Abstract
The rise of bilingual education triggers an important question: which language is preferred for a particular school activity? Our field experiment (n = 120) shows that students (aged 13–15) who process feedback in non-native English have greater self-serving bias than students who process feedback in their native Dutch. By contrast, literature on the foreign-language emotionality effect suggests a weaker self-serving bias in the non-native language, so our result adds nuance to that literature. The result is important to schools as it suggests that teachers may be able to reduce students’ defensiveness and demotivation by communicating negative feedback in the native language, and teachers may be able to increase students’ confidence and motivation by communicating positive feedback in the foreign language.
Highlights
Schools increasingly have a choice between using a more cosmopolitan language (e.g., English in Western countries) or using students’ native language in the classroom
A self-serving bias means that individuals tend to attribute positive feedback to their own ability, while they attribute negative feedback to external factors
Our research question is: Does the language in which feedback is processed–i.e. native (Dutch) versus non-native (English)–influence the self-serving bias? We conduct a field experiment in which we ask early teenagers doing bilingual (Dutch and English) education to what extent they attribute to their own ability their performance on a puzzle task in the classroom
Summary
Schools increasingly have a choice between using a more cosmopolitan language (e.g., English in Western countries) or using students’ native language in the classroom. The consequences of this choice are poorly understood, but they appear to be important. A self-serving bias means that individuals tend to attribute positive feedback to their own ability, while they attribute negative feedback to external factors. Our research question is: Does the language in which feedback is processed–i.e. native (Dutch) versus non-native (English)–influence the self-serving bias? We randomly assign students to receive positive or negative feedback from the task. We randomly assign English versus native language feedback, and ask the students, in that
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