The Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) is delighted to announce a talk by Professor Michael Thomas (Birkbeck, University of London) entitled “Does multilingualism enhance teenage cognition and education?”. This hybrid talk will be taking place on April 30th, 4.00pm. If you would like to attend, please complete our registration form.
Does Multilingualism Enhance Teenage Cognition and Education?
Professor Michael Thomas (Birkbeck, University of London)
The existence of educational and cognitive benefits for multilinguals has proved controversial both because of inconsistent evidence and the risk of confounds from factors potentially associated with multilingualism, such as socioeconomic status and cultural factors. We evaluated possible multilingual differences in a sample of 1,673 UK adolescents drawn from the SCAMP cohort (scampstudy.org), assessing educational attainment at 11 and 16 years, and the development of cognitive skills in between those points. Cognitive control is a proposed locus of multilingual differences and these skills are still developing in adolescence, while adolescents are completing national examinations important for their future. For children speaking more than one language from early childhood, controlling for confounds and combining both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, we found robust evidence for higher educational attainment compared to monolinguals, and evidence of cognitive benefits just in the cross-sectional analyses. Children learning English as a second language showed an initial educational disadvantage at 11, faster progress and a subsequent higher performance at age 16, but no cognitive benefit. Mediation analyses suggested that in the main, higher multilingual educational performance was not produced by cognitive benefits, and therefore that the two should be decoupled. The multilingual educational enhancement is of high relevance to policymakers.