Bilingual superpowers

Gaining literacy in two languages at once creates lifelong benefits for children, writes linguist Hilary Smith.

 

I often think how lucky children are who are brought up speaking more than one language and don’t have to study to learn a second language.

By learning to speak two (or more) languages as young children, they gain the ”bilingual superpowers” of cognitive, social, and economic advantage.

However, it can be challenging for these children when they learn English for the first time at school, especially if they’re taught to read and write only in this new language. Because children are fast learners and want to fit in at school, they learn English quickly, but often never become literate in their home language.

Those of us who meet other languages later, as high school subjects, do have the benefit of already being able to read. Growing up in monolingual Pākehā Canterbury, I became hooked on languages at high school and went on to study, teach and research language and linguistics.

I found it straightfoward to build on my literacy ability when I studied (with varying levels of success) languages which use the same — or nearly the same — alphabet as English, such as French and German, and later te reo Māori. This foundation then allowed me to work out the different alphabet used in the Lao language when I lived in Laos, and some of the related Thai alphabet. I remember the feeling of triumph when I could spell out the letters “Coca Cola” on a billboard in Bangkok!

The ability to transfer skills in this way is because of the basic principle of literacy — that the sounds of a spoken language are represented by symbols on a page. This fundamental principle is not specific to one language, but is transferable to the writing system of other languages, whether they have alphabets like English, Lao or te reo Māori, or represent whole words or their parts, such as in Chinese languages.

The Canadian linguist Jim Cummins developed the influential “iceberg” metaphor in the 1970s to explain how bilingualism works in the brain. It used to be thought that each language was like a separate iceberg floating in the sea of our mind. But anyone who has learned more than one language knows that they’re not separate — they’re more like different tips above the surface of the same underwater “language iceberg.” When I search my brain for how to say a little bit in te reo Māori, up pops ein bisschen, still lurking in my brain from my high school German classes.

So, what about literacy in two languages? An increasing body of international research evidence is showing that, as well as language-specific skills, the “common underlying proficiency” of the language iceberg also works with reading and writing. This is not just a conscious skill, such as when I studied other languages as a teenager or adult, but a subconscious ability reflecting how our brains work with that basic principle of literacy.

Some of the recent discussion about the changes to te reo Māori in primary school books assumes that it’s confusing for children to learn two spelling systems at the same time. At first this may seem to be obvious, especially when one of the languages is the complicated and confusing English spelling system. But their subconscious ability means that children can cope, even thrive.

My own research has confirmed this capacity. A few years ago, I was part of a team researching the effects of a “book flood” in Papua New Guinea primary schools. “Floods” of large numbers of high interest books in classrooms with low resources have been shown to result in improvements across the curriculum.

There are an amazing 700 local languages in PNG, as well as Tok Pisin (a pidgin based on English) and English. The school policies were to teach only in English. The126 project book titles that “flooded” each of the classrooms were all culturally relevant, but written only in English.

The children were tested in both English and Tok Pisin, and we found that there was a correlation between their reading and writing ability in both languages. So, even though children were taught only in English, there was no evidence that they were confused by two different spelling systems. Instead, the evidence showed that one language supported the other — giving children bilingual superpowers.

The Papua New Guinea project was incidental biliteracy learning. However, in the US, there are now some explicit approaches to biliteracy being used for teaching children in Spanish and English. Elementary school children are taught to compare and contrast the sounds and writing systems of both languages, strengthening their spoken ability in both languages, and building their biliteracy.

In Aotearoa, a recent study using a similar approach with primary school children in te reo Māori and English found that the programme supported literacy improvements in both languages.

There is no doubt that some children need a very clearly organised approach to learning to read, which is why the International Dyslexia Society developed (and trademarked) the Structured Literacy approach to teaching reading and writing.

However, if we focus on an English-only approach, we accelerate the loss of children’s home languages.

Many of those children who learn English and want to “fit in” at school end up losing their home languages by the time they leave high school. In my years of listening to people who have lost their home language, I have heard them always express regret.

Usually, this is because their parents didn’t know how to support their children’s bilingualism, although sometimes parents were told by teachers that they should switch to using English only, even at home.

As well as diminishing the value of other languages, requiring all children to go through the same rigid lock-step process of learning to read also risks turning children off the joy of reading. An extreme example would be returning to the Victorian-era readers, which were written entirely with two-letter words: “I am on an ox. Lo! It is my ox.”

That is surely unlikely, but some of the “decodable readers” in current use are only one step beyond that, and teachers tell me they can become boring for the children.

 

In New South Wales, I am part of a team supporting the revival of Gamilaraay, one of Australia’s more than 250 Indigenous languages, where we are currently exploring a bilingual and biliteracy approach. We have developed “alphabet” names for the sounds of Gamilaraay and are trialling our programme with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in over 70 early childhood centres on Gamilaraay lands. We’re also writing and translating books, but there is a long way to go to provide enough material for children to become fluent readers.

Back home, I’m planning a project with new settler school children in Te Papāioea/Palmerston North, trying out the structured methods of comparing two languages. I’m keen to see if we can develop tools which teachers can use to support the reading and writing development of children speaking both English and one or more of the other 170-plus languages spoken in Aotearoa.

We also need to give strong messages of support to whānau. We can start with Ten tips for using your language at home which I worked on with community language experts.

The te reo Māori version starts “Kōrerotia tō reo i ngā wā katoa, me akiaki hoki tō whānau ki te kōrero.” (Speak your language as much as possible, and encourage everyone in your family to speak as much as they can). We need to translate and promote it in as many languages as we can. And then we need to find as many ways as possible to make high interest books available for children in their languages as well as English.

We should not underestimate the capacity of our children’s brains, but should be celebrating and supporting all the benefits of their potential bilingual superpowers.

 

Dr Hilary Smith MNZM is an applied linguist based in Te Papāioea/Palmerston North. She spent seven years in English language teaching with VSA (Te Tūao Tāwāhi Volunteer Service Abroad) in Tonga, Papua New Guinea and Laos. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at Massey University and Honorary Affiliate of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University. She is the current president of ALANZ (Applied Linguistics in Aotearoa New Zealand) and co-convenor of the Languages Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand.

E-Tangata, 2025