More than a million five- to 18-year-olds in the UK use more than one language in their daily lives. Almost a fifth (18.1 per cent) of primary school children have a first language other than English (NALDIC, 2013), and there are increasing numbers of children whose first language is not English now entering early years settings.
While the majority of these children will be bilingual – using two languages in their daily lives – their backgrounds, family circumstances and cultural heritage will vary enormously. The diversity can be seen from the likes of Lorna, Noor and Annis, all of whom attend a north London primary school where 36 different languages are spoken (see below).
It is the role of the early years practitioner to meet the unique needs of the individual child; however, it is important to remember too that being bilingual is the most common way of being human – more than 70 per cent of the world’s population use two languages in their daily lives.
According to the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, early years practitioners must provide opportunities for children whose first language is not English to develop their home language in play and learning. Providers must also ‘ensure that children have sufficient opportunities to learn and reach a good standard in English during the EYFS’ (page 13).
While this guideline outlines staff qualifications, training, support and skills, there is no mention of how providers should develop training to support multilingual children or how to support children’s home languages, especially in a school like our north London case study.
So, how can early years practitioners create an enabling environment and develop positive relationships to nurture the learning and development of each bilingual or multilingual child? What does it mean to ‘ensure sufficient opportunities’ to develop a ‘good standard of
English’, and can this be done at the same time as children develop home languages in play?
Significant research has been conducted to ascertain how multilingualism might affect children’s development, particularly their linguistic and cognitive development (‘multilingualism’ is defined here as using more than one language in one’s daily life).
In schools today the most commonly used term to describe multilingual children is children with ‘English as an additional language’ (EAL) and, in fact, EAL can be understood as an umbrella term under which many different types of family languages and learning environments can be grouped.
Children like Lorna, Noor and Parfait have learned two languages from birth, a process called ‘simultaneous acquisition’ or ‘simultaneous bilingualism’. They might also be recognised as ‘advanced EAL learners’, as they are already fairly fluent in English.
‘Sequential acquisition’ or ‘sequential bilingualism’ refers to situations like Ahmed’s and Anis’s, where children learn one language well, often before starting school, and then begin to learn the school’s language when they are enrolled. Anis’s Reception teacher might also describe him as ‘newly arrived’ and ‘new to English’.
Simultaneous and sequential multilingualism involve different learning processes, and the contexts in which they have developed can also vary enormously. Some children, like Lorna and Noor, come from very settled multilingual British communities, meaning their families are able to benefit from well-established community support, like community schools that offer after-school provision and support families to develop their home languages further.
Other children, like Ahmed and Anis, have moved around and may have been affected by wars, environmental catastrophes or personal difficulties. Some like Parfait speak a language that is part of the school’s formal curriculum, while other such children might speak a language that is rare and unrecognised by anyone in the school or community.
Each situation calls for sensitivity and depends on early years practitioners getting to know the children and their families. Sometimes practitioners may inadvertently seem to value familiar (often European) languages more than others, and encourage parents to continue to speak these languages at home. Yet all languages are interesting and complicated systems of thought, and all parents should be encouraged to maintain their home languages. Strong, resilient learners tend to have a strong sense of identity, including linguistic identity.
Proficiency in a language requires not only learning vocabulary and syntax, but an understanding of the purpose, audience and context for the language. Children under two years old are particularly proficient at learning two languages at once because the human brain has its highest receptivity for language at this time.
It has been found that children can acquire more than one language spontaneously with little ‘effort’ up to approximately eight years of age, although they need to be exposed to a variety of spoken and written forms to develop full competence. Therefore, to use a language proficiently in the early years setting requires a certain amount of problem-solving, and more so when a young child is learning a second or third language, within what might be an unfamiliar culture, or in a new country.
CRITICAL THINKING IN THE EARLY YEARS
Language and thought are intrinsically linked. In fact, it is difficult to have a conscious thought without hearing the voice in your head. When attempting to solve a problem, we talk through what we see, ask ourselves questions, and then work logically through the problem to find the solution.
We use language to organise our thoughts. It is difficult to imagine how we could think, let alone think critically, without language. Psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner believed that thought can only develop through the medium of language, and that children’s thinking develops primarily by communicating with others.
There are many different definitions of critical thinking, and no absolute agreement on what it entails. But there are certain abilities that, although not definitive, would be broadly accepted as central elements.
These include the ability to understand logical connections between ideas, solve problems systematically, detect mistakes in reasoning, and be able to reflect on one’s own beliefs and values. Critical thinking involves analysis and evaluation of ideas, and the mental testing of hypotheses. It is, therefore, contingent upon the integration of a range of abilities, including a high level of cognitive development. The EYFS curriculum features critical thinking as an underpinning ‘theme’ and one which practitioners are required to nurture through a child’s play (DfE, 2014).
Of course, young children can be seen engaging in some aspects of problem solving before they can speak. Just consider a one-year-old attempting to build a tower with building beakers, or dropping pebbles in bottles. However, cognitive abilities accelerate after the age of two with the rapid development in language skills, permitting the child to engage in more symbolic activities and gradually more flexible (and arguably more critical) and abstract thinking. A group of three-year-olds who collectively want to build a pirate ship from cardboard boxes have learned to pretend and use a box to symbolise a boat and cardboard tube as its anchor.
The prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain, plays a crucial role in cognitive development and deals with higher-order thinking, such as problem solving, creative thinking, and regulation of the emotional system.
Several studies have indicated that the development of this executive control, particularly in regards to sustained attention and multi-tasking, is enhanced in bilingual children. These are skills that are fundamental to thinking critically.
Early exposure to languages facilitates a more complex and elaborate level of metalinguistic awareness (the understanding of language structure). This enables a person to reflect on their language and manipulate it to make sense. This skill relates to metacognitive awareness, the ability to consider your own thinking processes, which is important for evaluating and solving problems and, therefore, important to the critical thinking process (Baker, 2011).
Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues, and other researchers, have conducted a number of studies to test the cognitive abilities of young multilingual children. They found that multilingual children between four and eight years old demonstrate significant advantage over comparable monolinguals in solving problems that require controlling attention (Bialystok, 1999). This ability to control attention, including a higher resistance to distraction, can have far-reaching beneficial outcomes (see below).
However, it is important that early years practitioners recognise that for a bilingual child to obtain the full cognitive advantages resulting from enhanced executive control and metalinguistic awareness, fluency in both languages is beneficial. Steady use of both languages requires sufficient vocabulary development in both languages.
CREATING A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT
So, what can the early years practitioners do to ensure that children continue to develop all their languages?
Practice must be built on an acceptance that multilingualism is beneficial for all. Due to the flexibility of language and thought, multilingual children have advantages in divergent and creative thinking, as well as analysis. The use of two or more languages allows them to process information in each language and identify and combine a wider range of ideas.
For young children already used to hearing multiple languages and living within a multilingual home or community, being in an English-speaking environment will not seem particularly strange, but for others it may be very different. Such cases will require sensitive practitioners to guide the children through the transition while continuing to meet their physical, social, emotional, linguistic and intellectual needs. The child will learn English by interacting with their peers and adults, and by being encouraged and scaffolded in their exploration of spoken English.
Here are some suggestions for bringing about this transition:
- Staff, families and community leaders who speak other languages are a good resource. They can be invited into settings to discuss children’s play with them and to develop conceptual thinking or to read to them stories. The purpose would be to scaffold children’s thinking in their home languages and not just translate instructions. It is far better to have shared and sustained conversation with children in other languages.
- iPads and smartphones offer practitioners easy and instant access to words and phrases in different languages. They can be carried around the settings easily and used to access words to communicate with children in their native language. Bilingual dictionaries are also useful.
- Dual-language books enable children to improve their literacy skills as they enable children to transmit words developed in one language to another (Wang, 2011). Children can be assisted to read by using contextual clues as text is accompanied with pictures.
- Makaton is a programme to support spoken language and uses symbols and signs alongside speech (a sign language). Using Makaton is a way to include all children in a shared language and aid communication with multilingual children.
- Display labels and words in different languages.
SNAPSHOT: A NORTH LONDON PRIMARY SCHOOL
Ahmed
Three-year-old Ahmed arrived in England three months ago. The whole family arrived as asylum seekers and on arrival applied for refugee status. This has not yet been granted. Ahmed’s mother, father and older brother speak Arabic, and his parents have also learned Turkish and Greek during their long journey to England. Ahmed knows many Turkish and Greek phrases but speaks mainly Arabic, which is the language spoken at home. Ahmed has just started to attend the school’s nursery class where the only Arabic-speaking member of staff is on maternity leave.
Lorna
Four-year-old Lorna was born in England. Her father is British (of Scottish origin) and her mother is Chinese. Like Ahmed, Lorna attends the school’s nursery class. Her older brother, who is in the same school, also goes to a Chinese community school every week and learns Mandarin on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. He enjoys doing his Mandarin homework at home, and Lorna tells her mother that she wants Mandarin homework, too. Lorna speaks both English and Mandarin at home.
Noor
Noor’s grandparents migrated to England from Pakistan in 1960. They spoke only Punjabi when they arrived in Redbridge and while her grandfather learned to speak English at work fairly quickly, her grandmother did not, because she stayed at home looking after their children, including Noor’s father. Now at the age of 78, Noor’s grandmother loves to learn English with her grandchildren as she babysits them all.
Noor’s mother was also born in Redbridge to a Pakistani family, but her family moved back to Pakistan in the mid-1980s, when Noor’s mother was two years old. In her mid-teens the family moved again to London.
Noor, who is now nearly five years old, speaks English with her father and Punjabi with her mother. Many of her friends in the nursery class speak both English and Punjabi.
Parfait
Parfait was born in London and now at five has moved from the nursery class into Reception class. His mother is English and his father was born in France, and both speak French and English at home with Parfait. Parfait’s Reception class teacher likes to hear Parfait speak French at school because the whole class is learning French on Wednesday afternoons.
Anis
Anis, aged five, has just arrived in England and is now in reception with Parfait. Anis’s parents were born in Somalia but some years ago, they moved to Sweden, where Anis was born. Anis and his mother, father and older brother all learned to speak Swedish well, and now use both Somali and Swedish at home. English is a relatively new language for the whole family.
All names have been changed. The school was used as a case study in 2013.
MULTILINGUAL INFANTS: FACTS
- Newborn babies recognise their own language and turn their heads towards their mother’s language more than any other language. Their own language and its spoken sounds, rhythm and pitch are already familiar to them. Newborn babies are born as experienced learners.
- Infants hearing and interacting with adults in two languages know from the start that there are two systems in use and can distinguish easily between them.
- Multilingual children meet ‘normal’ milestones at the same time as monolingual children.
STUDY: TESTING RECALL
- A study involved 125 children (56 five-year-olds and 69 seven-year-olds) and compared 63 monolingual children and 62 bilingual children. The children were presented with a touch computer showing a grid, with each cell representing a pond. Frogs would appear from the ponds and the children were asked to remember which pond the frog came from.
- In one condition, a varying number of frogs appeared at the same time, and in a second condition a number of frogs would appear one after the other, requiring the child to recall both location and sequence. Scores were calculated by how many times children could correctly recall which pond the frog appeared from and in what order.
- Results showed that bilingual children performed better than monolingual children, with larger effects in the more demanding, sequential task. The suggestion is that bilingual children are at an advantage in focusing their attention when solving problems. (Morales, Calvo and Bialystok, 2013).
Vicky Burghardt is programme leader and senior lecturer in early childhood studies, Beverley Barnaby is a senior lecturer in early childhood studies and Dr Leena Robertson is associate professor and programme leader PGCE Early Years, at Middlesex University London
REFERENCES
- Baker C (2011). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 5th edition
- Bialystok E, Craik FIM and Luk G (2012), ‘Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Barac R, Bialystok E, Castro DC and Sanchez M (2014), ‘The cognitive development of young dual language learners: a critical review’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly
- Calvo A and Bialystok E (2014), ‘Independent effects of bilingualism and socioeconomic status on language ability and executive functioning’, Cognition
- DfE (2014), Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage
- Morales J, Calvo A, Bialystok E (2013), ‘Working memory development in monolingual and bilingual children’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
- NALDIC; http://www.naldic.org.uk
- Poulin-Dubois D, Blaye A, Coutya J and Bialystok E (2011), ‘The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
- Wang X (2011), Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family, Multilingual Matters