by: Gelsey Brizo

When I was in high school, my AP English teacher really disliked it when her students spoke Spanish, or any language aside from English, in her class. Being bilingual, this bothered me a bit and so one day I decided to ask her why. She told me it was because speaking Spanish had a negative effect on how we wrote in English. I was really surprised by her response, and I still am. Could being fluent in more than one language really harm the way you write? And if it could, could it also harm how you learn? Well, I can tell you from personal experience that I do not believe that to be true. But, of course, don’t just take my word for it. Recent research has shown that being bilingual, or multilingual, actually enhances your ability to learn.

For years, people thought that knowing more than one language was a hindrance because if you are bilingual you have two language systems functioning at once. If you have more than one active language system it was believed that one would interfere with the other, as my teacher thought. But actually, knowing more than one language seems to make you smarter. According to research conducted by psychologist Ellen Bialystok on toddlers in 2004, children exposed to more than one language since birth were more proficient problem solvers than then toddlers who had only been exposed to one language. Because the multilingual toddlers were accustomed to balancing more than one language system, they were able to handle complex exercises better than the monolingual toddlers. The multilingual toddlers were also shown to have better attention spans and better memory. In addition, a 2009 study conducted by Agnes Kovacs, shows that infants who have been exposed to more than one language demonstrate higher adaptability and faster learning skills. However, babies aren’t the only ones who benefit from being multilingual.

Researcher Albert Costa from the University of Pompeu Fabra, in Spain, says that because multilingual people have to switch between language systems so often, their minds are far more alert and efficient at processing new information than those of people who only know one language. An experiment he conducted on bilingual and monolingual adults measured how much brain activity was required for each group of subjects to observe an environment and process the new information. The results showed that the bilingual subjects were able to observe their environment more thoroughly than their monolingual counterparts and, in addition, they used fewer parts of their brains to make these observations. This shows that, since a bilingual’s brain is always actively hosting more than one language system, their minds are always alert for potential language switches. Therefore, their brains are accustomed to always observing and are more efficient at it.

Finally, to answer my teacher’s claim that speaking more than one language can negatively affect your writing, Spanish researcher Albert Costa said, in relation to his research on bilinguals, that there is a clear distinction between both language systems and that a switch isn’t made between the two unless the environment requires it. So, there is no reason for one language system to somehow interfere with another. In additions, speaking and writing in more than one language fluently actually makes you more sensitive to the grammar of the languages you are writing in. According to research done by Timothy Shanahan, a Professor at the University of Illinois, speaking, listening, writing and reading all develop in synchrony. All these language acquisition systems work in unison and develop based on a person’s proficiency in each area. This means that the better you speak a language, the better you can write in that language too. If you are fluent in a language, when you write in that language you are able to identify the subtleties in how sentences are phrased, and if they are phrased correctly, because you know what it’s supposed to sound like. For example, you cannot directly translate something from one language to the other because the grammar of one language is completely different from another. When you are bilingual, you can identify the differences in the grammar rules because you are accustomed to how things are supposed to sound in both languages. Because of this, you become sensitive to how grammar works and become more conscious of how you structure sentences in your writing.

So, does it still seem like knowing another language harms your capacity to learn? Most certainly not. Rather than harming you, knowing more than one language can improve your ability to learn. With heightened cognition, efficient information processing, better memory and better problem solving, the benefits of knowing a second language are obvious. Multilingual individuals might not necessarily be smarter, but they do seem to have the advantage when it comes to their ability to learn, as a lot of research has shown. Give your child the courage and the ability to prove everyone who doubts them, wrong, even if it is one of their teachers.

About the Author:

Gelsey Brizo. A senior at the University of Florida pursuing a degree in English. Born and raised in Miami, Florida she speaks both English and Spanish fluently and loves to watch and play soccer. A book fanatic who enjoys to read and write, she can’t go a day without a cup of coffee, a good read or her favorite music.

Work Cited:

Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. “Why Bilinguals Are Smarter.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

Shanahan, Timothy. “Relations Amoung Oral Languag, Reading and Writing Development.” Handbook of Writing Research. Chicago, 2006. 171-183. Print.