Bilingual Learning for Second and Third Generation Children

Abstract

Throughout the English-speaking world, children from bilingual backgrounds are being educated in mainstream classrooms where they have little or no opportunity to use their mother tongue. Second and third generation children, in particular, are assumed to be learning sufficiently through English only. This study investigated how British Bangladeshi children, learning Bengali in after-school classes but mostly more fluent in English than in their mother tongue, responded when able to use their full language repertoire within the mainstream curriculum. Through action research with mainstream and community language class teachers, bilingual literacy and numeracy tasks were devised and carried out with pupils aged seven to eleven in two East London primary schools. The bilingual activities were videorecorded and analysed qualitatively to identify the strategies used. The following cognitive and cultural benefits of bilingual learning discovered by researchers in other contexts were also found to apply in this particular setting: conceptual transfer, enriched understanding through translation, metalinguistic awareness, bicultural knowledge and building bilingual learner identities. The findings suggest that second and third generation children should be enabled to learn bilingually, and appropriate strategies are put forward for use in the mainstream classroom.Keywords: England, Bengali, primary school, bilingual learning, cultural content, language and cognition IntroductionResearch on bilingual learning has demonstrated its cognitive and cultural benefits. However, studies have mostly been conducted in countries where there is mainstream bilingual education, and often with first generation children. This study set out to investigate how second and third generation British Bangladeshi children at primary schools in East London, where English is usually the only language in the classroom, would respond to using Bengali as well as English for learning. The participant children, aged from seven to eleven, were also studying Bengali at after-school community language classes, but were mostly more fluent in English than their mother tongue.

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