Social Benefits of Bilingual Education

By now, you have probably already done some research on the benefits of bilingual education, however if you haven't, you have come to the right place! Receiving a bilingual education has some practical benefits for children, such as giving them a more global perspective and better job opportunities. Additionally, children's social skills also benefit from learning two languages.

One of the ways that a bilingual education affects children's social skills is through communication. A study done at the University of Chicago found that bilingual children are better at communicating than monolingual children. Through this study, researchers also found that multilingual children better understand the perspectives of others. These conclusions were reached after children were asked to pick the smallest car from a group. Monolingual children chose the smallest car out of the three, but multilingual children chose the smallest car of the ones that the adult could see. In making these choices, researchers noticed that multilingual children were taking into account the perspective of the adults before making their choices on which car to choose.

Another way in which bilingual education affects children's social and communication skills is through increasing their communicative sensitivity. This is a specific level of awareness about what is going on in any particular language interaction. Children learning two languages have a higher sense of this sensitivity because they often have to pick up cues of when to change languages. Multilingual children also have to constantly be thinking about who speaks what language, who understands what language, as well as times and places in which different languages are spoken. Through these different thought processes, multilingual children become more aware of their surroundings, and therefore subconsciously improve their communication and social skills.

To see more about the study from the University of Chicago read, The Exposure Advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication.