6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education

NPR:

Brains, brains, brains. One thing we’ve learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings.

But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. “In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,” says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

…

Today’s scholars, like Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto, now say that research was “deeply flawed.”

“Earlier research looked at socially disadvantaged groups,” agrees Antonella Sorace at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. “This has been completely contradicted by recent research” that compares more similar groups to each other.

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