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This whole idea of a bilingual brain is still, from my opinion, coming from a monolingual perspective in the sense that most of the world is bi- or m… - Nelson Flores
" "This whole idea of a bilingual brain is still, from my opinion, coming from a monolingual perspective in the sense that most of the world is bi- or multilingual. Why are we exceptionalizing the, quote, “bilingual” brain instead of the quote, “monolingual” brain to begin with? Why aren’t we saying, “What are the unique cognitive traits of monolingual people who are the minority of the population?” Maybe a bilingual brain is just a brain and it’s the monolingual brain that’s actually this weird thing that we need to study. Of course, I don’t actually believe that, but I feel like some of the discourse exceptionalizing bilingualism, when we reverse it and really think about, well, if we describe monolingualism in that way, that would be really strange. Yet, “bilingual” describes more of the world’s population than “monolingual.” What exactly are we doing there?
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About Nelson Flores
Nelson Flores studies how language and race intersect in bilingual education policies and practices in ways that are harmful to bilingual students of color. He is an Associate Professor in the Educational Linguistics Division at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Additional quotes by Nelson Flores
schools may like people to memorize vocabulary lists, but that’s a different argument, right? If, if what you’re saying is that these are the types of decontextualized language practices that they’re expected to be successful with in school, then that’s a different conversation. Because then I would argue, well, why are we using these decontextualized language practices in school, when we know that in the real-world that’s not how people actually use language. Maybe the problem isn’t that these particular students haven’t mastered a particular list of decontextualized vocabulary words. But rather, the fact that schools have decontextualized language from the practices in which they’re engaged in. Um, and I think that may be part of, – that would be a more interesting conversation, for me, than to look at these decontextualized vocabulary words.
I know that the way that standards are implemented are sometimes problematic, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with giving teachers some standards in terms of what students are expected to do at their grade level, right? Like, that’s a good thing to give teachers. but teachers who are instructing in languages other than English, oftentimes, don’t have even that to start with. And so, they’re kind of building things from scratch and constantly reinventing the wheel. and so I think that is something that could happen from a policy perspective.
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