Multilingualism as Cultural Capital?

Study of Studies

Donna L. Confere

Objectives

• To determine if there is a correlation between multilingualism and cognitive ability.

• To determine if multilingualism translates into higher grades and greater academic achievement.

• To determine if the number of languages in which a person has achieved proficiency impacts their economic advancement, stability, and status.

Cultural Capital

• Pierre Bourdieu (1986) The Forms of Capital:

• Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee (241-258).

Multilingualism and Cognition

Shift in research in the 1960s to 1980s:

Multilingual strengths in childhood:

• Flexibility

• Good at substitution

• Use of semantic cues

• Metalinguistic awareness

• Making corrections

Multilingual strengths in adulthood:

• Comparison of language rules

• Cognitive reserve

• Memory

• Abstract thinking

• Greater attention

Multilingualism and Education Outcomes

Schooling

• Contradictory studies related to grade point average (GPA).

• Interpersonal communication

• Conflict resolution

• Educational attainment questions

• Word choice

• Code switching

• Memory, abstract thinking, & attention

Multilingualism and Economic Status

Globalisation

Advantages

• Multilingualism accepted

• Job market

• Promotes self-efficacy

Disadvantages• Minority and tribal

languages

• Impact on elderly, poor and immigrants

• Dialect and “high” form of a language

Multilingualism as Cultural Capital

Possibilities• Language immersion

programs

• Focus on literacy

• Multilingualism and multicultural values

Impediments• Political power of

particular languages

• Immigration and prejudice

• Lack of focused curriculum on formal language

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