Ecological Factors In Bilingual Development

Like the majority of developmental studies, studies on the development of bilingualism (BL) has also recognized the importance of individual-environment interaction in the development of bilingual abilities. Factors ranging from personal characteristic, such as age and gender, family members and peers, social structure, up to popular culture can affect the outcome of individuals’development; however, understandably, in most researches, due to the difficulty of controlling and dealing with all such factors, they are excluded from analyses, resulting in the less conclusive results. Thus, now that there are fair amounts of research on various aspects of bilingual development, it is perhaps time to ask broader questions about the way those factors contributes to the observed variations. Ecological theory, according to which the mutual interaction of an individual with his/her context takes place under four levels of intertwined environmental influences, has been shown to be a successful developmental model and it would be an appropriate framework to take to make a better understanding of individuals’ development of language. This thesis would be a holistic review based on such an approach, starting with the introduction of ecological theory and language; next, after defining different types of bilingualism and bilingual education (BE), some myths surrounding these issues will be discussed, and then some actual findings and facts about the difference of bilinguals and monolinguals will be revealed. As discussed in this paper, many well established studies have pointed out the reasons leading to the existence of such myths, and have shown and supported the long lasting advantages of bilingualism over individuals’ language and cognitive development. The rest of the paper then, beyond the simple idea of whether bilingualism is good or bad, attends to how different factors interact with BL/BE at each level of person-context interaction; following by a summary and conclusion about the set of individual and contextual conditions that apparently enhance the advantages of bilingualism in a holistic view. Finally, paper ends with some recommendations and calls upon more comprehensive researches for the future in further areas that currently lack sufficient empirical finding in the literature.