Study shows that the use of the mother tongue in Hispanic children does not affect the learning of English | Orientation | Magazine

Before this study, the differences between bilingual children were mainly described in terms of mastery and balance.

EFE

June 25, 2021 – 6:30 p.m.

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The use of Hispanic children of the mother tongue within the family in the United States, where 12 million minors listen to a minority language at home, does not slow down or impair their learning of English, according to a study released that Friday by Florida Atlantic University (FAU).

The FAU study thus dispels the widespread erroneous impression that the use of a minority language at home interferes with children’s abilities to acquire good use of English in this country.

By contrast, FAU’s one-of-a-kind research on US-born minority children found that “exposure to minority languages ​​does not threaten the acquisition of English ”by minors.

What’s more, children learn English reliably and their overall knowledge of the language is greater as they also acquire Spanish.

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“We found that at an early stage of development, children who hear two languages ​​take a little longer to learn than children who hear only one language; however, there is no evidence that learning two languages ​​is too difficult for children.” said Erika Hoff, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at FAU.

A key finding of the study is that low levels of proficiency in two languages ​​at 5 years is not a typical result of exposure to two languages.

In fact, bilingual children who show poor command of both languages ​​by age 5 “may have an underlying impairment or inadequate environmental support for language acquisition.”

The study, conducted in collaboration with George Washington University, is the first to describe the outcome of early exposure to two languages ​​in terms of bilingual skills.

The research addresses the question of what level of English and Spanish can be expected in 5-year-old children who come from Spanish-speaking homes in which they also hear English in different proportions.

English learning is not slowed down

The experts used a test that measured the vocabulary level in English and Spanish of 126 5-year-old children born in the United States, within Spanish-speaking families and with one or two immigrant parents who have been exposed to Spanish since birth. and they have also listened to English at home.

They also measured indicators of children’s language learning ability.

Before this study, differences between bilingual children were described primarily in terms of proficiency (bilinguals who are fluent in English or bilinguals who are fluent in Spanish) and balance, but it turns out that this is not the only way that bilinguals differ.

“Previous research has tended to treat the development of bilingual children in each language as a separate outcome, rather than treating dual-language skills as the sole outcome of exposure to two languages,” Hoff said.

An approach that leaves unanswered the question of how the acquisition of one language is related to the acquisition of another, among other aspects.

The findings of this study suggest that mastery of a language is not the same as proficiency in its use and that bilinguals differ in both mastery and overall knowledge of the language.

There are balanced bilinguals at age 5 who have better English skills than some bilinguals who are fluent in English.

Individual differences in mastery are significantly related to exposure at home, although the function that relates exposure to mastery is biased towards English.

“Exposure in the home where Spanish predominates seems to be necessary” and individual differences in total knowledge of the language “are significantly related to indicators of language learning capacity in terms of phonological memory and non-verbal intelligence,” he said. the study. (I)

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