Thought and Two Languages: The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Development

Abstract

By the end of 1979, approximately 3.6 million children in the United States were judged to be in need of special linguistic assistance to cope with the regular school curriculum (Pifer, 1980); at the time, however, roughly 315,000 children were participating in some kind of bilingual education program. Despite the fact that federal spending on bilingual education is comparatively low, and that existing programs reach only a fraction of eligible children, bilingual education is presently under considerable attack. Indeed, few other educational experiments in recent years have managed to arouse such passionate debate-so much so, in fact, that the future of this promising educational tool is uncertain (Pifer, 1980, p. 4). The attack against bilingual education can be explained mostly in terms of political, cultural, and socioeconomic variables (see Fishman, 1977). A discussion of such variables is well beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, for our purposes it should be noted that psychological and educational research on the effectiveness of bilingual education often has provided the attackers with sophisticated weapons. For example, an influential study of bilingual education projects sponsored by the Office of Education in 1976 (American Institute for Research, 1977) showed that many existing programs were not providing academic gains for students and, in some cases, were allowing students to fall behind. Although the study has been criticized severely for basic methodological flaws, it has contributed significantly to a negative mood against bilingual education efforts in the nation (Blanco, 1977). Tucker and D'Anglejan (1971) outlined four commonly held beliefs regarding the effects of bilingual education: