A Selective Bilingual Advantage in High School Students

Abstract

The present study investigates the impacts of bilingualism on academic performance among high school students by using cognitive assessment scores as proxies for GPAs. As seminal works, finding a constant bilingual advantage (BA), are being increasingly disproved in favor a selective BA, task demand in working memory (WM) was introduced to examine this. A mixed method was used. Participants completed a self-assessment survey, rating their academic performance and beliefs regarding the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Then, the flanker and modified flanker tasks tested participants’ WM. Using measurements of the means, medians and p-test, it was discovered that bilingual students only outperformed monolinguals on the low demand regular flanker task while equally on all other tasks, not in accordance with the Executive Control Theory (ECT) commonly supported in recent works. Additionally, the survey revealed that both monolingual and bilingual students recognize the positive impacts of language on cognition, but not the application of cognition to increased school performance. By bringing awareness to this relationship, this could encourage more students to study a foreign language in high school, bridging the cognitive-linguistic gap.