Teaching and Measuring Tools for Bilingualism - Essay Example

Running Head: BILINGUALISM Bilingualism This paper takes a look at bilingualism, its many definitions and the phenomenon wherein which it exists today. Bilingualism has become a necessity in today’s world of globalization and competence in more than one language has become a requirement for most individuals. Various examples of bilingualism activities are looked into in different regions of the world. Various methods for measurement of bilingualism are also presented as researched. Some attendant problems are also discussed based on the measures used. The paper concludes that although both teaching and measuring tools for bilingualism have not yet been sufficiently developed, evidences that bilingualism is good and productive for individuals point to the direction that more work be conducted in refining both teaching and measuring tools. Bilingualism A bilingual person is someone who speaks two languages. A person who speaks more than two languages is called multilingual (Birner n.d.). According to Chan (1998) the definition of bilingualism can be arbitrary due to different connotations for different people. Bloomfield, an American linguist defines bilingualism as a native like control of two languages. Thiéry, a French linguist defines a true bilingual as one who can at all times be taken for a native speaker by native speakers of either language. Haugen, a Norwegian-American linguist says that bilingualism starts when a speaker of one language can produce complete and meaningful utterances in another language. Diebold states its compliment that a type of bilingualism commences when a person begins to understand utterances in a second language. Bilingualism or multilingualism is no longer a rarity in today’s world. With the promotion of English as the global language most societies today know English as well as a native language and sometimes even a regional language. A lot of people, too, especially those who function in international circles have become multilingual in order to accomplish their everyday tasks. People become bilingual by acquiring two languages at the same time in childhood as in the case of most countries where the medium of instruction is different from the native language or in cases where the educational system provides for learning more than one language. Bilingualism can also be achieved by deliberately learning a second language, like in the case of migrants who have to learn a second language if they have migrated to a place where a different language is used. In order to develop bilingualism, the individual must be exposed to both languages in an interactive way (Birner n.d.). This means that the individual has to have continuous stimuli to speak, read or write in both languages. According to Birner (n.d.), linguists believe that the period from birth to puberty is the critical period for a child to acquire any language easily, which tends to say that the structure of the brain changes at puberty, and after that it becomes harder to learn a new language, which in turn means that it is easier to learn a second language as a child than as an adult. According to Hammers & Blanc (2000), bilinguality is the psychological state of an individual who has access to more than one linguistic code as a means of social communication. Varying degrees of access are a result of different dimensions which are psychological, cognitive, psycholinguistic, social psychological, social, sociological, sociolinguistic, sociocultural and linguistic. Measuring Bilingualism Since language proficiency means proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing in a language, measurement of bilingualism necessarily would mean measuring the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in the two languages. According to Chan (1998), language competence can be surface fluency or the ability to hold simple conversations in a shop or on the street, or academic fluency which may take longer to acquire but provides the bilingual person the ability to speak, read and write in the language for academic-like purposes such as understanding lessons, acquiring new knowledge, research, ability to conduct analysis and problem solving in the language being used. Other issues of language which may need measures include lexical transference of words, information and content from one language to another, phonological or accent transference of phonemes or allophones from one language to another, prosodic transference or the intonation patterns of one language influencing another, semantic transference of the sense, not the word form, of a word in one language to a cognate or related words or partial equivalent or homophone, syntactic transference or the taking over by one language of a sentence pattern of another, tonemic transference of tonemes from tone languages such as Swedish, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, or non-differentiation from non-tonal languages, pragmatic transference of cultural rules and conventions, morphemic transference of morpheme or the smallest unit which has a grammatical function and an independent meaning from one language to another, morphological transference of a word formation model from one language to another, and graphemic transference of writing conventions from one language to another. Bilingualism can be measured by first determining what to evaluate. Some of these considerations include progress made in oral and written proficiency in each language or academic achievement outcomes for different language groups at different points in time. For example, with the goal of high levels of oral proficiency, achievement could be measured through test scores such as in the CELDT, California English Language Development Test, or the FLOSEM, Stanford Foreign Language Oral Skills Evaluation Matrix (Leary & Hargett n.d.). In institutions which teach a second language, measurement and assessment is a continuous process. Various tools are used to measure progress, which include writing portfolios, tests, reading inventories and oral interviews. Tests are used for language placement, program admissions and exits, and college credit. Important considerations for testing are the four primary language skills of listening, speaking, reading, or writing (Scarsdale n.d.). With bilinguality being a psychological state as mentioned earlier, dimensions relevant to its measurement include relative competence; cognitive organisation; age of acquisition; exogeneity; social cultural status; and cultural identity (Hammers & Blanc 2000). According to Sanchez (n.d.), in early bilingual learners, data collection techniques used to measure linguistic knowledge in bilingual children focused on oral production data in both languages and on code-mixing. Data is coded and quantified in order to find regularities and systematization such as in word recognition through oral production and comprehension. Oral data collection was more prevalent than written ones since acquisition literacy has not yet been completely developed. It is a different situation in second language acquisition research. One approach uses experimental data collection methods and techniques and relies on acceptability judgments, elicited imitation tasks and truth-value judgments. Another approach is focused on naturalistic data and techniques using spontaneous narrations, picture-based descriptions and interaction tasks. However, due to the perception that oral production reflects knowledge of language use but not necessarily linguistic competence has prevented some from relying on spontaneous oral production data. Thus, experimental techniques that allowed for controlled conditions was favored as a better measure. The development of oral proficiency assessment tools for second or foreign languages such as the Oral Proficiency Interview was also used for measuring language abilities for educational purposes. There is evidence that second language learning improves cognitive abilities. Foster & Reeves conducted a study in 1989 on the effects of an elementary school foreign language program on basic skills. They looked into the months of foreign language instruction in French and scores on instruments designed to measure cognitive and metacognitive processes. They concluded that students who received foreign language instruction scored higher on tasks involving evaluation which is the highest cognitive skill according to Blooms taxonomy and that those who had studied French the longest performed the best. In another study by Landry in 1983, the conclusion was that second language learners score significantly higher than monolingual students. Second language learning appears to provide children with the ability to depart from the traditional approaches to a problem and supply them with other resources for new and different ideas. In a 1976 study by Barik & Swain, higher IQ measures were achieved by an immersion group in a French immersion program than those in the regular English program. And in a 1979 study by Samuels & Griffore, bilinguals showed greater cognitive flexibility than monolinguals in the areas of performance IQ, picture arrangement, and object assembly (ACTFL 2008). These evidences of cognitive ability may therefore be used as measures of bilingualism. There are indeed problems in measuring bilingualism. One is fluency, there is no standard scale to measure relative fluency. Measurement issues are complex since self-reporting is unreliable as in the case of government censuses. Even objective fluency tests may be flawed since they only measure certain skills, like grammatical competence and exclude others, such as the overall communication competence in different situations (Langendoen 2001). Debates about bilingual education are political and pedagogical. In Theobald’s (n.d.) study, proponents and opponents of bilingual education argue that it affects Latino dropout rates. The argument of proponents is that bilingual education can help cure the dropout problem while opponents argue that it is a cause. Theobald concluded that there is no evidence that bilingual education, compared to ESL programs, either help or hurt the Latino dropout problem. However, Latino dropout rates increase when the number of Latino students who are not served by some form of English acquisition assistance program increase. In a study by Karahan (n.d.) various methods are employed to measure language proficiency. Officially, measurement of foreign language knowledge is done through foreign language examinations held by the Center for Selection and Placement of Students in Higher Education Institutions. The Foreign Language Examination is used for selection and placement in higher education programs specializing in foreign language and literature. The content of foreign language tests consists of vocabulary and grammar, translation, and reading comprehension. The Foreign Language Examination for Public Officials is used for determining the level of foreign language knowledge of public officials who want to get a promotion or salary increase in their occupation. The same test is also required for jobs at ministries and most of the public institutions. The candidate has to identify one foreign language from German, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Persian, French, Dutch, English, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, or Serbian. The Foreign Language Examination of Inter-universities Council is used for determining the level of foreign language knowledge of candidates for associate professorship and for students who want to take post-graduate degrees at a Turkish university. The content of the test includes vocabulary and grammar, translation, and reading comprehension parts as applied to basic areas of science, health sciences and social sciences. As earlier mentioned, bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children with the assumption that the constant management of two languages enhances executive functions. Bialystok et al (2004) conducted research to determine whether the bilingual advantage applies to adults as well and whether bilingualism has effects on cognitive control in aging older adults. Conclusions showed that bilingual participants responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory making it appear therefore that controlled processing is more effectively carried out by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes. Conclusion Bilingualism or even multilingualism has become a natural requirement rather than a special skill in today’s world of globalization. The ability to be communicatively competent in more than one language has become a necessity and so many studies and researches are conducted to effectively pursue bilingualism. As more and more tools are being developed to effectively teach second or more languages, problems of measurement of proficiencies attained have also surfaced. But whether or not teaching and measuring tools have already been sufficiently developed, a variety of evidences covering multitudes of aspects beyond mere traditional language proficiency considerations have been featured in different researches supporting the notion that bilingualism is good and productive for the individual. Reference List ACTFL. (2008). References for Cognitive Question. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=4526 Bialystok, E., Craik, F.I.M., Klein, R., Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/pag192290.pdf Birner, B. (n.d.). Bilingualism. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/Bilingual.pdf Chan, K. (1998). Bilingualism and biculturalism. Bilingualism. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.geocities.com/goktimus/bilingualism.html Crawford, J. (2007). The Decline of Bilingual Education: How To Reverse a Troubling Trend? Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.elladvocates.org/documents/bilingualed/Crawford_Decline_of_BE.pdf Hammers, J.F. & Blanc, M.H.A. (2000). Bilinguality and bilingualism. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=105283376 Karahan, F. (n.d.) Bilingualism in Turkey. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/089ISB4.PDF Langendoen, T. (2001). Review: Baker, Bilingual Education (2nd review). Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2762.html Leary, K.L. & Hargett, L. (n.d.) How to frame evaluation questions. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.lindholm-leary.com/toolkit2/sections/appendix/toolkit6_sec2.pdf Sanchez, L. (n.d.) Bilingualism/ Second Language Research and the Assessment of Oral Proficiency in Minority Bilingual Children. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lsanchez/publications/LAQ.pdf Scarsdale Public Schools. (n.d.). Bilingualism. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.scarsdaleschools.org/ESL/bilingualism.html#faq10 Theobald, N. (n.d.). Bilingual Education: Cause or Cure? Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://teep.tamu.edu/reports/report023.doc What happened to familial acculturation? (n.d.) Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.umass.edu/sadri/pdf/WP/WP - Cort.pdf Read More