Benefits Of Bilingualism

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Questioning the Benefits of Bilingualism
Few people have questioned the reliability of the statement that bilingualism brings people benefits, but when we scrutinize the former researches and proofs that support this belief, the results are disappointing. With the arguments of Ed Yong in The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism and other proofs I found, the executive benefits of bilingualism is more an illusion that people want to believe.

According to Ed Yong, former experiments with a supportive conclusion of a bilingual advantage on executive functionings are built upon flimsy foundations, including pre-set biases and flaws in the design of the tests. The problem is compounded with the failure to replicate the former experiments. …show more content…
The tendency to report only the studies that work is not only a trap researchers always steps on, but one that lies in media’s routine of function, where it varies into publication bias. The aptitude to accept positive, attention-grabbing papers makes journals put less weight on negative, contradictory ones that reveal the truth of bilingualism. For instance, in a research of 104 abstracts on bilingualism that were presented at scientific conferences, researchers found that 68 percent of abstracts with a conclusion of an executive-functioning advantage were eventually published in journals, compared to just 29 percent that found no advantage. More positive findings can be published than those finding no advantage of bilinguals. This biased publication selection leads to a perception of a stronger evidence for the phenomenon than it actually …show more content…
Confounding factors, or uncontrollable scope of variables could explain the better performance of bilinguals in some tests of attention or mental control, because many studies compare monolingual and bilingual people who vary in more ways than the number of languages they speak, with other variables that can affect the outcomes hugely. These variables include their nationality, educational level, socioeconomic background, immigrant status, and cultural traits, all of which might play a more important role in attention or mental control. Just as Paap says, “Some positive findings are likely to have been caused by failures to match on demographic factors and others have yielded significant differences only with a questionable use of the analysis-of-covariance to “control” for these factors.”(Paap) It’s not difficult to imagine a bilingual American college student with middle class families who emigrated from France has more executive advantage over a monolingual Chinese farmer whose family has been engaged in farming for generations. No solid conclusion of a bilingual advantage can be drawn before diminishing the effects of these variables, if not excluding them. But the reality is that very few studies satisfactorily account for
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