Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T03:55:39.918Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Producing bilinguals through immersion education: Development of metalinguistic awareness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2012

ELLEN BIALYSTOK ,
KATHLEEN F. PEETS  and
SYLVAIN MORENO
ELLEN BIALYSTOK*
Affiliation:
York University
KATHLEEN F. PEETS
Affiliation:
Ryerson University
SYLVAIN MORENO
Affiliation:
Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest
*
Ellen Bialystok, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enrolled in either a French immersion or a regular English program. All children were from monolingual English-speaking homes and attended local public schools in middle socioeconomic neighborhoods. Measures included morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and verbal fluency, with all testing in English. These tasks differed in their need for executive control, a cognitive ability that is enhanced in bilingual children. Overall, the metalinguistic advantages reported in earlier research emerged gradually, with advantages for tasks requiring more executive control (grammaticality judgment) appearing later and some tasks improving but not exceeding performance of monolinguals (verbal fluency) even by fifth grade. These findings demonstrate the gradual emergence of changes in metalinguistic concepts associated with bilingualism over a period of about 5 years. Performance on English-language proficiency tasks was maintained by French immersion children throughout in spite of schooling being conducted in French.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 177 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Adi-Japha, E., Berberich-Artzi, J., & Libnawi, A. (2010). Cognitive flexibility in drawings of bilingual children. Child Development, 81, 1356–1366.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atchley, R. A., Rice, M. L., Betz, S. K., Kwasny, K. M., Sereno, J. A., & Jongman, A. (2006). A comparison of semantic and syntactic event-related potentials generated by children and adults. Brain and Language, 99, 236–246.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ben-Zeev, S. (1977). The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive development. Child Development, 48, 1009–1018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1986). Factors in the growth of linguistic awareness. Child Development, 57, 498–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology, 24, 560–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1993). Metalinguistic awareness: The development of children's representations of language. In Pratt, C. & Garton, A. (Eds.), Systems of representation in children: Development and use (pp. 211–233). London: Wiley.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2010). Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond inhibition. Developmental Psychology 46, 93–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Luk, G. (2008). Lexical access in bilinguals: Effects of vocabulary size and executive control. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 522–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Luk, G. (in press). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2010). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 525–531.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., & Majumder, S. (1998). The relationship between bilingualism and the development of cognitive processes in problem solving. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 69–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., Majumder, S., & Martin, M. (2003). Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage? Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 27–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Martin, M. M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental Science, 7, 325–339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Campbell, R., & Sais, E. (1995). Accelerated metalinguistic (phonological) awareness in bilingual children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 61–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N., (2008) Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282–298.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cromdal, J. (1999). Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish–English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cummins, J. (1978). Bilingualism and the development of metalinguistic awareness. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 9, 131–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delis, D. C., Kaplan, E., & Kramer, J. H. (2001). Verbal fluency subtest of the Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1972). Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1, 299–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (3rd ed.). Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Galambos, S. J. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1990) The effects of learning two languages on levels of metalinguistic awareness. Cognition, 34, 1–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Galambos, S. J., & Hakuta, K. (1988) Subject-specific and task-specific characteristics of metalinguistic awareness in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 141–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F. (1996). Second language immersion programs. In Goebl, H., Nelde, P. H., Stary, Z., & Wolck, W. (Eds.), Contact linguistics: An international handbook of contemporary research (Vol. 2, pp. 493–502). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Genesee, F. (1984). Beyond bilingualism: Social psychological studies of French immersion programs in Canada. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 16, 338–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F., & Jared, D. (2008). Literacy development in early French immersion programs. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 49, 140–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., & Werner, G. A. (2002). Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish–English bilinguals. Neuropsychology, 16, 562–576.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hakuta, K. (1986). Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lambert, W. E., Genesee, F., Holobow, N., & Chartrand, L. (1993). Bilingual education for majority English-speaking children. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 8, 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luo, L., Luk, G., & Bialystok, E. (2010). Effect of language proficiency and executive control on verbal fluency performance in bilinguals. Cognition, 114, 29–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McBride-Chang, C. (1995). What is phonological awareness? Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 179–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moreno, S., Bialystok, E., Wodniecka, Z., & Alain, C. (2010). Conflict resolution in sentence processing by bilinguals. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23, 564–579.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portocarrero, J. S., Burright, R. G., & Donovick, P. J. (2007). Vocabulary and verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 22, 415–422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (1998, updated 2003). Manual for Raven's Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales. San Antonio, TX: Harcourt Assessment.Google Scholar
Ricciardelli, L. A. (1992). Bilingualism and cognitive development in relation to threshold theory. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21, 301–316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rickard Liow, S. J., & Poon, K. K. L. (1998). Phonological awareness in multilingual Chinese children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 339–362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosselli, M., Ardila, A., Salvatierra, J., Marquez, M., Matos, L., & Weekes, V. A. (2002). A cross-linguistic comparison of verbal fluency tests. International Journal of Neuroscience, 112, 759–776.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strauss, E., Sherman, E. M. S., & Spreen, O. (2006). A compendium of neuropsychological tests: Administration, norms and commentary (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Turnbull, M., Hart, D., & Lapkin, S. (2003). Grade 6 French immersion students’ performance on large-scale reading, writing, and mathematics tests: Building explanations. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 49, 6–23.Google Scholar
White, L., & Genesee, F. (1996). How native is near-native? The issue of ultimate attainment in adult second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 12, 233–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yelland, G. W., Pollard, J., & Mercuri, A. (1993). The metalinguistic benefits of limited contact with a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 14, 423–444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar