Thursday 3 May 2018
Professor Ianthi Tsimpli was invited to give a Keynote talk by the Irish Research Network in Childhood Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Her talk explained how multilingualism can be an advantage for both language and cognition. Research on bilingual children in Europe and the US reveals cognitive advantages but also contradictory findings on the development of literacy (e.g. reading comprehension) skills in the majority language. In several countries of the Global South, multilingualism is the norm. The language(s) of education in countries like India, for example, may not be the first or home language of the school-going child. Her talk reported on some preliminary findings from a large-scale project in primary school children in India focusing on numeracy, mathematical reasoning and cognitive tasks with the purpose of understanding the role of language of education in contexts of severe socioeconomic deprivation.