Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

242 Language Diversity in the Classroomtheir monolingual counterparts on both verbal and non-verbal intelligencetests. The authors concluded that the bilingual child had greatermental flexibility and superior concept-formation skills, although theyalso admitted that the directionality of the correlation between bilingualability and measured intelligence could not be ascertained. FollowingPeal and Lambert’s investigation, many others have supported a positiverelationship between bilingualism and intelligence. Equally, there havebeen dissenting views, as well as cogent criticism of the 1962 study itself.The latter center upon the ‘directionality’ limitation just mentioned, butalso upon the generalizability of the results: important here are Peal andLambert’s use of only ‘balanced’ bilinguals, as well as questions aboutthe representativeness of the sample of children and the difficulty ofequating home backgrounds simply by holding socioeconomic statusconstant.Beyond the problems in defining bilingual ability per se, otherformidable difficulties arise. Do perfectly balanced bilinguals personsin whom the two languages exist at equal levels of fluency constitutethe ‘best’ contrast with monolinguals? And, even assuming that we couldadequately assess degrees of language competence, the measurement ofintelligence remains problematic. How do we ensure comparabilitybetween groups of bilinguals and monolinguals: controlling for age,gender and some other variables may not be difficult, but what aboutsocioeconomic status? Most measures of this may not come to grips wellenough with home differences of vital importance; see the earlierdiscussion of disadvantage. And, again, the correlational problem: ifwe discover a relationship between bilingualism and intelligence, can webe sure it is a causal one and, if so, in which direction does the causalityflow? Does bilingualism heighten intelligence, or does brightnessincrease the likelihood of functional bilingualism?These and other difficulties mean that strong conclusions aboutbilingualism and cognition are not warranted. Some feel that there isa link between the two, but that any cognitive advantages attachingto bilingualism are rather slight; others have been mainly concernedto show that there is not a cognitive price to be paid for bilingualism.As McLaughlin (1978: 206) noted: ‘almost no general statementsare warranted by research on the effects of bilingualism... in almostevery case, the findings of research are either contradicted by otherresearch or can be questioned on methodological grounds’. And Paulston(cited by Rotberg, 1984: 137) added that bilingual education research ischaracterized by ‘disparate findings and inconclusive results... a studycan be found to support virtually every possible opinion’. Research