Tag: bilingualbenefits

A first-of-its kind study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families has found that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children reliably acquire English, and their total language knowledge is greater in that they also acquire Spanish. Results of the study,...

For the first time since its inception, all 50 states and the District of Columbia are or have begun working toward implementing a state Seal of Biliteracy program, according to the recently released 2020 National Seal of Biliteracy Report for the 2018-19 Academic Year. The program, which began in 2008 as a grassroots movement in California aims to recognize...

Infants and young children have brains with a linguistic superpower, according to Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists, who found that unlike adults who use a specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres to process most discrete neural tasks, young children use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. This may...

Bilingual children and adolescents may grow up with more grey matter, according to a new study published in Brain Structure and Function, in which an international team of academics led by the UK’s University of Reading and the U.S. Georgetown University examined detailed scans of children’s and adolescents’ brains and found that bilingual participants had potential advantages of both...

Ingrid T. Colón gathers the financial evidence to support multilingualism "fluent bilinguals earned more than $5,400 annually than their monolingual peers" Helping students retain and strengthen their home language affords them many cognitive, social and even health benefits. Research shows that multilingualism can have many economic benefits, too. According to a report published by the New American Economy, the demand...

The National Science Foundation's Partnerships in International Research and Education (NSF PIRE) has awarded a $5 million dollar grant over five years to help translate the scientific benefits of language learning from the lab to the classroom. Research has shown that speaking two or more languages makes minds more open to learning and more flexible, so now's the time...