As Quebec tightens regulations around student eligibility for education in English or other languages, the proportion of anglophone and allophone students—those whose home language is neither English nor French—attending French schools in the province has shot up. According to recent data from the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), 32 per cent of anglophone students and 92 per cent of allophone students are enrolled in schools where the primary language of instruction is French. These numbers are up from 18 per cent and 79 per cent in 2000. 

With such a high proportion of students going through the school system in their second or third language, researchers are wondering how kids cognitively handle this experience. 

Gigi Luk, a professor in McGill’s Faculty of Education, has been tackling this issue in the context of Spanish-English bilingualism in Massachusetts. Her recent paper, published in collaboration with scholars from Harvard and the University of California, investigates differences in brain activity between English monolingual students and Spanish-English bilingual students when watching a pre-recorded science lecture in English. 

As Luk explained, the study is unique in how closely it replicates natural classroom-style learning. 

“In this particular study, it’s very special, because we developed the videos from scratch using curriculum material in Massachusetts, and we actually used those materials to write a script and then have a teacher help us turn that script into something she would actually say in a classroom,” Luk said in an interview with The Tribune. 

Nonetheless, students didn’t quite have a normal classroom experience: In Luk’s study, they were watching the lectures from within an fMRI machine. 

“Nothing is natural when you’re in an MRI scanner, I’m not going to lie,” Luk joked. 

But the fMRI allowed Luk to dig deeper into what was really going on in students’ minds when they were learning in a way that other methods like questionnaires and assessments couldn’t. 

What they found was that the same areas of the brain were lighting up for both categories of students, but when they looked more closely, there were some key differences. Using functional connectivity analysis—a technique that looks at how the activity in different regions is correlated with activity in a chosen “seed” region—they were able to uncover how the bilingual students’ minds were behaving differently. 

“The general finding is that, for children who speak Spanish as a first language, but listening to the video in English, we see largely similar brain area. So it’s not like they’re using completely different brain regions, but in fact they have more diffused and larger networks compared to the functional connectivity pattern in children who only speak one language,” Luk explained. 

What this essentially means is that the Spanish-speaking students were putting more effort, and more different types of effort, into learning the same material as the English-speaking students. 

“When you’re listening to lectures in a language that maybe you’re still developing, maybe there’s vocabulary that you don’t understand, or maybe there are sentence structures that are too long to keep track of,” Luk speculated. “We don’t know exactly what it is, because our study does not allow us to answer those questions, but the task of listening to this lecture was harder for them.”

Interestingly, the researchers also administered several tests to assess the students’ general language abilities in both Spanish and English. They found that, for the Spanish-speaking students, performance in English and Spanish was correlated, so if they scored higher on the Spanish language assessment, they were likely to do better in English as well. 

“Learning two languages is not like a seesaw, where one is better, so the other has to go down,” Luk explained. “The human brain is incredibly plastic, and when we learn multiple languages, they help each other out, rather than cancelling each other out.”

Moving forward, Luk plans to conduct an extension of this study with French-English bilingual participants in Montreal, investigating whether these results hold true in an environment where balanced bilingualism is much more common and the linguistic context is very different.