TASK: Read carefully the following article and create an outline of the text. Then, write a clear summary of it in 300–350 words.
THE JOYS AND BENEFITS OF BILINGUALISM
More than half the world’s population is now bilingual. Now thought to encourage flexibility of mind and empathy, bilingualism is also transforming societies.
Everyone knows that it’s moving and melancholic to watch your children change over the years. But to hear them alter their language, over the course of a few weeks and months, is almost surreal. Our children were 12, 10 and seven when we moved from Somerset to their mother’s country, Italy, last summer. Now, in Parma, barely a day goes by when they don’t inadvertently say something odd: “Mum, I’m eshing [going out]”; “Can we eat pesh? [fish]”; “I’ve scritten [written] to Grandpa”. Every time it happens we laugh about our private pidgin, called – take your pick – “Engaliano” or “Italish”. But behind the laughter is mild astonishment at the speed at which children can overlay and overlap languages.
Sometimes, they’re not inventing words, but using the English ones in an Italian way: “I have been advantaged,” Benedetta said a few weeks ago, meaning: “I’ve been fortunate”. “I lost the bus,” Emma said, implying, of course, “I missed it”. “She’s an insupportable person” is an Italish way of saying: “I can’t put up with her”.
I, too, feel altered. If you’re a writer, and words are your currency, you’re hopefully eloquent, maybe even wise. But when you live in a language not your own you become, inevitably, something of a village idiot. However fluent you are, your accent is ever obvious and you lack the nuances and registers of a native. Humour is hard. In a language as mellifluous as Italian, you will always be blunt, a bit like a German speaking English.
So if the children appear differently to us, so must we to them. From having been a stickler for linguistic precision, their father must seem an erratic guide: they can hear my mispronunciations and absent subjunctives. After such a short period, their mother’s faultless English has slipped a notch or two. They’re realising that they’re due to overtake both of us in a matter of months. They will hopefully become what Francesca and I can never be: truly bilingual.
Until recent decades, bilingualism was deeply frowned upon and considered deleterious to development. The received wisdom for much of the 20th century was that there was really only space for one language in a child’s brain. It was thought that if, for example, immigrants maintained a mother tongue at home, it would impede integration at school and probably lead to academic regression and confusion. As one journal study put it in 1926: “The use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation as measured by intelligence tests.” The choice to avoid the mother tongue wasn’t simply an educational, but also a social, one; the home language was invariably considered a source of shame, a sign of poverty or difference that would almost certainly lead to being singled out and bullied. For immigrants, integration used to imply the deliberate avoidance of your parents’ language, at least in any public setting.
The pendulum began to swing, very slowly, after 1962, when an academic study was conducted into monoglot French speakers and English-French bilinguals in Montreal. The authors, Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E Lambert, had expected a variety of tests to prove that the monoglots were more able than the bilinguals, but the exact opposite was the case. “Intellectually,” they said, “the bilingual child’s experience with two language systems seems to have left him with a mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental abilities.” That dry prose of the monograph, The Relation of Bilingualism to Intelligence, disguised a revolution: for the first time, academics were suggesting that, far from being a hindrance, exposure to more than one language could offer a distinct advantage.
The effects of bilingualism on neuroplasticity (the modification of brain structure and function) seemed clear cut, so researchers needed to understand how the brain accessed the two (or more) languages. What emerged, through hundreds of experiments, was the notion that rather than having two different “pockets” containing, say, French and English, the bilingual’s brain had one huge holdall for both. (Not everyone agrees: linguists are more likely than psychologists to believe that languages are separate, the grammars even more so than the vocabularies.) Either way, in any linguistic setting, bilinguals’ brains would begin “joint activation”, rummaging to find the right words in the appropriate language. That requires, of course, immediate inhibition and activation, stopping the wrong language and authorising the right one. The result is what’s called “enhanced attentional control”, with obvious implications for concentration, memory, and so on.
The effects of bilingualism appear to take place almost from birth. Extraordinary experiments – involving electric sensors in babies’ dummies – suggested that infants only a few months old can distinguish one language from the next. Eight-month-old infants are able to distinguish the facial expressions of one language from another. If such “enhanced perceptual attentiveness” is evident so early on, it’s perhaps not surprising that the bilingual brain seems to be wired differently. Along with a host of other research, implied in the results is an ability to empathise, to see a situation from another’s perspective.
It’s as if some bilinguals can speak, say, 95% of two languages, rather than a 100% of one. For those who want their children to be articulate and sophisticated language users, that missing 5% is a major hole, especially if you want them fully to appreciate, say, Dante or Shakespeare. But as François Grosjean, the French psycholinguistic said, a bilingual is not “two monolinguals in one” and shouldn’t necessarily be judged according to monolingual parameters.
The research that finally put the prejudice to bed was conducted by Jim Cummins and Virginia Collier at the University of Toronto. They discovered that students who had a native language literacy would display CALP (“cognitive academic language proficiency”) in a secondary language far sooner than those who didn’t have a strong native language. The implication was that it’s far more advantageous for immigrant children to hear an eloquent, grammatically correct, richly nuanced language at home than be exposed to low-level pidgin English. They can then transfer those language skills – the concepts, diction and sophisticated structures – to their new language.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that so much cutting-edge research into bilingualism, from Cummins and Collier to Bialystok, comes from Toronto. It’s a city in which it is estimated that half the inhabitants are bilingual. But those figures are now the norm: 56% of European citizens and 60% of Los Angeles residents are functionally bilingual. Globally, the figure for bi- and multilingualism is thought to be over 50% and rising, meaning that being monolingual is no longer (if it ever was) the default to which polyglots are an odd exception.
It may seem that the battle is won and that no one nowadays would question the virtues of bilingualism. Yet supporters of multilingualism, such as Antonella Sorace, insist there is much work to do. It’s very common to hear people tut-tutting at immigrants using their own language in the playground, because they believe it’s a block to integration. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that parents are being told by schools to stop speaking their own language at home. Plenty of nationalists still think that “code-switching” sounds traitorous, a bit like being a double agent, hence the existence of reactionary lobbies such as the “English-only movement”in the US and its equivalents for Hindi in India. Emmanuel Macron’s ambition, expressed last month, for French to become the global lingua franca shows how hard it is to let linguistic pride go. When an independence movement becomes identified with linguistic assertion, as in the Basque country, Catalonia or Wales, bilingualism can be seen as an affront to the aspiring nation struggling against the “colonialist power”. The result is that, for some, the use of Castilian or English is seen as a betrayal.
There’s an old controversial theory called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Growing from the work of American anthropologist Franz Boas (the man who famously noticed that Inuit had multiple words for snow), the hypothesis suggests that the language you speak affects the way you conceptualise your surroundings. The fact that, for example, the Amondawa people of the Amazon have no word for “time” or that neither Gaelic nor Latin has precise equivalents for “yes” or “no”, surely changes how those speakers make their way in the world.
Even the mental images we have for the same notions are different: icing sugar in Italian is “veil sugar”, while in French you know someone not like “the back of your hand”, but like “the bottom of your pocket”. I’m frequently frustrated that I can’t find exact equivalents of terms I need to deploy in Italian, such as “condescending” or “accountability”. Italian words don’t fit what I mean. It’s intriguing, too, that “reality” in Italian is sometimes plural, as if there’s no solid truth we can get hold of here, but just competing versions of it.
It’s easy to jump to silly conclusions, which is why the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is controversial. It’s so prone to reductionisms: “If the English have those linguistic voids, lacking a way to say ‘simpatico’ or ‘buon appetito’, they must be boorish anti-foodies.” Without equivalents of “accountability”, the lazy thinking goes, Italians must be slippery or unreliable. Yet, for all its controversies, the hypothesis – known also as “linguistic relativism” – surely points to a truth: that the more languages we know, the more agile our conceptual thinking will be.
In another language, you don’t just learn new words, or sounds, but new notions. It’s like putting on different spectacles and seeing the world with different eyes. You gain a different perspective and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you become more, rather than less, eloquent.
Reading notes:
– the text seems to point to the fact that, in the past, bilingualism used to be seen in a different light – “now thought to encourage flexibility”;
– the author begins from his personal experience: his children are bilingual and tend to mix the two languages; he also seems to point to the fact that bilingual people live in a sort of linguistic limbo (never at home in their second language);
– children learn faster than their parents;
– until recently, bilingualism was believed to be detrimental to a child’s development: in the past, studies maintained that bilingualism prevented immigrant children from integrating and led to mental retardation; immigrant children avoided their mother tongue for social reasons (it was considered a symptom of poverty and/or incapacity to adapt);
– things changed beginning with the 1960s when studies showed that, on the contrary, bilinguals were much more flexible in terms of mental abilities than their monoglot counterparts; this constituted a revolution;
– further experiments show that polyglots have an “enhanced attentional control” – namely, they manage to switch from one language to another effortlessly and this has obvious implications for concentration and memory;
– experiments further show that bilingual brains are wired differently and they have a greater ability to empathise;
– researchers in Toronto showed that students can transfer easily their language skills from one language to another when one of the languages is eloquent, grammatically correct;
– “monolingual” is no longer the DEFAULT;
– evidence shows that resistance to bilingualism still exists: some nationalists object to immigrants using their native language, believing that ‘code-switching’ is a form of betrayal to the new country, while some independence movements, such as the Basques, resent the use of the language of the ‘colonialist power’;
– the author mentions ‘linguistic relativism,’ which is the idea that the structure and vocabulary of a language affects its speakers’ views of the world;
– the author concludes by saying that when one speaks several languages, one does not merely learn words, but new perceptions of the world; thus, with luck, true bilinguals may have increased, rather than diminished, insight and eloquence;
Summary outline:
Intro: In the article “The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism,” published in The Guardian on January 21, 2018, the writer, Tobias Jones, discusses changing perceptions of bilingualism. + his personal experience.
First paragraph: Until recently…
Second paragraph: the revolution (new studies refute past perceptions of bilingualism)
Third paragraph: resistance to multilingualism (nationalists who claim that immigrants using their native language are betraying the country in which they live).
Conclusion: linguistic relativism + the author’s conclusion;
Summaries of “The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism” by Tobias Jones:
Option 1:
In the article “The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism,” published in The Guardian on January 21, 2018, the writer, Tobias Jones, discusses changing perceptions of bilingualism. Triggered by the personal experience of his family, he reflects on language learning, and reports that bilingualism is now believed to increase ‘empathy’ and mental flexibility.
Until recently, bilingualism was believed to be detrimental to a child’s development. The belief was that a child’s brain could only manage one language, and that using two languages could lead to confusion and hinder academic learning. Furthermore, in social terms, the use of a different mother tongue was seen as underlining the speaker’s low immigrant status, and therefore to be a source of shame.
However, following a Canadian study in 1962, academics were surprised to learn the contrary. In fact, bilingualism seems to lead to a particularly agile mind and ‘enhanced attentional control’ which aids concentration and an ability to perceive the world from another’s point of view. Moreover, tests have proved that children who hear a correct and fluent home language from their parents can transfer this fluency and finesse to their new language; diversely, parents who try to speak in a ‘low-level’ pidgin form of the target language do a disservice to their children.
Notwithstanding, advocates of multilingualism caution that there are still detractors. Although half of the world is now bilingual, there is evidence that there is still resistance to it. Some nationalists object to immigrants using their native language, believing that ‘code-switching’ is a form of betrayal to the new country, while some independence movements, such as the Basques, resent the use of the language of the ‘colonialist power’.
Jones concludes by explaining his fascination with the differences between Italian and English. He refers to the (controversial) hypothesis of ‘linguistic relativism’ which is the idea that the structure and vocabulary of a language affect its speakers’ views of the world. He agrees that when one speaks several languages, one does not merely learn words, but new perceptions of the world; thus, with luck, true bilinguals may have increased, rather than diminished, insight and eloquence.
Option 2:
In “The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism,” published in The Guardian on January 21, 2018, Tobias Jones explores the evolving perspectives on the subject of bilingualism. He shares a personal narrative about the noticeable changes in his children’s English due to Italian influences, highlighting the rapid pace at which they are acquiring a new language compared to himself and his wife, who appear to lag behind.
Historically, dual language acquisition was viewed with skepticism, believed to hinder child development, and was seen as a barrier for immigrants’ social integration. Jones notes that speaking a language other than the societal norm was often regarded with embarrassment and was thought to contribute to social ostracization.
However, from the year 1962 onwards, research began to illuminate the cognitive advantages of being bilingual, including improved mental flexibility and the ability to empathize more deeply. Jones emphasizes that these cognitive benefits are evident from a very early age, with studies indicating that infants can recognize differences between languages.
Despite the growing acceptance of multilingualism, there remains significant opposition. Jones highlights the existence of nationalist sentiments that view the preservation of an immigrant’s native language as a form of betrayal. He discusses how linguistic pride can sometimes fuel political movements, making bilingualism a contentious issue in the face of nationalistic aspirations.
Jones concludes by addressing the concept of linguistic relativism—the idea that language shapes people’s perception of reality. This principle supports the argument that mastering multiple languages enhances cognitive flexibility and allows for a broader understanding of the world. In essence, Jones argues that bilingualism offers more than just the ability to communicate in different tongues; it opens up diverse worldviews, making bilingual individuals more insightful and articulate than those who speak only one language.
The Summariser 