Bilingual Competence and Bilingual Proficiency in Child Development

Preface

Preface This book is about the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of underlying competence that come together in making up its component parts. When two or more languages are part of a child’s world, we have a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. The same is true (some opportunities richer, others less so) for bilingualism in adults. This explains in part why recent years have seen such an upsurge of interest in this area of research. We will barely lift the cover on this voluminous body of investigation . In fact, we will restrict ourselves mainly to problems of language ability (pro- ficiency) when children use two languages for tasks related to schooling, especially in learning how to read and write. Describing kinds of knowledge (competence) as “underlying” involves no idea that there is anything deep or occult about them. Rather, it seems like a good way to begin to frame some of the problems of language use—thinking about, for example, what the component parts of bilingual proficiency might be so as to understand it better. Our main concern in looking at the research discussed here will be the questions that second language and bilingual educators ask. This includes research that addresses issues of competence: how it develops, how knowledge is organized mentally , and how it is processed. As we get a better idea about the knowledge and processing components that come together in performance, we should better understand how two languages are used for different purposes. At the same time, findings from research specifically oriented toward aspects of learning and teaching pose interesting problems for other applied subfields, and even for work on theoretical models. That language learning and literacy might be enriched by including second languages , alongside the use of first languages, is one idea that we will explore. Another research proposal that makes this idea somewhat more interesting (because as it stands it’s rather unremarkable) is that this manner of language inclusion might apply without exception, for example, in school. But not all languages (i.e., the x Preface people who speak them) have access to the same resources for developing learning materials and texts, and this clearly imposes certain limitations and practical constraints . So the question might better be formulated like this: how and to what extent might an inclusive bilingual or multilingual educational approach be applied even in cases where distribution of resources is sharply unequal? The discussions about child bilingualism are all based on research or take research-based proposals as a beginning framework. They also take a direction that is influenced by a point of view, or just a view, that in some ways is more like a long view of where things might lead us somewhere down the road, someday. For now, it would be safe to say that most researchers in the field of bilingualism today have concluded that exclusionary (deliberately monolingual) approaches to language learning result in one or another kind of missed opportunity: one kind for children who already know the customary or official language of instruction when they enter elementary school, and a related but different kind for children who know a language that isn’t used for instruction and who need to learn a second. One perspective on this state of affairs takes very seriously the following possibility: that scientific studies of language learning might contribute to clearing away unnecessary limitations on human development related to knowledge of one language or another. In theory, we would like to be able to say, it shouldn’t matter what language a child knows or knew first. Much of the research reported on here comes from a project on child bilingualism in which an indigenous language is part of the picture. The full picture, when an indigenous or minority vernacular comes into contact with a national or official language, more often than not involves missed opportunities of significant proportion . A major UNICEF-sponsored study of the developmental potential for children in developing countries (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007) reminds us of this enduring asymmetry in the world today. The researchers estimated, conservatively, that over 200 million children in these countries are affected by loss of cognitive potential . In early childhood, contributing factors included extreme poverty, poor health, and poor nutrition, along one dimension, and deficient care and impoverished experience along another. Together, according to the authors...