Literature Review: Multilingualism

Redick Dun

Writing 2: Academic Writing

May 24, 2021

 It has long been suggested that children raised multilingually would gain advantages

compared to other monolingual children. However, many parents or caregivers, have also

been wondering whether they should raise their children multilingually and also how to

do so. Researchers from different fields have conducted numerous experiments and

studies, trying to answer these questions, but the results are not accessible enough to the

public, mainly because they are usually reported in peer-reviewed journals. Individuals

are more likely to receive information from newspaper articles and YouTube videos,

which are much easier to read or watch; however, it is also possible that these

non-academic sources are not supported by theories and evidence, and so spreading the

wrong or misleading information. In this literature review, both academic and

non-academic sources are examined in a comprehensive perspective to emphasize how

each source helps the audiences respond to specific issues, which include but are not

limited to: what is the most effective method to raise a multilingual child, and is it in fact

worth to do so. A total of five sources as a whole, after analysis, should serve to convince

the general crowd that the most effective way to raise multilingual children is to expose

them to a multilingual environment. As a result, multilingual children do benefit from, for

instance, demonstrating better problem-solving and communication skills in later stages

of their life.

"Monolingual, Bilingual, Trilingual: Infants' Language Experience Influences the

Development of a Word-Learning Heuristic" is a peer-reviewed journal written by Krista

Byers-Heinlein and Janet Werker. The authors argue that the development of

disambiguation is mainly due to language experience, and their goal of writing this article

is to share the study result with other psychologists or anyone who is interested in
psychological research. In the article, there are three main elements: a well-developed

hypothesis, the experiment procedure, and the statistics. These three elements are all

essential to a psychology discipline peer-reviewed journal, and the authors clearly realize

that their potential audiences, desiring “a better understanding of the subject matter”, are

expecting to see these elements presented in a reasonable manner.1 In the article, the

authors first define the term ‘disambiguation’ as “a tendency to associate a novel noun

with a novel object” and then hypothesize that disambiguation is developed mainly due to

language experience.2 In the following sections, they describe the experiment procedure

in detail, present the datas in charts and graphs, and lastly use statistics to interpret the

datas. The authors also realize that most of their audiences have the ability to analyse and

elaborate on the raw data and statistics by themselves, so their priorities are to present the

study-related information as detailed as possible and to avoid being opinionated and

zealous in earning “(their) audience’s consideration of (their) perspective.”3 In the last

section of the article, the authors only summarize the study and give suggestions for

further research. The article’s credibility is granted by the authors presenting information

in a specific genre (peer-reviewed journal) style and being unbiased, but it also has two

major constraints because of the genre style. The first constraint is that no absolutely

certain conclusion can be made in a peer-reviewed journal, as “the evidence or the claim”

is always “open to doubt.”4 Phrases such as ‘suggests’ and ‘indicates’ are frequently used

in the article, which is a sign of the authors being rigorous and skeptical about the

1
Irvin, L. Lennie. “What Is “Academic” Writing?” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, Parlor
Press, 2010.
2
Byers-Heinlein, Krista and Janet F. Werker. "Monolingual, Bilingual, Trilingual: Infants' Language
Experience Influences the Development of a Word-Learning Heuristic." Developmental Science 12, no. 5
(09, 2009): 815-823.
3
Irvin, L. Lennie. “What Is “Academic” Writing?” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, Parlor
Press, 2010.
4
Johnson, Julie. “Qualifiers, Intensifiers, and ‘Hedging’”, Writing 2, 2021.
causational relations among variables. However, average people will prefer to see

confident claims and useful suggestions like what is the correct multilingual parenting

style, being made at the end of the article rather than to see a summary conclusion. The

second constraint is that a peer-reviewed journal should only focus on one and only one

hypothesis. Therefore, as the authors are trying to generalize a conceptual theory that

they are initially interested in, they often fail to interpret and emphasize other statistics

which can be used to support a different theory. For instance, in the peer-reviewed

journal, the authors successfully use the datas to support the claim that the development

of disambiguation is mainly due to language experience, but Redick Dun, the author of

“Op-Ed: Teaching Languages? You could and you should”, uses the same set of datas to

suggest that “every parent or caregiver is capable of raising multilingual children.”5 The

peer-reviewed journal has great potential to propose multiple theories and make

applicational suggestions based on the findings, but because of the limitation of its genre,

it does not emphasize theories that can attract the public but only focuses on the

conceptual one. Therefore, because of its constraints, the article is not as accessible to the

public as it could have been.

One source that discusses the issue and at the same time attracts the public is a

YouTube video uploaded by a Youtube content creator named Multilingual Family. In the

video, one female speaker discusses how her husband and she, a couple speaking more

than six languages in total, have raised their children multilingually. As what the title of

the video “Tips for Raising Multilingual Babies in More Than Three Languages” means

literally, the speaker condenses her more than fifteen years parenting experience into a

ten minute video and gives her advice to other parents and caregivers who are also
5
Dun, Redick. “Op-Ed: Teaching Languages? You could and you should.” Writing 2, April 26, 2021.
interested in raising multilingual children. Advice includes but is not limited to: deciding

which language you want your children to learn and exposing your children to the chosen

languages environment.6 It is worth noting that the Youtube content creator probably has

not seen the published peer-reviewed journal. However, if she did, she would find her

second advice is closely related to the main hypothesis that is examined in the journal.

Both the creator of this YouTube video and Redick Dun are, either intentionally or

unintentionally, translating an existing work from one genre to another. Specifically, they

are extracting the most valuable concept from a 12-15 pages academic article and

expressing it in a way in which the public can easily understand and apply it in daily life.

However, one major constraint of this YouTube video is that the advice being given is

only based on the speaker’s personal experience, so they are not well supported by

argument and evidence. One could question the generalizability of the advice, simply by

questioning how useful the advice is for a broader group of people or situations. For

instance, according to the speaker, her husband and she are fluent in speaking more than

six languages, but not all couples in every family are exactly the same; things could vary

if other parents or caregivers speak different languages or if their degrees of fluency are

different. Therefore, I consider this YouTube video to be a source that has high

accessibility to the public but low credibility.

There are sources that not only address the same topic, but also find a balance

between accessibility and credibility. “Raising a Truly Bilingual Child”, written by Perri

Klass, is a newspaper article published in The New York Times. In the article, the author

illustrates what parents and caregivers should do if they expect their children to be

multilingual, but at the same time, she also cites academic articles from different
6
Multilingual Family. “Tips for Raising Multilingual Babies...” YouTube video, 17:56. June 13, 2020.
disciplines and uses the findings to support her arguments. For instance, she claims that

“early exposure to more than one language can confer certain advantages”7 in the

beginning of the article, which implies that children being exposed to a

multiple-languages environment will learn additional languages better and faster; right

after the claim, she includes a link which can direct readers to one of her previous

newspaper articles. On the other hand, she also emphasizes why it is not an easy task to

raise multilingual children, which is because “acquiring a language requires massive

exposure to that language.”8 In other words, for a child to be fluent in a language, he or

she should be exposed to a language-specified environment, which can be a challenging

task to non-multilingual parents or caregivers. In order to show the rationale behind the

argument, she directly quotes from a 2015 psychology discipline review article. Not

surprisingly, she includes a link which directs readers to the peer-reviewed article for

reference. In most cases, the author should have determined “what the essay (article)

might look like” before starting writing this article.9 Perri Klass must have realized that

supporting her argument with academic sources increases the chance of convincing

readers. At the same time, she would not be concerned about the scope of her audience.

In 2020, approximately 70 million unique people visited The New York Times website

and readed articles every month, and the chance of people reading her article is extremely

high.10 The arguments are well supported and the article is exposed to the general crowd,

giving this newspaper article both high credibility and high accessibility to the public.

7
Klass, Perri. “Raising a Truly Bilingual Child.” The New York Times, July 10, 2017.
8
Klass, Perri. “Raising a Truly Bilingual Child.” The New York Times, July 10, 2017.
9
Dirk, Kerry, “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, edited by
Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 249-262. Parlor Press, 2010.
10
Watson, Amy, “Weekday circulation of The New York Times from 2000 to 2020,” Statista, Apr 29, 2021.
 Three sources discussed above support the hypothesis that the most effective way to

raise multilingual children is to expose them to a multilingual environment. However, the

benefit of doing so remains unexplained. Another newspaper article, which is also

published in The New York Times, addresses the latter issue. In “The Superior Social

Skills of Bilinguals”, the author Katherine Kinzler claims that the advantages of being

bilingual include but are not limited to: demonstrating “better problem-solving skills” and

“better communication skills.”11 Specifically, she claims that bilingual children are better

than monolingual children at performing communicational tasks mainly because

“multilingual exposure facilitates the basic skills of interpersonal understanding.”12 It is

worth noting that the author is also a Psychology Professor at the University of Chicago,

and in the article, she only cites one academic article to support her argument, in which

the academic article is also written and published by herself. She uses the academic

article as a reference to present a follow-up study conducted by her colleagues and her.

Based on the study results, the author then claims that babies, as early as 14- to

16-month-old, “will understand the importance of adopting another’s perspective for

communication” if they have been exposed to a second language.13 Because the article is

published in The New York Times and the author is referring to her own study, this

newspaper article is considered to have both high accessibility to the public and high

credibility. However, the article still fails to give a real life example of how exactly being

exposed to a multilingual languages environment will benefit the children in specific

tasks.

11
Kinzler, Katherine. “The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals.” The New York Times, March 11, 2016,
12
Kinzler, Katherine. “The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals.” The New York Times, March 11, 2016,
13
Kinzler, Katherine. “The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals.” The New York Times, March 11, 2016,
 Katherine Kinzler could address the shortcoming of her Op-ed newspaper article by

citing another peer-reviewed article “Bilingual Two-Way Immersion Programs Benefit

Academic Achievement”. In the peer-reviewed article, the authors examine how

bilingualism positively affects bilingual children’s reading and math skills. Specifically,

they introduce the two-way immersion (TWI) program to the audience, in which the

program is an educational model that integrates native English speakers and native

speakers of another language. After both minority-language and majority-language

students have participated in the TWI program and studied together for a period of time,

their performances on reading and solving mathematical tasks are compared to those of

their peers. Based on the result, the authors conclude that bilingual exposure, as

participating in bilingual two-way immersion programs in this case, may “enhance

reading and math skills in both minority-language and majority-language elementary

school children.”14 It is valuable to discuss this academic source in the literature review,

not only because it emphasizes the potential benefits of practicing multilingualism and

discusses the benefits in the education discipline, but also because it analyzes a new

range of people, in which the previous articles focus on infants, and this academic article

primarily focuses on elementary school children. It implies that multilingualism is

applicable throughout different stages of development, and in most situations children are

benefiting from multilingual exposure.

Each article contributes to the discussion of multilingualism from a different

perspective, but each of them has their own constraints. This literature review brings five

sources, including both non-academic and academic ones, together to examine them in a

14
Marian, Viorica, Anthony Shook, and Scott R Schroeder. "Bilingual Two-Way Immersion Programs
Benefit Academic Achievement." Bilingual Research Journal 36, no. 2 (2013): 167-86.
comprehensive perspective. For anyone who is interested in the conversation of

multilingualism, after reading this literature review, they will realize that practicing

multilingualism and raising multilingual children are not tasks that cannot be done; for

most parents and caregivers, the most effective way should be to expose their children to

a multilingual environment; no matter how things would vary from family to family, it is

safe to claim that multilingual children are benefiting from practicing multilingualism.
 Bibliography

Byers-Heinlein, Krista and Janet F. Werker. "Monolingual, Bilingual, Trilingual: Infants'

Language Experience Influences the Development of a Word-Learning Heuristic."

Developmental Science 12, no. 5 (09, 2009): 815-823.

Dirk, Kerry, “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1,

edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 249-262. Parlor Press, 2010.

Dun, Redick. “Op-Ed: Teaching Languages? You could and you should.” Writing 2, April

26, 2021.

Irvin, L. Lennie. “What Is “Academic” Writing?” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

Volume 1, Parlor Press, 2010.

Johnson, Julie. “Qualifiers, Intensifiers, and ‘Hedging’”, Writing 2, 2021.

Kinzler, Katherine. “The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals.” The New York Times,

March 11, 2016,

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/the-superior-social-skills-of

-bilinguals.html?searchResultPosition=2

Klass, Perri. “Raising a Truly Bilingual Child.” The New York Times, July 10, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/well/family/raising-a-truly-bilingual-child.h

tml

Multilingual Family. “Tips for Raising Multilingual Babies...” YouTube video, 17:56.

June 13, 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YLk_Icljds&t=318s
Marian, Viorica, Anthony Shook, and Scott R Schroeder. "Bilingual Two-Way Immersion

Programs Benefit Academic Achievement." Bilingual Research Journal 36, no. 2

(2013): 167-86.

Watson, Amy, “Weekday circulation of The New York Times from 2000 to 2020,”

Statista, Apr 29, 2021.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273503/average-paid-weekday-circulation-of-t

he-new-york-times/#:~:text=As%20one%20of%20the%20most,of%20controvers

y%20over%20the%20years.