Name : Rizki Pratama

NIM :17202241078
PBI B 2017

Bilingualism, Intelligence, Transfer, and Learning Strategies

Varieties of bilingualism
we may say that a person is bilingual if he or she knows:

1. two languages in the same modality, for example, two speech-based languages such as
spoken English and spoken German, or, two sign-based languages such as American Sign
Language and Japanese Sign Language.
2. two languages based on different modalities, e.g. spoken German and American Sign
Language, or, spoken French and written Sanskrit.

Effects on first-language development

Negative reports

 Smith (1939) argued that bilingualism caused retardation in language development. This
conclusion came from his experience when teaching the Iowa children who were
essentially white and monolingually English while the Hawaii children were ethnically
diverse, of Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese parentage, and
bilingual, with English as one of their languages. he found that the bilingual children
from Hawaii had many more errors in their English speech than did their Iowa
counterparts.
 Bereiter and Engelman (1966) and Basil Bernstein (1960, 1961) in the 1960s, who
claimed that non-standard speakers of English – in particular, inner-city African-
Americans in the USA and working-class whites in Britain – had poor language
knowledge compared to standard English speakers.

Positive reports

 Bruck et al. (1976) found that English speaking children in a French immersion
programme found that, by the fourth or fifth grade, the second-language French skills,
including reading and writing, were almost as good as those of native French-speaking
children. Importantly, all of this was achieved at no loss to their English native language
development (as compared to a control group of English monolingual children)
 Bostwick (1999) The results revealed no negative effects on first-language acquisition.
Furthermore, both groups performed equally well on tests of academic achievement. The
 results showed that, the immersion students scored better on tests of English. Thus the
Japanese–English immersion students equalled their Japanese monolingual peers in first-
language learning and academic achievement, while at the same time they learned a
foreign language.

Effects on intelligence
Negative reports

 Goddard (1917) On the word-fluency portion of the test done by 30 recently arrived adult
immigrants at Ellis Island. it was found that less than half of the adult immigrants could
provide 60 words, a figure much below the 200 words that 11-year-old American
children could provide. Based on these results, Goddard classified 25 of the 30 people as
‘feeble-minded’.
 Saer (1922, 1923)tested the intelligence of 1400 children between the ages of 7 and 14.
Based on the higher scores for monolinguals on IQ tests, he concluded that bilinguals’
thinking processes were confused by the use of two languages

Positive reports

 Peal and Lambert (1962) They concluded that bilingualism results in greater mental
flexibility and abstract thought. Furthermore, they suggested that rather than the two
languages causing ‘confused thinking’, bilingualism improved thinking
 Bain and Yu (1980) results of some cognitive performance tests showed the bilinguals to
be superior to the monolinguals, in addition to their having acquired two different
languages.

Sequential and simultaneous learning situations

 There are essentially two conditions according to which a person may become bilingual:
1. the two languages can be acquired sequentially, such as the second language being
learned later at school,
2. simultaneously, such as where the young child is exposed to two different languages in
the home at the same time.
 Simultaneous learning, by its very nature, is thus for children only.
 sequential learning can occur with both children and adults; the second language can be
learned during lower-level schooling, e.g. elementary school, or it can be learned after the
person has become an adult, e.g. at university or in another country.
Sequential learning of two languages
In sequential bilingualism young children are said to pass through four common stages (Tabors
and Snow, 1994):

1. Children attempt to use the language learned at home with other children in the wider
community where a different language is used
2. They abandon their home language in favour of communication through gesture
3. The children begin to use the second language in ways similar to children learning a first
language.
4. Finally, they begin to produce grammatical utterances in appropriate situations.

Simultaneous learning
There are two basic situations in which a child may learn two (or more) languages at the same
time:
(1) Each person speaks one language only to the child: One Person–One Language,
(2) Each person speaks two different languages to the child: One Person–Two Languages.

Developmental stages in bilingual language learning

 Children learning two first languages simultaneously follow the same route as other
children learning their first language (Lyon, 1996) bilinguals move through the same
stages of one-word utterances, two- and three-word utterances, then increasing
complexity with morphemeacquisition and complex sentences

First-language and second-language relations affect learnability: the transfer effect

First language similar to second language

 The nature of the similarity relationship between the first and second languages will
determine the rate of learning.
 To the extent that two languages have similarities, such as the position of the article (as in
English and French), gender (designation of nouns as masculine or feminine, as in French
and talian), obligatory marking of nouns for plurality, and similar syntactic structures (as
in English and French), there will be a greater facilitation.
 There can be significant similarities in terms of vocabulary, as well. Just looking over the
past few sentences we can note shared vocabulary between English and French
 Pronunciation would be a major learning problem, though, because the sound systems of
those two languages are quite different.
  we may conclude that the greater the similarity between two languages in terms of their
syntax, vocabulary, and sound system, the more rapid the rate of acquisition in the two
languages.

Facilitation occurs even between very different languages

 the knowledge of a prior language will help the learning of a second language even when
the two languages are quite different with respect to vocabulary, syntax and
pronunciation
 The knowledge that words and sentences represent objects, ideas, situations, and events,
for example, is something that the first-language learner brings to the second-language
situation and does not have to struggle to relearn.

Strategies for second-language production

 Strategies that are used for the purpose of keeping the conversation going involve
‘communication’ strategies (Faerch and Kasper, 1983; Kasper and Kellerman, 1997).
 Communication strategies may have an effect on learning since the more the learner
speaks the greater linguistic input the learner will receive.
 Communication strategies may also involve using words or phrases from the first
language when they are unknown in the second language(codeswitching), or coining new
words such as ‘airball’ for ‘balloon’ (Varadi, 1983).

Strategies for becoming a better second-language learner

 According to Rubin (1981) the strategies used by successful language learners include:
1. verification: checking to see if their hypotheses about the language are correct,
2. inductive processing: creating hypotheses about the second language based on
one’s second- or first-language knowledge,
3. deductive reasoning: using general logic in problem solving,
4. practice: such as repetition, rehearsal, and imitation,
5. memorization: including mnemonic strategies and repetitions for the purpose of
storage and retrieval,
6. monitoring: being alert to the making of errors and paying attention to how one’s
message is received by the listener.

Teaching reading in a bilingual situation at home

How to teach the reading of two languages
  First, each parent speaks one language only to the child, e.g. the mother speaks Chinese
and the father speaks English, and the child learns both languages (as speech)
simultaneously.
 Suppose that the parents start teaching the child to read English. Atleast one parent must
be involved, the one who speaks English to the child.
 After about a year or so, by which timeEnglish reading is established in the child, then
the teaching of Chinese would be started.
 the simultaneous teaching of reading is not advisable, not just because of the risk of the
child confusing the two writing systems, but because the parents would be greatly
burdened
Which language should be read first?
 We would recommend that the language to be learned first is the one that is most
important for the child’s welfare. it should be the language that is used in the community
and in school.
 The second language will not be hard to teach to read after the first, because once the
child can read the first language, he or she will have learned the basic principles of
reading. These principles will make the learning of second-language reading easier.