Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingualism: A Very Brief Overview 237some of the problems here can also affect the apparently more objectivetests of fluency and flexibility. We might, for example, ask people torespond to instructions in two languages, measure their response timesand, on this basis, try to ascertain dominance. Or we could presentpicture-naming or word-completion tasks, we could ask subjects to readaloud or we might present a word that occurs in both languages (pipe, forexample, occurs in both French and English) and see how it ispronounced. We could simply test for extent of vocabulary, or see howmany synonyms for a given word a person can come up with. Und soweiter.As well, it can easily be appreciated that factors such as attitude, age,sex, intelligence, memory, linguistic distance between languages and thecontext of testing all have the potential to confuse and confound thepicture. Furthermore, even if we were able to gauge with some accuracy,there would remain problems of adequate labelling. That is, measuredindividuals would hardly fall into one, or two, or four neat categories ofability, or degrees of bilingualism. I should also mention here thecommonly held view that limits exist on linguistic capacities, that thereis some finite available cranial space; indeed, this ‘container’ philosophybedevilled the academic literature for quite some time. As I have alreadynoted, the suggestion is at its simplest that what you gain on theswings of one language you lose on the roundabouts of the other. But allsuch metaphors are flawed in at least two ways: first, there is no evidencethat a simplistic container model is appropriate at all; second, even if wewere to acknowledge some finite absorption and retention potentials, allthat we know of intellectual structure and function would suggest thatthey are quite large enough that we need not worry about exhausting ourmental credit (think of Cardinal Mezzofanti). (Obviously, the linguisticaspects are but one part of a more general cognitive picture; the mostrecent neuropsychological research suggests the inadequacy of simple‘container’ metaphors; see Fernyhough, 2006, for a cursory considerationof ‘metaphors of mind’.)There are some important dichotomies to attend to, as well. First, thereis the distinction between receptive (or passive) bilingualism andproductive (or active) competence. The difference here is between thosewho understand a language, either spoken or written, but cannotproduce it themselves, and those who can do both. Second, there is adistinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism: with the former,the learning of another language means an expansion of the linguisticrepertoire; with the latter, the new language may displace the existingone. Additive bilingualism generally occurs where both languages