Education: Languages

Lord Broers Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers]

I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for bringing our attention back to this vital subject. I am speaking today because I believe that knowledge of more than one language enhances one’s breadth of outlook and intellectual acuity, especially for those trained narrowly as scientists and engineers. It is not only the obvious practical benefits of being able to work with and to operate in other countries that are of great importance, but the effect that it has on one’s intellectual capability.

I wish to share with the House what I learnt following a BBC World Service programme a couple of weeks ago. Some noble Lords may have heard the programme or know about the work described, which is relevant to this debate. Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA was talking about the work of Professor Ellen Bialystok of York University, Toronto, who has shown that bilingualism gives children a distinct cognitive advantage over their monolingual peers. She has found that bilingual children outperform monolingual children on tasks involving executive control. These comprise the cognitive processes that allow for abstract thinking, planning and initiating and inhibiting actions. Three separate experiments on six year-old students demonstrated that children who routinely spoke more than one language could better focus on pertinent information and suppress their attention to a distracting or irrelevant item. Her surprising finding was that bilingual children performed better than monolingual children not only on the difficult condition that involved alternating between letters and numbers but also on the simple condition in which they just connected consecutive numbers.

Stimulated by her results with children, Professor Bialystok joined Dr Fergus Craik, a neuropsychologist at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, to go to the other end of the age scale and see whether similar effects were present in healthy adults. They looked at the records of 184 patients diagnosed with dementia, about half of whom were fluently bilingual, speaking two or more languages daily. It turned out that the onset of dementia was an average of 4.1 years later for the bilingual patients than for those with only one language. The theory is that bilingual people are constantly having to use their attentional control system, thereby increasing its capacity, which appears now to help to resist the effects of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Those findings fitted with evidence from post-mortem studies, which have shown that about a third of people with the physical symptoms of Alzheimer’s, such as amyloid plaques, had no cognitive impairment before they died, meaning that their brains somehow fought off the disease. Perhaps there is hope for us monolinguists yet, but we will have to become fluent in another language. The Toronto scientists did not find these effects in those with a knowledge of a language but who were not fluently bilingual.

All this reinforces what I have long believed and what led me to work with Ann Dowling and Sarah Springman in the Cambridge University engineering department to set up the language programme for engineers, about which I spoke in the debate on this subject—also called by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins—last December. I am pleased to report that this programme remains popular, with almost 800 students participating this year. However, it would be even stronger if more students had studied languages in school.