The Impact of Bilingualism on Skills Development and Education

The diverse language profiles of learners have posed a critical challenge for education in many multilingual societies. Here we proposed a systematic research framework to address this issue. Within this framework, we reviewed and summarized the findings from several of our studies that examined the impact of bilingualism on teaching and learning in the context of Singapore from different perspectives using a variety of methods, including surveys, behavioural assessment, neurocognitive tasks, and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging). First, we demonstrated the diversity in bilinguals’ language profiles using a series of survey studies. Second, we discussed the possible impact of bilingualism on early education by considering various factors that might be associated with language learning and development. Third, we reviewed the existing neuroimaging evidence to delineate how language and reading were represented in the bilingual brain. Finally, we illustrated an ongoing project that employed a combination of multiple methods to investigate the impact of different script types on the neural reading networks for typical and atypical bilingual readers. Our studies have implications for other bilingual societies. Moreover, this chapter establishes the significance and importance of our thriving efforts in bilingual/multilingual research for the science and policy in education.