Differenciated linguistic and metalinguistic skills in a bilingual learning curriculum

Abstract

The present paper adds to the bilingualism research by presenting data from an investigation involving Brazilian children who have learned English at a bilingual school, from the age of six onwards. The main goal was to investigate whether the linguistic and metalinguistic benefits normally attested for bilinguals with advanced proficiency would also be identified in a group of children that is only exposed to a second language in a formal context, for a total of 10 hours a week. In order to do that, we compared the production of passive sentences in Portuguese between the bilingual children and a group of monolingual speakers of Portuguese using a production task, in which children were required to create sentences by looking at pictures. Results indicate that the bilingual children produced a larger number of passive structures than the monolingual children, thus revealing differentiated metalinguistic skills as well as more cognitive control of linguistic processes. These data also corroborate the view that metalinguistic awareness and selective attention, which are skills normally more developed in individuals from bilingual families/ communities also apply to the children that use two linguistic codes to build knowledge, that is, children studying in bilingual curricula.