Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children - Research Paper Example

The assignment will propose a theoretical framework which assigns a central role to the interaction or the interdependence between the factors in explaining the academic as well as cognitive development of bilingual children. The paucity of meaningful data on the effectiveness of bilingual children can be attributed to the case that evaluations have ignored the correlations between the factors. The findings of the previous attempts stated bilingual children performed below expectations on the verbal parts of tests on intelligence and on the academic tasks and the researches and the investigators stated mental confusion and language handicaps to be the behind factors.

The “balance effect” hypothesis in this genre proposed that a bilingual child paid for the L2 skills by a fall in L1 skills (Cummins, 1979). A mismatch between the language at home and the language at schools leads in retardation in the field of academics. The UNESCO exemplified the hypothesis stating that a child can be best taught in his mother tongue. Some researchers argued that instructions proposed through a medium of weaker language will lead to retardation in the subject matter taught.

The researchers studied the inadequacy of both linguistic mismatch hypothesis as well as the hypothesis that bilingualism to be the source of academic and cognitive retardation. The researchers opined that bilingualism can influence in positive fashion to cognitive and linguistic development. The fine documented achievement of immersion programs for the linguistic programs is far from being inconsistent without the simplistic notion that mismatch in linguistics can cause academic retardation.

It is not surprising that educators re-examined the assumptions behind the underlying bilingual education and have emphasized the socio cultural as well as the school program variables rather than the factors on linguistics. The recent reviews on the perspectives of linguistics