The Multilingual Times: Breaking the Language Barrier Between Journalism and Science

This paper recounts and reflects upon the first two years of a project of transdisciplinary online collaboration involving a group of students studying journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), who are paired one-to-one with a group studying linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Taking as its starting point the idea that most journalism urgently needs to improve the accuracy and depth of its science coverage, and the equally urgent idea that scientists need to improve their capacity to communicate clearly to a wide public, the project has seen the students working together to produce an accessibly written blog, The Multilingual Times, reporting on the latest peer-reviewed research in the field of multilingualism. By using a series of Google Drive folders and files to host the collaborative work, the instructors (the paper’s co-authors) are able to monitor students’ progress, address issues as they arise, and assess the contributions of each student to the finished blog-posts. The project is therefore, in additional to its other pedagogical facets, something of an experiment in using Google Apps and its online synchronous and asynchronous capacities to facilitate collaboration

The Bilingual Advantage and the Language Background Bias

The idea that bilingualism can give us an advantage in life is of great interest to the scientific community due to its significant positive implications for healthcare and education at large. In recent years, several scholars have provided evidence in favour of the so-called bilingual advantage or benefit, suggesting a positive association between bilingualism and cognitive development. In order to understand whether the claim is fully warranted, the present paper sets out to examine the evidence in support and against the existence of a bilingual benefit for individuals. Following a brief discussion on the use of the terms bilingualism and multilingualism in the literature, the paper proceeds to provide a summary of evidence of advantages and disadvantages currently associated with prior language knowledge in the mind, highlighting some of the possible reasons for the different results that are being reported and introducing the language background bias. The paper ends with some suggestions for future research that can help us move forward and increase our understanding of the bi-/multilingual advantage as a broader phenomenon

Interlanguage influence and multilingualism An empirical investigation into typologically similar and dissimilar languages

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Language learning and mathematical learning: is there a multilingual benefit for both?

International audienceMultilingual speakers are frequently argued to show an advantage when learning additional languages. Does the same advantage arise when the same multilinguals are learning Maths? This is the core question our study has addressed. French L1 students with two additional non-native languages at low to intermediate proficiency level (Group 1; n=402) were compared with French students who had knowledge of four or more languages (Group 2; n=193). The first group represents the typical French student with foreign languages studied in a formal education context, while the second group includes all those students who speak different languages in the home and are mostly of immigrant origin. Due to this difference, socioeconomic status was fully controlled. All students were given a past Pisa test for Maths (Pisa 2012) and some extracts from the A2 and B1 Cambridge tests for English Reading. Results at first show that Group 1 performs significantly better than Group 2 in both Maths and English. Additional analyses that control for SES then show differences in performance in Maths but not in English. This suggests that an increase in number of languages leads to improved performance in language learning while the effect is not so clear-cut in mathematical learning

The role of mother tongue literacy in language learning and mathematical learning: is there a multilingual benefit for both?

International audienceThe present study examines the multilingual benefit in relation to language learning and mathematical learning. The objective is to assess whether speakers of three or more languages, depending on language profile and personal histories, show significant advantages in language learning and/or mathematical learning, and whether mother tongue literacy can be associated with their performance in Maths and English language tests. Participants are all multilinguals with knowledge of French as an L1 or as a non-native language. Three core groups were examined: a) School multilinguals (n=449), typically French L1 speakers with knowledge of two additional languages learned in a formal school context; b) Multilinguals with Literacy in the home language (n=45) and Multilinguals without literacy in the home language (n=113). All participants were given a Maths test, an English language test and a questionnaire. A questionnaire for parents was also used. Results suggest a positive role of mother tongue literacy in language learning as well as mathematical learning