﬁrst language, strongly suggests that there is some sort of commonality among languages that is separate from the usual similarity measures that are used in comparing languages. Such commonalities, which all languages share, would consist of such principles as: words have a mor- pheme structure and a phoneme structure, words combine into phrases and into sentences and clauses, basic constituents must be ordered in some way, and such operations as substitution, deletion, and addition are involved. The knowledge that words and sentences represent objects, ideas, situations, and events, for example, is something that the ﬁrst-language learner brings to the second-language situation and does not have to struggle to relearn. 8.5 Strategies for second-language production 8.5.1 The First-Language Strategy and the Second-Language Strategy Because errors are easy to observe and are good indicators of a person’s level of second-language knowledge, there have been many good studies done on errors (see Corder, 1981, for a review). There is some confusion, 169 AIT_C08.pm5 169 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning though, when it comes to interpreting just what the cause of errors might be. In our opinion, only a minority of errors can be attributed to interference, where the ﬁrst language intrudes on the second. Rather, most errors are sys- tematic, being the result of the application of what we shall call the ‘First- Language Strategy’ and the ‘Second-Language Strategy’. These strategies are applied when relevant second-language knowledge is not yet available or is incomplete. Consider the following errors made by the ﬁrst author’s Japanese univer- sity students while writing English answers to an examination question (* indicates ungrammaticality). 1. *Now Tom happy is. This sentence follows Japanese constituent order with the verb placed at the end. 2. *Afterwards they ate the dinner. The article is improperly inserted before the mass noun ‘dinner’. There was no previous reference to a speciﬁc ‘dinner’. For the sake of fairness, let us now consider an error commonly made by English speakers who are learning Japanese. The English speaker might well produce the following order of constituents in 3a while translating from English to Japanese: 3a. *John Mary met theatre at yesterday. (Spoken in Japanese by an English speaker) Here the Japanese Subject + Object + Verb constituent order is correct but the adverbials, ‘theatre + at’ and ‘yesterday,’ are improperly placed. They must be at the beginning of the sentence, not at the end. The preposition ‘at’ correctly follows the noun it is associated with (in English prepositions pre- cede the noun), thus, ‘theatre + at’ is a type of Prepositional Phrase. No article appears with ‘theatre’ because Japanese does not have the article. Thus, 3b. Yesterday theatre at John Mary met. is the proper order in Japanese (Adverbials + Subject + Object + Verb). Let us now discuss these sentences and the cause of the problems that they raise: 1. Error caused by Interference: *Now Tom happy is. (Written in English by a Japanese speaker) For the Japanese student who has had years of English and knows English word order well, it is likely that this is a case of interference. In the process of constructing the sentence, perhaps because of haste, the Japanese order of constituents intruded on the process so as to cause the error. 170 AIT_C08.pm5 170 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies 2. Error caused by Second-Language Strategy: *Afterwards they ate the dinner. (Written in English by a Japanese speaker) The student has to some extent learned the article rule and its appli- cation to types of nouns but perhaps mistakenly thought that ‘dinner’ here is a countable noun that requires the article. Another possibility is that because the student was unsure of the status of ‘dinner’, she employed what could be called an Article Insertion Strategy. That is, when in doubt, insert the article, because nouns taking the article are more frequent in the second language. Thus, this error is the result of applying general knowledge of the second language to production of the second language. 3. Error caused by First-Language Strategy: *John Mary met theatre at yesterday. (In Japanese, by an English speaker) Supposing that the English-speaking person did not know the Japanese rule, then this could well be an instance, not of interference, but of the result of using the First-Language Strategy, that is, applying ﬁrst-language knowledge to the second language. When second-language knowledge is lacking, this strategy is very useful. It is one that, we believe, all second- language learners automatically use and rely on, especially in conversa- tion. Usually it is better to say something, even if wrong, than to say nothing. This strategy will allow for something to be said, even though it is based on knowledge of the ﬁrst language. 8.5.2 Strategies for sentence production and communication Strategies that are used for the purpose of keeping the conversation going involve ‘communication’ strategies (Faerch and Kasper, 1983; Kasper and Kellerman, 1997). Communication strategies may have an effect on learning since the more the learner speaks the greater linguistic input the learner will receive. The greater the input, the more the opportunity for language learning. This type of strategy includes overgeneralization, in which a rule of the second language is applied in inappropriate contexts such as the deﬁnite article being used with ‘dinner’ in the example above. Communication strategies may also involve using words or phrases from the ﬁrst language when they are unknown in the second language (codeswitching), or coining new words such as ‘airball’ for ‘balloon’ (Varadi, 1983). 171 AIT_C08.pm5 171 17/10/2005, 16:58 Second-language learning 8.5.3 Strategies for becoming a better second-language learner Learning strategies which will assist in the acquisition of a second language is a different topic from the one just discussed. The topic previously under discussion mainly concerned using strategies for improving and main- taining communication and conversations. What strategies a person might develop so as to improve the learning of a second language is another topic. Researchers such as Rubin (1981), Wenden and Rubin (1987), Cohen (1998), O’Malley and Chamot (1990) and Oxford (1990, 1996) are involved in such issues. Thus, for example, according to Rubin (1981) the strategies used by successful language learners include: (1) veriﬁcation: checking to see if their hypotheses about the language are correct, (2) inductive processing: creating hypotheses about the second language based on one’s second- or ﬁrst-language knowledge, (3) deductive reasoning: using general logic in problem solving, (4) practice: such as repetition, rehearsal, and imitation, (5) memorization: including mnemonic strategies and repetitions for the purpose of storage and retrieval, and (6) monitoring: being alert to the making of errors and paying attention to how one’s message is received by the listener. While one could argue that these are strategies that any language learner naturally uses, research indicates that the explicit teaching of such strategies will improve the capacity of the learner. (See Cohen (1998) for a review of this phenomenon.) 8.6 Teaching reading in a bilingual situation at home 8.6.1 How to teach the reading of two languages Suppose that parents are raising their child bilingually with, say, English and Chinese. Suppose too that the parents wish to teach the child to read both languages. First, the parents should be using the One Person–One Language (1P–1L) approach, which was discussed earlier in this chapter. In this approach, each parent speaks one language only to the child, e.g. the mother speaks Chinese and the father speaks English, and the child learns both languages (as speech) simultaneously. As for teaching reading, however, we recommend that the teaching be done sequentially, with the second language following the ﬁrst after a year or two. Suppose that the parents start teaching the child to read English. At least one parent must be involved, the one who speaks English to the child. (It would be beneﬁcial if the other parent joined in too, but just for reading 172 AIT_C08.pm5 172 17/10/2005, 16:58 8 Bilingualism, intelligence, transfer, and learning strategies and not for language teaching.) After about a year or so, by which time English reading is established in the child, then the teaching of Chinese would be started. The lead teacher should be the parent who speaks Chinese to the child. In our view, the simultaneous teaching of reading is not advisable, not just because of the risk of the child confusing the two writing systems, but because the parents would be greatly burdened. They would have to keep and use two sets of reading materials and vie for time for teaching. Since many of the reading activities involve placing cards on objects, the clutter with two cards, each in a different language on each object, might be exces- sive, and inconvenient to the child. 8.6.2 Which language should be read first? We would recommend that the language to be learned ﬁrst is the one that is most important for the child’s welfare. Basically, it should be the language that is used in the community and in school. By learning to read the lan- guage of the community, the child will be able to read the signs that are everywhere outside the home. This will reinforce the child’s learning at home and motivate the child to read more. Attaining a high level of reading before the child begins school, where such reading is the norm, will assist the child in being able to deal with whatever is offered in school in terms of reading, and give the child a head start. The second language will not be hard to teach to read after the ﬁrst, because once the child can read the ﬁrst language, he or she will have learned the basic principles of reading. These principles will make the learn- ing of second-language reading easier. 173 AIT_C08.pm5 173 17/10/2005, 16:58

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