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<header class="gmail-article-header"><h1 class="gmail-headline">Hello or shalom? Half of Israeli kids grow up bilingual</h1>
<h2 class="gmail-underline">Israel is possibly the
world’s best ‘lab’ for researching the little-understood phenomenon of
being raised with two or more spoken languages.</h2>
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By <a title="Abigail Klein Leichman" href="https://www.israel21c.org/writer/abigail-klein-leichman/">Abigail Klein Leichman</a> </span>
<span class="gmail-date">May 22, 2018, 8:16 am</span>
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<img src="https://www.israel21c.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/shutterstock_bilingual-1168x657.jpg" class="gmail-attachment-x-large gmail-size-x-large gmail-wp-post-image" alt="" title="Illustrative photo by Eiko Tsuchiya/Shutterstock.com" width="1168" height="657"><div class="gmail-caption">Illustrative photo by Eiko Tsuchiya/Shutterstock.com</div>
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<p>“Anna,” a preschooler in the Israeli city of Bat Yam, was
thought to be cognitively impaired because testing her in Hebrew showed
her cognitive skills lagging behind her classmates. But when retested in
her home language, Russian, she was found to be normal.</p>
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<p>About half of all Israeli children speak a different language at home
than in school, making Israel possibly the world’s best “laboratory”
for researching the fascinating but still little-understood phenomenon
of growing up with two or more spoken languages.</p>
<p>One important Israeli discovery is that comparing bilingual kids like
Anna to monolingual children is like comparing apples to pears, says
Bar-Ilan University Prof. <a href="https://faculty.biu.ac.il/~armonls/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sharon Armon-Lotem</a>.</p>
<p>For two decades, her lab has studied language-acquisition processes
of Israeli preschoolers from English-, Russian- and Amharic-speaking
homes.</p>
<p>Roughly 20 percent of children entering first grade in Israeli
secular public schools come from immigrant homes in which the dominant
language is not Hebrew. The largest cohort is Russian-speakers,
numbering about 1.2 million out of an overall Israeli population of 8.7
million.</p>
<p>Adding more than a million Israeli households where Arabic, Yiddish
or African languages are spoken, the percentage of bilingual children
climbs to as high as 50% of the general population, Armon-Lotem tells
ISRAEL21c.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_89785" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignright">
<img class="gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-89785" title="Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem of Bar-Ilan University. Photo: courtesy" src="https://www.israel21c.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bilingual-ARMONLOTEM.jpg" alt="" width="1392" height="1691">
<div class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem of Bar-Ilan University. Photo: courtesy</div>
</div>
<p>To evaluate bilingualism properly, one must understand that children
who grow up speaking two or more languages in everyday life are not
using the same brain processes as do monolingual children learning a
second language in school, say Armon-Lotem and other Israeli experts.</p>
<p>And if bilingual children like Anna initially have a smaller Hebrew
vocabulary, they have better syntax and concept-generation skills in
both languages.</p>
<p>Overall, they develop language no differently than monolingual peers –
unless they have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), an area where
Israeli research is world renowned.</p>
<p><strong>What is normal?</strong></p>
<p>DLD, estimated to affect 5-7% of both monolingual and bilingual
children, causes dramatic delays in language acquisition not related to
other impairments. DLD might manifest differently in each of a child’s
two languages, but usually shows up as difficulty with word retrieval
and grammar.</p>
<p>Since these same phenomena can happen in typically developing
bilingual children as they learn the majority language, bilingual
children with and without DLD are often misdiagnosed.</p>
<p>Armon-Lotem emphasizes that bilingualism does not lead to impairment.</p>
<p>From 2009 to 2013, she led a <a href="http://bi-sli.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">network</a>
of researchers from 26 European and five non-European countries in
formulating standards for characterizing typical bilingual development
and identifying atypical bilingual development in over 30 language
pairs.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12242" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Research</a>
by Natalia Meir in Armon-Lotem’s lab was the first to show that it is
possible to disentangle typical and impaired language development, and
with 90% accuracy.</p>
<p>“We’ve made a lot of progress in this area in Israel,” says Prof.
Joel Walters, professor emeritus of linguistics at Bar-Ilan and now
chair of the department of communication disorders at Hadassah Academic
College in Jerusalem, which hosts hundreds of specialists at its annual
conference on communication disorders in multilingual and multicultural
populations.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_89786" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignnone">
<img class="gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-89786" title="bilingual-group" src="https://www.israel21c.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bilingual-group.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1200">
<div class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Researchers in bilingualism ata
Hadassah Academic College conference include Profs. Joel Walters, second
from left, Sharon Armon-Lotem, third from left, and Carmit Altman,
fourth from right. Photo: courtesy</div>
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<p><strong>Codeswitching</strong></p>
<p>Walters’ study of the processes underlying how the brain merges two
or more languages into a single utterance is informed by recent brain
imaging of bilinguals.</p>
<p>One of his focuses is “codeswitching” –when a bilingual speaker
starts a sentence or word in one language and switches to the other.</p>
<p>“Codeswitching was once thought of as a random phenomenon but
actually it’s very systematic and occurs in sentences, phrases, and even
within words,” Walters tells ISRAEL21c.</p>
<p>An English-Hebrew bilingual child might tell her sister “<em>muzi</em>,” merging the English word “move” with the Hebrew “<em>zuzi.</em>”</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_89787" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignright">
<img class="gmail-wp-image-89787 gmail-size-full" title="Prof. Joel Walters of Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem. Photo: courtesy" src="https://www.israel21c.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bilingual-WALTERS.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="1266">
<div class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Prof. Joel Walters of Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem. Photo: courtesy</div>
</div>
<p>Walters and two co-authors recently published in the <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367006918763135" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>International Journal of Bilingualism</em> </a>about
their study of Russian-Hebrew bilingual six-year-olds asked to retell a
Russian story to a Hebrew-speaking puppet, a Hebrew story to a
Russian-speaking puppet and a codeswitched story to a bilingual puppet.</p>
<p>The children were also asked to respond to conversational questions
asked in Russian, Hebrew and codeswitched speech about holidays and
activities at home and in preschool.</p>
<p>In both tasks, the children did more codeswitching from Russian to
Hebrew, “because that’s the language of school and street and that’s the
language that will help them integrate socially.” However, in children
with impaired language development the directionality is not as
predictable, says Walters.</p>
<p>As Israeli researchers formulate better ways of evaluating and
treating bilingual children with DLD, Armon-Lotem is planning to
establish a global database of voice files sent from clinicians and
preschool teachers who work with bilingual children in different
language pairs. Data scientists at Bar-Ilan will use new methods in
machine learning and big data to better identify existing markers of DLD
and possibly find new markers.</p>
<p><strong>Am I Russian or Israeli?</strong></p>
<p>Carmit Altman of Bar-Ilan’s School Counseling & Child Development
Programs studies the social impact of growing up bilingual, looking at
family language policy — what language parents want their child to speak
and how they enforce that preference.</p>
<p>One of her group’s frequently cited studies, published in 2014,
examined the language policy of 65 Israeli families raising their
children in Russian. They found three main approaches: parents with a
strict policy of speaking only Russian at home; parents who don’t forbid
Hebrew at home and sometimes encourage it; and those who actively
promote both Hebrew and Russian at home for speaking and reading.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_90220" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignright">
<img class="gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-90220" title="Dr. Carmit Altman of the School Counseling & Child Development Programs, School of Education, Bar Ilan University. Photo: courtesy" src="https://www.israel21c.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/carmit-altman.jpg" alt="" width="1528" height="1908">
<div class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Dr. Carmit Altman of the School
Counseling & Child Development Programs, School of Education, Bar
Ilan University. Photo: courtesy</div>
</div>
<p>They predicted the strictest language policy would result in the best
performance in Russian but the middle group performed just as well.
Children from this group also showed an advantage in Hebrew in tasks
predictive of future Hebrew literacy skills. “In syntax, all the kids
did better in Hebrew than in Russian, with no group differences,” Altman
tells ISRAEL21c.</p>
<p>Her lab also studies how bilingual children and their parents
perceive their children’s language abilities, and their sociolinguistic
identity and preferences. They invented a “magic ladder” scale on which
preschoolers can attach happy and sad magnet faces to rate their
agreement with statements such as “I speak Hebrew well.”</p>
<p>Parents of both English-Hebrew and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children
think their children prefer Hebrew, but the kids say they prefer their
home language, Altman found. And while the kids consider themselves
hyphenated Israelis, their parents consider them totally Israeli.</p>
<p>There were differences in performance perception. “In Russian-Hebrew
families, both children and parents think the children perform similarly
in Russian and Hebrew. In English-Hebrew families, children feel they
perform better in English while parents think the children have similar
abilities in both languages,” says Altman.</p>
<p>In collaboration with Armon-Lotem, her group is developing tools to
help researchers understand these differences and to help preschool
teachers detect which bilingual children may need a DLD evaluation.</p>
<p><strong>Advantages of bilingualism</strong></p>
<p>The ability to speak more than one language is widely accepted as
beneficial in ways from the practical (business, academics, travel) to
the medical (possibly delaying symptoms of dementia).</p>
<p>When Altman was doing a post-doc in New York, she and her husband
spoke Hebrew to their children at home. She feels that raising kids
bilingually “is a gift you can give your child for life” and that
cross-generational communication is one strong motivation for doing so.</p>
<p>“Having more than one language and more than one culture is definitely a huge advantage in life,” agrees Armon-Lotem.</p>
<p>It is less clear whether bilingualism sharpens “executive functions”
such as shifting attention and inhibiting instructions, as was believed
in past decades.</p>
<p>“In one study we found that English-Hebrew bilingual children with
DLD show an advantage in executive function over monolingual children
with DLD,” says Armon-Lotem. “But we didn’t find the same in
Russian-Hebrew bilinguals. We might be able to find cognitive advantages
for certain populations at certain age ranges and within certain
tasks.”</p>
<p>She and her colleagues are beginning to study bilingualism in
children with autism and Down syndrome; and will provide tools to help
bilingual preschool children, including Eritrean asylum-seekers in
Jerusalem, tell coherent stories in Hebrew and their home language.</p>
<p>A conference on the scientific and societal contribution of research
in multicultural and multilingual communities is planned (in English) on
June 4-6, 2018, to launch the Israeli branch of Bilingualism Matters at
Bar-Ilan University. For information, click <a href="http://www.bilingualism-matters.ppls.ed.ac.uk/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">here</a>. </p></div></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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