Week of February 28, 2001

The ins and outs of bilingual education have been hotly debated, but what is actually going on in the bilingual brain? This week we look at bilingualism, and what it tells us about the human capacity for making sense of the world around us. Guests include writer Julia Alvarez; Dr. Joy Hirsch, who heads a magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Dr. Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive psychologist who is Professor of Psychology at Toronto's York University; Lynette Holloway, an education reporter for the New York Times and commentary by John Hockenberry.

The show begins with an interview with writer Julia Alvarez, who moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was ten years old. Ms. Alvarez's books include the best-selling novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies.

Alvarez reads an excerpt about how she first learned English from her newest book, Something to Declare. "All parents have code language they use," she posits, but this was particularly necessary in life under a dictatorship. She first remembers hearing English when her parents wanted to shield their children from worrisome news. "Say it in English, so the children won't understand." Later, when she was learning English in elementary school, Alvarez recalls wondering "Why have a whole new language for schools and for books, with a teacher who could speak it teaching you double the amounts of words you really needed?" Alvarez only really learned English when she and her family moved to the United States when she was ten.

Shuttling between two languages formed her early awareness of language, words, and how they are used to express meaning - an awareness that was crucial in her development as a writer. Comparing English and Spanish, Alvarez admires the precision of English, but sometimes finds there are things she can still say best in Spanish. For instance, when one apologizes in Spanish, one says "Yo sentir-lo," literally "I feel it." Alvarez compares it with the English. " 'Sorry' -- who needs it? But 'I feel it'! Now there's an apology!" Alvarez comments on the increasing use of Spanish throughout the United States, even in Vermont, where she now makes her home. "We're not a monolingual country anymore," Alvarez concludes, "and thank goodness." Julia Alvarez's books, including Something To Declare, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo! and In the Time of the Butterflies are published by Plume Books.

Next, Dr. Fred Goodwin interviews neuroscientist Dr. Joy Hirsch, who heads a magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. FMRI allows scientists to peer into the brain and to create photographic maps of the brain at work, by tracking the increase of blood flow to various portions of the brain. Identifying the parts of the brain used for key abilities, such as speaking and understanding language, allows neurosurgeons to plan surgery that takes into account the need to protect the patient's critical brain functions.

In 1997 Dr. Hirsch and her then graduate student, Karl Kim, used fMRI to research as to what portions of the brain were activated by use of a second language. They wanted to know if there was any difference between the brain activity of "early bilinguals," those who learned a second language at a very young age, and "late bilinguals," who learned a second language as a teen-ager or adult. They discovered that early bilinguals use the same part of the brain's language center, Broca's Region, whether they are using their native or second language. With fMRI imaging the brain region for both languages appears identical. But for late bilinguals, two separate, adjacent, but not overlapping parts of Broca's region are activated, depending on which language is being used. So people who learn a second language as teenages or adults seem to store the ability to speak that language in a different part of the brain than the first language, whereas learning the languages very early in life results in their storage of the ability to speak each language in the same portion of the brain. However, when it comes to processing language, for which another part of the brain is responsible - Wernicke's Area - both early and late bilinguals store the ability to understand and process both languages in the identical part of the brain.

To learn more about the Dr. Kim's and Dr. Hirsch's study of the bilingual brain, or to contact Dr. Hirsch, check out the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's web site at www.mskcc.org. To read more about the study, click here.

D(for a press release about the study and link to Nature magazine, which published the study, see "for journalists" and go to "press releases." )

Dr. Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive psychologist who is Professor of Psychology at Toronto's York University, next spoke with Dr. Goodwin about her work comparing problem solving skills of monolingual and bilingual children. Dr. Bialystok's research indicates that bilingual children may be at an advantage over monolingual children in an important problem-solving skill, namely, the ability to block out misleading information. In one study, Dr. Bialystok compares bilingual and monolingual children between the ages of 4 and 6, peers on every level except for the number of languages they speak. Whether bilingual or monolingual, the children know what letters are and that letters correspond to sounds, but they do not yet know how to read.

She shows a child two pictures, for instance, a picture of a dog and a picture of a king, sitting side by side on a table. She brings out a card with the word "dog" written on it, tells the child what it says, and places it under the picture of the dog. She asks the child what it says. Then she engineers an apparent "accident" (for instance, she makes a teddy bear run across the table) that displaces the card with the word "dog," so that it comes to rest under the picture of the king. Again she asks the child what the card says. The difference between monolingual and bilingual children is striking. While 35% of the monolingual children answer correctly when the card is displaced, 80% to 90% of the bilingual children still answer correctly. They are not misled by the new proximity of the card to the king, rather than what it identifies, the dog. They are better able, says Bialystok, to make the distinction between a symbol (the word) and the thing to which it refers (the picture), to understand that words are only referents. This ability to block out misleading information holds true in bilingual children not only in pre-reading skills, but also in tests having to do with mathematical concepts, shapes, and sizes.

Dr. Bialystok speculates that this ability is tied to the bilingual child's early exercise of the executive function, which resides in the pre-frontal cortex. This ability allows us to sort out information and tune out what is irrelevant. For instance, it allows us to walk into a room and immediately find the person we are looking for, without equally attending to every flashing light and noise. In bilingual adults, both languages they know are activated when they speak one language, yet they are able to keep words and phrases from the language that is not being used from "littering about" the language they are speaking. In other words, they are using the executive function of the pre-frontal cortex to inhibit the language that is not being spoken. Dr. Bialystok suggests that bilingual children's early experience in inhibiting one or another language develops the executive function's capacity to tune out irrelevant information.

What is the application of her research to class rooms in which bilingual education is being taught? Dr. Goodwin asks. Noting that there is evidence that the ability to read in one language translates easily into an ability to read in another language, Dr. Bialystok supports "anything that motivates children to learn how to read."

Dr. Bialystok's newest book is Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy and Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press. Her other books include In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition, co-authored with Kenji Hakuta, and published by Basic Books.

Lynette Holloway, an education reporter for the New York Times shares her experience covering recent changes in New York City's bilingual education policy. Recently, California's Proposition 227 "all but eliminated bilingual education" in that state. Supporters of bilingual education around the country have feared that bilingual programs in other communities will be next. However, observes Holloway, when New York City supporters of bilingual education saw that bilingual education was not on the chopping block, they worked with the Board of Education to assess how to improve the city's education of "limited English proficiency" children. In New York, new policy will offer four choices to parents of these children, a) intensive training in English as a second language (E.S.L.) b) regular E.S.L. c) dual language teaching, in which classes are taught on alternate days in English and another language and d) bilingual education, in which classes are taught primarily in the student's native language, supplemented with a separate course in spoken and written English. Holloway notes that the first option, intensive training in English as a second language, corresponds to what is being taught in California as "English immersion" but that the program is being labeled differently in New York because of the controversy that has attended California's large scale dismantling of bilingual education. New York City will make a priority of moving children out of primary instruction in their native language within three years of their entering public school, in part by changing the test that has been used to evaluate their readiness for mainstream education.

Lynette Holloway and the New York Times can be accessed on the web at www.nyt.com For a critique of bilingual education in the United States, visit the Center for Equal Opportunity, headed by Linda Chavez, at www.ceousa.org.

And for more information about the spectrum of bilingual education in the United States, and links for raising a bilingual child, check out the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, at www.ncbe.gwu.edu.

Commentator John Hockenberry concludes the show, musing on his fleeting experience of being… well…. almost bilingual.

 

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