How does bilingual education develop the brain?

Bilingual education is slowly gaining popularity in our society predominantly because of two reasons. Firstly, due to globalisation - different cultures and lifestyles shape the neighborhoods of every major city in the world. As such, bilingual education is naturally promoted by education boards and schools due to presence of diverse communities. Secondly, recent research has revealed that bilingual education has a positive impact on the human brain. With scientific backing, more educational institutes and parents have expressed increased interest in bilingual education. This article will dig deep into the specifics and understand how it works.

Fact #1 - Bilingual Education Contributes to Increased Activity in the Brain

The human brain works at its best when it is put to test, when it is given multiple tasks. Juggling these tasks requires the brain to exercise some executive functions - thereby exploring new potentials. This is exactly what bilingual education achieves.

When a child learns two different languages, his or her mind has to juggle between multiple words for a particular meaning. Essentially, the brain strives hard to match each sound with pre-existing knowledge. This exercise strengthens a student's ability to process multiple things at the same time and become a great multitasker.

Fact #2 - Bilingual Children Handle Problems Better

In a world where information is aplenty, the ability to recognise and deduce accurate meaning becomes hard. This is known as conflict inhibition. Studies have employed two popular tests - reverse categorization and shape conflict. To analyze how these tests help determine better conflict management:

1. Reverse Categorization - As the name suggests, participants are asked to place a set of big blocks in a big bucket and a set of smaller blocks in a smaller bucket. Next, they are asked to switch it up. The smaller blocks should be placed in the bigger bucket, while the bigger blocks go in the smaller bucket. Bilingual children fared better than their non-bilingual peers in this test.
2. Shape Conflict - Participants were tasked to correctly identify everyday objects, such as fruits in a series of challenging images. For example, a large fruit would be embedded into a smaller fruit. Even with images that exhibited extreme shape conflicts, bilingual children were able to come out on top.

Fact #3 - Bilingual Education Helps Students in Adapting Well to Any Environment

One of the key benefits of bilingual education is that it gives rise to adaptive abilities. People who are used to processing information in different languages will never find it hard to learn and adapt to new environments. This is partly because children are used to a similar kind of exercise in their classrooms.

Bilingual education also has a subtle psychological side to it. The feeling of alienation in a new environment hardly dominates an individual who has undergone bilingual education. In addition, the enthusiasm and confidence to learn are also well exhibited among these individuals. Clearly, bilingual education only not improves cognitive abilities, but also provides a slight psychological edge.

Fact #4 - Bilingual Children Have A Holistic World View

Since the introduction of a second language also is in part an introduction to new culture, kids naturally become more appreciative of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. They are also good at analyzing and interpreting language and events better. How? Researchers asked subjects to view several video clips that show different events, such as biking or walking. People who spoke only their native language were content on describing just the actions - meaning that they did not take into account or recognize the beginning, middle or ending parts of the video. They tend to place actions with respect to time. Bilingual speakers, on the other hand, had the uncanny ability to interpret a single event in different perspectives purely because they could speak in different languages.

Derek Tan writes articles relating to education. Please visit Canadian International School for more information.

Derek Tan writes articles relating to education. Please visit Canadian International School for more information.