Importance of bilingualism

What is the issue?

Encouraging bilingualism in children leads to cognitive benefits, helping them realise their potential in a competitive world.

Why there is more demand for private schools?

• English is an aspiration language for most Indians and learning it is viewed as a ticket to economic prosperity and social status.
• Thus almost all private schools in India are English medium.
• Many public schools have the State’s official languages as the primary school language.
• Here, English is introduced as a second language mostly from grade 5.
• Some States also mandate learning of a non-native third language from grade 6.
• This lack of priority to the English in public schools is one of the major reasons for high enrolment ratios in private schools.

How does this affect native language?

• Proficiency in English is often correlated with higher educational and social standing.
• Given the parent’s preference for English, many private schools aggressively focus on building English-speaking skills among children right from nursery grades.
• Many of these schools adopt a ‘total English pedagogy’ in which all of formal and informal school interaction is in English right from nursery grades.
• Many schools also discourage the use of native language by completely banning any conversation in native language.
• As a result, children have a negative attribute towards their native languages.

What does the research show?

• People are born with an innate capacity to learn any language and more than one language.
• Behavioural studies indicates that if children are exposed to two languages by age 7, then they gain proficiency in both the languages.
• Several studies have indicated that bilingual children have better cognitive benefits over monolingual children especially on non-verbal tasks, conflict resolution, cognitive flexibility and other cognitive control tasks.
• However, bilinguals tend to divide their linguistic competence across two languages and hence have a marginally compromised lexical strength and lexical recall.
• Despite this, they do not have any academic or literacy disadvantage.
• Thus, bilingualism should be encouraged in early childhood policy for cognitive benefits.

What schools should do?

• The current practice of starting second language in primary school may not be the best strategy.
• Instead, schools should encourage ‘everyday’ use of at least two languages right from kindergarten.
• It should actively encourage parents to speak both English and their mother tongue right from the birth of the child.

Source: Business Line