TY - JOUR

T1 - Testing bilingual educational methods

T2 - A plea to end the language-mixing taboo

AU - Anton, Eneko

AU - Thierry, Guillaume

AU - Goborov, Alexander

AU - Anasagasti, Jon

AU - Dunabeitia, Jon Andoni

N1 - This research has been partially funded by grants PSI2015-65689-P and SEV-2015-0490 from the Spanish Government, PI2015-1-27 from the Basque Government, ERC-AdG-295362 from the European Research Council, and by the AThEME project funded by the European Union (grant number 613465).

PY - 2016/11/21

Y1 - 2016/11/21

N2 - Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that one subject should be taught in only one language and one person should stick to one language in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and monolingual functioning on memory performance in immediate recall as a proxy for comprehension and attention during learning. In Experiment 1, non-balanced bilingual youngsters were provided with definition pairs introducing familiar objects in a single-language or in a mixed-language context. After each definition block, participants were asked to identify previously introduced objects presented amongst a stream of Old and New items. In Experiment 2, the same speaker produced the two definitions in the mixed-language context, thus violating the second principle introduced above In both experiments we found no advantage for the single-language over the mixed-language context of exposure. Keywords:

AB - Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that one subject should be taught in only one language and one person should stick to one language in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and monolingual functioning on memory performance in immediate recall as a proxy for comprehension and attention during learning. In Experiment 1, non-balanced bilingual youngsters were provided with definition pairs introducing familiar objects in a single-language or in a mixed-language context. After each definition block, participants were asked to identify previously introduced objects presented amongst a stream of Old and New items. In Experiment 2, the same speaker produced the two definitions in the mixed-language context, thus violating the second principle introduced above In both experiments we found no advantage for the single-language over the mixed-language context of exposure. Keywords:

U2 - 10.1111/lang.12173

DO - 10.1111/lang.12173

M3 - Article

VL - 66

SP - 29

EP - 50

JO - Language Learning

JF - Language Learning

SN - 0023-8333

IS - 52

ER -