ESRC IAA PhD Student Community Outreach Fellowship: Childhood Bilingualism in Complementary Schools

Description of impact

Bilingualism is commonly considered a drawback for children even by their own parents. Foreign parents often prefer to adopt and use the language of the community with their children, abandoning their mother tongue, in the erroneous belief that bilingual children fall behind in language and cognitive development. However, recent studies examining cognitive abilities in bilingual children have revealed bilingual advantages (Bialystok, 2015; Barac & Bialystok, 2012). Our own experimental results offer comparable results between monolingual and bilingual children thus not observing bilingualism as disadvantageous in line with large-scale studies investigating primary school children (e.g., Duñabeitia, et al., 2014) and teenagers (Gathercole et al., 2014) speaking a minority language (e.g. Basque or Welsh). Nonetheless, this does not seem to be communicated to the end users, which are the parents, teachers, and professionals that are in daily contact with bilingual children. Parents are afraid of speaking their first language to their children, they are uncertain about the consequences of bilingualism and the impact it might have on their child. It seems like a matter that requires impact activities in order to accomplish a change in the culture and behavior of the public. As a result, the proposed activity involves building upon the Fellow’s PhD thesis in order to lead to impact and engaging with non-academic partners and end-users leading to benefits. More specifically, the aim is to engage with a Greek complementary school in the UK based on research findings at Bangor University in order to i) promote a change in the way childhood bilingualism/multilingualism is viewed by parents, teachers and professionals, ii) increase engagement with non-academic partners leading to future collaborations and research. The impact activity consists of a workshop in the school premises with teachers and parents promoting awareness about bilingualism, encouraging a dialogue around the audience’s experience and engaging with the external partner for future research collaborations. More specifically, the workshop will consist of a presentation on bilingualism followed by time for questions and answers. Also there will be a slot where parents and teachers can share their experiences on bilingualism with the audience and previously recorded videos from parents raising or who have raised bilingual children will talk about how bilingualism or multilingualism has influenced their child. The non-academic external partner will be the Greek School of Saint Nicholas from which we have received written agreement. This external partner will contribute by supporting the organisation of the workshop, informing the relevant parties and providing the facilities and staff time for preparation. Future collaboration will also be discussed.

Description of the underpinning research

This activity builds upon the PhD thesis of the Fellow based at Bangor University and supervised by the PI. The PhD began in September 2014 and ends in September 2017. The results of the study lead to impact in complementary schools.
The PhD thesis investigates cognitive and language abilities of bilingual Greek-English children, monolingual Greek and monolingual English children. The bilingual children attend a complementary school every weekend for 3 hours in order to learn the Greek language and heritage. Findings from the study have been presented in the International Conference on Bilingualism in Education at Bangor University (10 - 12 June 2016) and will be presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB11) at the University of Limerick (June 2017). The first findings show that bilingual and monolingual children are comparable in cognitive abilities. The study is on-going, however the results regarding bilingual children attending the complementary school are sufficient in order to engage with parents and teachers of the school where the data collection took place, linking research with impact.
The PI has a track record of publications in high-impact factor academic journals in the field of language acquisition and bilingualism, such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language Acquisition etc.

The activity falls in the area of Bilingualism, which is interdisciplinary (Linguistics, Psychology, and Education) and as such, one of the key ESRC priorities. The current research is closely linked to the area of Psychology due to the cognitive abilities of bilingual children that are investigated. Additionally, the language abilities and the educational context of the complementary school are connected to the areas of Linguistics and Education. The public sector and more specifically, bilingual children, parents and teachers of bilingual children will benefit from learning about the advantages of bilingualism, supported by the findings of the Fellow’s PhD study, thus developing social science research impact.

Beneficiaries and reach of impact

The end users will include bilingual children attending a complementary school in the UK, their parents and teachers. The school is the Greek School of Saint Nicholas at Liverpool.
This impact activity will offer the parents and teachers insights in bilingual research, informing them how bilingualism can provide many advantages to their children. This outreach activity will focus on a cultural and behavioural change making parents and teachers more confident about bilingualism.
Immediate impact will be evaluated through feedback forms and via a baseline measurement of behaviour at the initiation stage of the activity in order to measure behaviour change. This will be obtained in the beginning and at the end of the outreach activity, asking the attendees, as well as after the actual activity. Numbers and details of attendees will also be recorded. More detailed long-term feedback by the school will be sought at a later stage.

Impact status	Closed
Impact date	1 Apr 2017 → 30 Jun 2017