Is early bilingual immersion a good thing?

Many parents and some teachers worry that early bilingual immersion could have a negative impact on school performance. However, this notion has been widely disproved by all the recent research on the topic, including a University of Liège study by Martine Poncelet and Anne-Catherine Nicolay from the Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behaviour. Better still: early exposure to a second language appears to improve cognitive abilities, at least during the first few years of school. 

There is no universal agreement on the definition of bilingualism. In fact, there are even two opposing views.  The first and most rigorous definition insists that in order to considered bilingual, a subject must master each of the two languages as well as a monolingual native speaker.  "However, people who speak two languages usually tend to use them in different situations - one with family and the other professionally, for example. This means that the vocabulary they use is not the same for each language," explains Professor Martine Poncelet, head of the Neuropsychology of Language and Learning Unit within the University of Liège's Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behaviour. A university researcher who is a native French speaker may actually feel more comfortable presenting their work in English. The same thing happens with children who speak one language at school and another at home.  

The other extreme is to regard anyone who knows several words in another language as bilingual. Today the definition most widely accepted by specialists is more balanced: bilingualism is characterised by fluency in both languages, without requiring the subject to use both languages equally well in all contexts. 

In truth, there are a number of levels and types of bilingualism. An important distinction relates to the age at which the second language is introduced. As such, "early or simultaneous bilingualism" refers to children who learn both languages at the same time, or at least before the age of 3.  This is the case when their parents are from different countries and each speaks their own native language. This is also typical of families who live abroad, where the children are rapidly immersed in the language of the host country.  "Sequential bilingualism" refers to children who learn a second language after the age of 3. If the second language is not acquired until after the age of 10, it's referred to as "late sequential bilingualism".

A dramatic reversal

Until the early 1960s, bilingualism was generally perceived as being detrimental to mental functioning. In fact, the earliest research on the links between bilingualism and cognition provided evidence in support of this negative perception. Researchers showed that the IQ of bilinguals was significantly lower than that of monolinguals, among other things. But there were significant flaws in their methodology. "When this research was examined more closely, it became clear that they compared individuals from very different socio-cultural backgrounds, and the bilinguals were generally immigrants who were disadvantaged because of their origins," says Martine Poncelet. “Furthermore, the Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests were administered in the majority language, which the immigrants may not have spoken as well as their native language. And lastly, those tests also had strong cultural biases.”

Things changed in 1962, when Canadian researchers Elisabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert brought attention to the methodological errors of previous studies and provided convincing data showing that bilinguals were not actually inferior to monolinguals in a number of cognitive aspects. At the same time, psychologists became more interested in bilingualism and ways to evaluate bilinguals, particularly in their native language. The results of this research seemed to demonstrate that there was no disadvantage to speaking two languages.

In the 1980s and 90s, another Canadian researcher, Ellen Bialystok of York University in Toronto conducted research (1&2) on different aspects of cognitive development showing that, on average, bilingual children had superior abilities, mainly in terms of attentional and executive functions (these allow us to inhibit irrelevant information, plan out our actions, develop strategies, etc.). "Ellen Bialystok subsequently conducted further studies which showed that these advantages extended to adults, including the elderly," explains Martine Poncelet. “Better still: bilingualism may delay the onset of Alzheimer's. Why? Because when someone speaks two languages, they will have more extensively developed executive and attentional functions throughout their life, building what is referred to as a "cognitive reserve". 

However, we still don't fully understand the mechanisms that provide bilinguals with a cognitive advantage. According to the ULg researcher, it is thought that speaking two languages requires people to constantly inhibit the other language, and that it takes enormous mental flexibility to switch from one language to another. As a result, inhibition skills and mental flexibility are stronger, and Ellen Bialystok's research shows that bilinguals are markedly superior to monolinguals in these two areas.

The success of immersion

In the 1960s, English-speaking Canadians recognized the need for their children to be fully bilingual. At that time, Wallace Lambert initiated the first experiment in early bilingual immersion education. The formula is simple: teaching is conducted part of the time in the native language (currently 25 or 50% of the time depending on the school) and the rest of the time in a second language (75 or 50% of the time). As part of this approach, the language is not taught as a foreign language, but rather is used to teach other subjects. 

Several criteria must be met. First of all, an early start: in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Léonie de Waha school in Liège welcomed its first bilingual class in 1989, which began in the 3rd year of pre-school. Secondly, the teacher should be a native speaker. However, this requirement is not always met given the lack of applicants - teachers of or recent graduates in German philology are sometimes hired. In French-speaking Belgium, there is a shortage of Anglo-Saxon teachers, which explains why only 20% of language immersion classes are in English, as compared to 80% in Dutch - even though a significant number of parents would like their children to learn English. 

Currently, at least 160 primary schools and 100 secondary schools offer bilingual immersion programs in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. "The main objective is for students completing their 6th year of primary school to have the same skill level in all subjects as their monolingual counterparts, all while having acquired a thorough knowledge of Dutch or English," says Martine Poncelet.

The right cards

The University of Liège's Neuropsychology of Language and Learning Unit has been conducting research on early second-language immersion education, particularly focusing on the impact of English immersion on French writing. 

For a study published in 2009(3), the ULg psychologists systematically evaluated children from their second to their sixth year of primary school, using standard reading tests and then much more nuanced tests, for example using letters that aren't pronounced the same way in English and French. As a reminder, these children first learn to read in English, then in French the following year. 

What were the results of this study? Martine Poncelet: "First of all, children in English immersion programs had the same level of general reading comprehension (in French) as monolinguals by the third year of primary school, and also performed similarly on tests that required them to decode French written words with letters that aren't pronounced the same way in French and English. As for spelling in French, our results showed that children in English immersion spelled just as well as their monolingual peers. And at the end of their fifth year of primary school, they were able to transcribe graphemes that differed the most between French and English as well as their monolingual counterparts.” 

Overall, the study showed that by the sixth year of primary school there were no differences in reading or spelling between children in bilingual immersion and monolingual children. Of course, this is an average that some children deviated from either on the higher or lower end. 

 In a study published in 2013 in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology(4), Martine Poncelet and Anne-Catherine Nicolay, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behaviour, addressed another key question: are all children able to benefit from second-language immersion? "Our goal was not to discriminate, but rather to highlight certain characteristics that might make immersion more difficult, in order to help children with lesser abilities access these programs regardless." reveals Martine Poncelet.

In addition to intellectual ability, Anne-Catherine Nicolay evaluated an entire series of cognitive skills in children in their third year of pre-school, just before they started an immersion program: short-term verbal memory, auditory discrimination (the cognitive ability to distinguish between sounds), phonological awareness, as well as attentional and executive skills. Next, she evaluated the same children every year to measure how well they had acquired the second-language vocabulary at the end of each of the first three years of elementary school. 

It turns out that the best predictor of vocabulary acquisition is not IQ, but rather two other aspects of cognitive function. On the one hand, the ability to repeat words which don't exist in the language (nonwords) and auditory discrimination skills. On the other hand, selective attention skills and mental flexibility. “If all these elements are present, then the child is very likely to acquire the second language successfully," says Martine Poncelet. “Which doesn't necessarily mean that they will be a good student. Those are two different things. A student who does well in a second-language immersion program will also usually do well in non-immersion education. But a child with difficulties in school will inevitably do no better in immersion."

Anne-Catherine Nicolay's work was focused on French-English bilingualism in native French speakers. Now the ULg psychologists are trying to determine if the same predictors apply to other languages - Dutch, for example - given that English is a very particular language in terms of prosody.

A burning question remains: does immersion create additional difficulty for children with limited learning abilities? This is a common concern among parents, who believe that immersion is only for good students. At first, teachers also held this elitist view. But this is not the case, claims Martine Poncelet. According to the psychologist, the example of Léonie de Waha high school, which has students from a range of sociocultural backgrounds, shows that immersion does not have a negative impact on children with learning difficulties, and it does not make school more difficult for them.

She continues: “Furthermore, Canadian researchers such as Johanne Paradis from the University of Alberta have shown that in children with dysphasia, that is with a specific language acquisition impairment, bilingualism does not hinder learning either in their native language or the second language: their dysphasia was expressed in similar ways in both languages, and the same way it would have manifested in a monolingual context. This is also the case for children with dyslexia, as learning a second language early on does not in any way accentuate their dyslexia."

A momentary advantage?

The last aspect of the work conducted by Martine Poncelet's team relates to the possible cognitive advantage of bilingualism. The ULg psychologists wondered if the cognitive advantages uncovered by Ellen Bialystok in terms of the attentional and executive capacities of bilingual children (whatever their age) would also appear in children who learned a second language in an early second-language immersion context. As such, Anne-Catherine Nicolay and Martine Poncelet(5) became interested in children who had had 3 years of early English immersion education. These children didn't fully master the language yet, but they understood it.   In short, their level of vocabulary at the age of 9 corresponded to that of a 5 year-old native English speaker. 

These children were given different tasks to measure auditory selective attention, divided attention, and mental flexibility. As part of the selective attention task, the children listened to the sound of alternating deep and squeaky owl screeches. The children were told to press a reaction key as quickly as possible each time they heard an irregularity in the sequence. In the dual-task test, two situations were presented at the same time. As in the previous exercise, the children were asked to press a reaction button as quickly as possible when they heard an irregularity in the auditory sequence. But they were also asked to react whenever an owl appearing on their computer screen closed its eyes.

During the mental flexibility task (which evaluated their ability to switch their attention from one target to another), a blue and a green dragon appeared randomly on the screen, either on the left or the right side of the screen. The children had reaction keys on the left and right sides of the keyboard. During the first trial they were asked to press the reaction key on the side where the green dragon appeared, and during the next trial they were asked to press the reaction key on the side where the blue dragon appeared (which could be the same side where the green dragon had appeared in the previous trial). And so on. In other words, mental flexibility was measured by the ability to inhibit their intention - expressed by the hand movement - to push one of the two buttons if the intention was inappropriate.

And what did the researchers discover? In all three tasks, children who were in linguistic immersion programmes for 3 years had, on average, a similar number of errors to their monolingual peers, but their response time was faster. Even though the advantage was slight, it was significant. "This means that they had better control of the situation on a cognitive level, which was manifested by a quicker response to the stimulus," explains Martine Poncelet.

"We subsequently obtained similar results in children who we ensured had the same average cognitive performance levels before they entered either a bilingual immersion or monolingual programme(6)."  

Contrary to what Ellen Bialystok's studies suggested, the observed advantage seems to fade over time. The ULg psychologists tested 6th grade students and the first adults that were placed in second-language immersion in Léonie de Waha school (in 1989) for selective auditory attention, divided attention, and mental flexibility. They found no difference between these two sample groups and control populations of same-age monolingual subjects. Is the advantage of bilingualism thus only temporary? And if so, why? "For adults, one of the hypotheses is that people reach the height of their attentional and executive skills around the age of 25, and by definition, they cannot go beyond this limit," says Martine Poncelet. “Another hypothesis suggests that the advantage of bilingualism comes from going back and forth frequently between both languages, but a number of adults don't have regular opportunities to practice their second language.”

However this doesn't explain why the cognitive advantage of bilingualism seems to have already disappeared from children in the sixth year of primary school. "In any case,” says the researcher, “we need to confirm our result by replicating the study on a larger scale - our study was limited to 30 children. We would also like to determine when the cognitive advantage emerges. This is why we intend to conduct evaluations after a year and a half of immersion." 

(1)  Claudia Dreifus, The bilingual advantage - A conversation with Ellen Bialystok, in The New York Times, May 30th 2011. Read the article
(2) Elen Bialystok, L'acquisition d'une deuxième langue, le bilinguisme pendant la petite enfance et leur impacrt sur le développement cognitif précoce, York University, 15 mars 2006. Read the article

(3) Nicolay, A.C., Fantauzzi, A., Comblain, A., & Poncelet, M. (2009). Impact de l'apprentissage de la lecture et de l'écriture en anglais sur l'acquisition ultérieure de la lecture et de l'orthographe en français chez des enfants francophones immergés en anglais. In N. Marec-Breton, A.-S. Besse, F. de la Haye, N. Bonneton-Botté &, E. Bonjour. (Eds), Apprentissage de la langue écrite. Approche cognitive (pp.49-66). Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 
(4) Nicolay, A.-C., & Poncelet, M. (2013). Cognitive abilities underlying L2 vocabulary acquisition in an early L2-immersion educational context: A longitudinal study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 115, 655-671. http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/153896

(5) Nicolay, A.-C., & Poncelet, M. (2013). Cognitive advantage in children enrolled in a second-language immersion elementary school program for 3 years. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(3), 597-607. http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/153895

(6)Nicolay, A.-C., & Poncelet, M. (submitted). Cognitive benefits in children enrolled in an early bilingual immersion school: A follow-up study.