One such research was published this week on The Journal of Neuroscience that focused on the lasting benefits of raising bilingual kids by focusing on older adults. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, concluded that bilingual adults’ brains are much sharper and quicker when responding to multiple stimuli. I want to think this is why I’m a master multi-tasker myself!

CLICK TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE …

In the lasts months I´ve been buried in all types of research and studies regarding bilinguals because of all the material I  needed for the book we´re writing. Not that I need to be any more convinced about raising my daughter bilingually, it´s just fascinating to read about studies that basically take pictures of the brain, called neuroimaging, to clearly map out how the brains of bilinguals are different from monolinguals. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and these do!

One such study was conducted last year at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. We told you all about it and the findings in this post- Bilingual Babies: The Sooner, The Better.

In a nutshell, their conclusions suggest that the brain of a baby who has heard more than one language since birth (or even in-utero) remains more receptive to learning more languages for a longer period of time than a monolingual brain. That´s why we always say that the sooner you learn a second language, the easier it will be for you to learn more down the road.

What I also found fascinating about this particular study is that while conducting the Bilingual Baby Project, researchers also found and pinpointed three things that are very important for a baby´s overall bilingual comprehension skills; all of which are up to the parents to be aware of and execute.

3 Important Factors to Consider When Raising a Bilingual Child

1. The amount of exposure to each language. Babies and children need to hear the minority language being spoken to them 50-60% percent of their waking hours. It´s important that this exposure comes from human interaction, and not as much from media usage. Media is an important complement, but not something to rely on. Talk to your baby all the time from the day he/she is born. Talk, read, sing-out-loud, immerse him in an all-Spanish environment which could be a playgroup where all the moms are speaking Spanish.

2.The strategies parents use to raise a bilingual child. The two most used and most effective strategies to raise bilingual kids are One Parent One Language (OPOL) and Minority Language at Home (mL@H.) OPOL is when one of the parents speaks one language and the other parent another, all the time. For OPOL to be effective, the commitment from the parents has to be very clear and they must stick to their assigned language all the time. For a deeper insight into the OPOL method, check out these posts.

The mL@H method is the one Roxana and I use because we speak only Spanish at home with our husbands, all the time. English is pretty much not allowed among the three of us in my house. We´ve purposely created a home environment where the minority language can thrive and so my girl can associate Spanish to the comfort of family and home.

In short, what´s really essential is to have a strategy and commit to it. Flexibility is important because you have to adapt with your child´s needs and changing family conditions, but try to be as committed as possible because children do thrive on routine and consistency.

3. The parents’ desires to raise bilingual children. I love this one! Rarely do scientific linguistic research touch upon desire, at least to my knowledge, and I certainly believe it´s one of the most important factors. Both you and your spouse (if there is one) need to truly want and desire for this child to be bilingual. The reasons are usually personal and have to do with nostalgia, family ties, and a cultural bond, and these are the best! It´s that burning desire and want which will constantly drive you to have a method and stick to it; it will also motivate you to find a playgroup, the right dual immersion school, to travel, etc. I will go on a limb and say that desire is the driving force behind a bilingual child. Your desire comes first and that will feed into her´s.

What do you think? What is the one factor that has been the most effective in your bilingual journey, and/or the one you wished you had more of?

{Photo by efleming }

{Photo by: maveric2003}

Embracing your culture can be really good for you – especially if you’re a student.

A recent study titled “Culture Predicts Mexican-Americans’ College Self-Efficacy and College Performance” found that Mexican immigrant students who identify and practice speaking their native language have higher grade point averages than those who are put in English-only environments in their schools. The reason? David Aguayo, the doctoral student who conducted the study, found that the stress levels of those students who found themselves in a new territory were decreased when they embraced their culture.

This speaks volumes about bilingual students in our country. It’s also an amazing discovery to help identifying what can be done to promote the college success of Mexican-Americans in the U.S.

We had the chance to ask Aguayo a little more about his study. The interview can be found below:

SpanglishBaby: You said that student’s who embrace their cultural heritage do better in school, what evidence did your study find to prove this?

David Aguayo: In short, immigrant students in college who identified with their Mexican culture had a better GPA than the 2nd and later generation students who did not. Along with other studies, I am suggesting that embracing one’s culture, as students are settling into this American one, can help in reducing stress levels associated with the new territory and its expectations, allowing them to focus on learning new concepts and ideas.

SB: You mention that it’s not only about speaking their native language, but also “eating certain foods or interacting with people who share your heritage” what helps. Can you elaborate?

DA: Referring specifically to the Spanish language and the Mexican culture, immigrant students will benefit from an environment that endorses their cultural practices. No matter how that practice looks like, when students feel safe at school and at home their defense mechanisms will decrease, allowing them to be open to new experiences.  Better put, instead of throwing someone into the deep end of the pool, when immigrant students are allowed to maintain what they know and use it as their life-vest, they will better learn to navigate the system, coming out at the end with strong self-perception and self-esteem, which is found to have better academic outcomes.

This differs for 2nd and later generation students who identify as Mexican-Americans and it depends on the type of environment in which they grown up. If these 2nd and later students grow up in a predominantly White environment, without any mention of their parents culture, they may identify more with their Anglo peers. In comparison to those 2nd and later students who, despite the White environment, identify more with a Mexican culture (food, music, language, values) that has been inculcated throughout their development.

SB: What exactly does “allowing native language in school” mean to you? Does this mean hiring bilingual teachers or simply encouraging students to speak in their native language? And which do you think would have better results?

DA: I feel that this question has a political undertone, which includes the political discourse of whether schools should be English-speaking or English/Spanish-speaking, which is a conversation that is led by values. Nonetheless, language should be decided amongst a school’s needs and goals, rather than a state-wide or even nation-wide agenda. Regardless of whether you are pro-English-only initiatives or not, allowing native language in schools, in my opinion, would assists immigrant students to feel more comfortable in such environment, so that they can slowly move to classes that will help them get to college, not just graduate high school.

My concern lies more in the mental health of students. Therefore, my answer will be shaped according to students’ needs within their respective environment: this will look differently in a predominantly White school versus a more diverse one. Nevertheless, bilingual teachers and administration serve the need that school districts have when there are a large proportion of parents who do not speak English or do not know how to navigate the school system

It is important to keep in mind, however, that given the global economy that we are in as a nation, our teachers and administration (bilingual or not) ought to be aware of students’ differences, accept those differences, and be sensitive to students’ needs, while expecting similar academic work, according to students’ academic abilities.

But, when you speak of “better results” do you mean graduation rates? Because if you do, our students need more role models and mentors that will guide them through the educational pipeline. Our students need people who will hold them to higher academic expectations. English or Spanish or both, we need these students to graduate high school and partake in a post-secondary education.

SB: What advice do you give Latino parents when it comes to helping their kids succeed in school, especially the ones that are so concerned about their kids learning English that they virtually stop talking to them in Spanish with the hopes that this will help?

DA: Again, it depends in the environment that these students grow up in. If the parents force their children to speak solely English, but the kids are around Spanish-environment outside of home, then this will create great conflict in their home and identity, specially during adolescence. However, if these same parents are in an all-White environment, the kids will grow up with little identity conflict. According to studies, success is not solely determined by language, but rather academic preparation, high expectations, and mentorship and guidance (both by parents, educators, and peers) which proves fruitful in students’ academic outcomes. Therefore, I recommend that parents be more involved in their children’s education from very early on. Particularly our Latina/o parents, because a vicious stereotype (that our Latina/o students are not academically fit for success) exists amongst many educators, which is holding our students behind, by simply having subconsciously lower expectations.

David Aguayo is a doctoral student in the College of Education at the University of Missouri. In the future, he plans to study and investigate why Mexican-American students who have lived here all their lives don’t do as well in school as Mexican-Americans who have moved here more recently.

When we launched SpanglishBaby almost six months ago, I wrote a post about why raise bilingual children. In the weeks and months following, we’ve tried to write about or at least mention the latest studies related to bilingualism which have given us even more reasons why it’s such a great decision to raise our children bilingual. But we’ve never really taken a closer, more detailed look at why bilingualism is one of the best gifts we can give our kids.

I guess the most remarkable thing about all these studies is that they prove the human brain is truly amazing. According to the latest study, “babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one.” The main reason has to do with our brain’s flexibility and how exposure to two languages from early on increases this characteristic.

The study, conducted by scientists in Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies, was published this month in the journal Science and it tested more than 40 12-month old bilingual and monolingual babies. Although it seems kind of impossible to test children this young, researchers do so by tracking eye gazing. Here’s how it works:

“Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there’s a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language. In this particular study, 44 12-month-olds were tested to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one.”

Hopefully this valuable information will be enough to, once and for all, debunk some of the major myths associated with bilingualism:

Growing up with two or more languages will only confuse your child.

This misconception has been around for a long time and apparently it goes back to issues of immigration in the United States. Educators used to tell immigrant parents that it was better for their children to speak English at home – erroneously stating that early exposure to two languages put children at a disadvantage.

It takes longer for bilingual children to learn how to speak. 

The author of Raising a Bilingual Child, Barbara Zurer Pearson, says this myth is not supported by any scientific evidence. In fact, “with respect to most developmental language milestones, bilinguals are either at the same level as or ahead of monolinguals.”

They will only end up mixing both languages. 

This is inevitable and it’s harmless. But to monolinguals, it’s proof that the child isn’t really able to tell his languages apart. The actual term for this behavior is “code-switching” and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I do it and it’s not because I’m not completely fluent in both English and Spanish, but because sometimes a word sounds better in a particular language.

Another recent study conducted by researchers at Cornell Language Acquisition Lab concluded that bilingual children are better able to concentrate than their monolingual counterparts. According to the scientists, “children who learn a second language can maintain attention despite outside stimuli better than children who know only one language.” This ability to better concentrate can positively contribute to a child’s future academic success, the study went on to explain.

What parent wouldn’t want to provide their children with that possibility?

As if all these were not reasons enough to raise bilingual children, a Northwestern University study to be published next month, found that it’s easier for bilingual people than for monolingual ones to learn a new foreign language. Furthermore, the advantage “persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.”

In another words, if we’d like to introduce our children to a third language or they choose to learn one later on in their lives, they’ll have a much easier time thanks to our decision to raise them bilingual early on.

Fascinating, no? As I’ve mentioned in the past, no matter how you look at it, raising bilingual children is a win-win situation.

I hope you have the time to read all the studies mentioned here. They are definitely worth it. We’d love to know what you make of the findings, so please feel free to share your thoughts with us!

{image by  emrank }