Comments on: Are bilinguals better language learners?

By: Alcaeus Echave

Alcaeus Echave — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 02:53:29 +0000

The blog post is interesting because I am bilingual. It made me ponder on how bilinguals are better at language learning. The author of the post made several points, one of which is that there are real advantages and disadvantages. The last statement struck me the most as it mentions focusing on ensuring the quality of opportunity regardless of the linguistic repertoire. I think that is important because no matter what your background of language is, you must have equal opportunities with other people. At the end of the day, language is used to communicate and to be able to express our thoughts freely.

By: Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 09:11:48 +0000

In reply to Miriam Faine. In addition, Russian and German and English are all Indo-European languages, Turkish is not. That should be taken into account. Several other factors too, as Miriam mentions. Tove

By: David Marjanović

David Marjanović — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 09:11:29 +0000

For instance, he cited research (Lorenz, 2018) that found that Turkish and Russian monolingual learners of English were able to get the meaning of the English progressive aspect right 100% of the time. In contrast, German-Turkish and German-Russian bilinguals only got it right about as frequently as monolingual German speakers. It seems obvious that transfer from German, which has no progressive aspect, negatively affected the English language learning of these bilinguals. So in this case, bilingualism did not help but hinder when it came to this particular grammatical feature of English language learning.

I'd bet actual money, if I had any, that that was because these children were taught in German, so it occurred neither to them nor to their teachers to compare the English progressive aspect to anything in Turkish or Russian. Maybe it would have been enough if teachers said "most languages, actually, have such a thing". But of course most people who teach English in German have no idea of comparative typology.

By: Yining Wang

Yining Wang — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:25:21 +0000

Thank you for this good summary, Hannah. Professor Siemund’s lecture is indeed enlightening. It examined particular dimension of language learning from different types of bilinguals/multilinguals and explores ‘bi-/multi-lingualism’ from a more objective linguistic perspective. Particularly enjoy the point of “trade-off between accuracy and flexibility” as “monolinguals might be more accurate, plurilinguals might be more flexible”. But I can not quite understand your point of “accuracy versus fluency”. Why accuracy and fluency can not co-exist even in a monolingual?

By: Miriam Faine

Miriam Faine — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 23:04:51 +0000

However, if we are talking about school based language learning, social and material contexts also affect schooling outcomes across the curriculum. So bilingual Turkish German children may be from migrant worker families who lack social and cultural capital and the research here is conflating bilingualism with social and economic disadvantage.