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Issues in Promoting Multilingualism Teaching – Learning – Assessment Edited by Hanna Komorowska Issues in Promoting Multilingualism Teaching – Learning – Assessment Edited by Hanna Komorowska Foundation for the Development of the Education SystemWarsaw 2011 Title Issues in Promoting Multilingualism Teaching – Learning – Assessment Editor Prof. Dr. Hanna Komorowska Reviewer Prof. Dr. Jerzy Zybert Chief Managing Editors Jan Andrzej Nicał, Magdalena Machcińska Editing Zofia Janowska Graphic design Michał Gołaś Graphic design, typesetting and composition Piotr Konopka Printing TOPDRUK Publisher Foundation for the Development of the Education System (FRSE) National Agency for the Lifelong Learning Programme ul. Mokotowska 43 00-551 Warszawa e-mail: [email protected] www.frse.org.pl European Language Label www.ell.org.pl ISBN 978-83-62634-18-4 The publication was funded with the support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme. The European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.

Free copy Michał B. Paradowski MULTILINGUALISM – ASSESSING BENEfITS 1. Introduction It is no accident that a significant portion of all developmental research has been devoted to issues of language acquisition and linguistic performance (Bialystok 2007: 393) . Nor that a sizeable share of the K-12 curriculum is being dedicated to language arts. On the one hand, language is ‘a cognitive instrument [which] provides access to concepts and meanings, the logical system for problem solving, and creates the organizational basis for knowledge’ ( ibid.) . On the other, it is ‘a social tool [whereby] human interactions occur, social position is determined, and educational opportunities are defined’ . It is not only a system of symbols registering categorisation of the world and human creation, but also an instrument used to alter reality – suffice it to recall the newspeak of propaganda employed by totalitarian systems on the one hand, and recommendations to use the ‘language of benefits’ and ‘positive thinking’ in theories of marketing and psychology on the other . Words – created, used, supplanted with new ones – lie at the foundations of ideologies, religions, legal systems and cultural markets (Paradowski et al. 20 0 9) .

In countries such as Poland, marked by very high linguistic homogeneity, with only very few geographically isolated ethnolinguistic ‘attractions’ such as the Kashubians, Lemkos, Silesians or Górale, we got used to the uniform linguistic landscape . Many of us take it for granted, oblivious of the fact that in much of the world schools may be cauldrons of regional dialects, vernaculars can be used with family and friends, while bureaucratic exchanges may be carried out in yet another, ‘official’ language – a situation Michał B. Paradowski 332 that the locals will accept without batting an eyelid . Multilingualism is the natural potential available to every normal human being rather than an unusual exception; monolingual speakers are but the consequence of environmental factors which have failed to provide the opportunity to learn another language:

A theory purporting to account for universal language learnability cannot be considered adequate if it excludes the non-monolingual speakers of this world.

(Satterfield 1999: 137) Multilingualism need not even require the ability to speak unrelated languages; a user of e .g . the ‘literary’ and a vernacular / dialectal variety is already multicompetent . At the same time, it does not require per fect fluency in all the languages at one’s command; setting the boundary would probably be a mission impossible . We might quote here Byram (1997), according to whose theory of intercultural competence fully mastering a TL is not advisable, as this causes the speaker to lose his/her original perspective .

Ironically and paradoxically, it has been in largely monolingual environments that researchers seemed most concerned with bilingualism and that exhibited the most fervent discussion about the consequences of a multilingual experience (Bialystok 2007: 394). 2. Educational ramifications of bilingualism – the shifts in approaches Bilingualism has enjoyed a marked surge in research concentration over the past decade, but it first attracted the attention of psychologists in the 1920s, when underlying the interest was the desire to understand why bilinguals perform poorer at school than their monolingual peers (May et al. 2004). Because in many countries, particularly English-speaking ones, bilingualism typically ‘affected’ immigrants or inhabitants of economically backward rural regions (such as Welshmen in Great Britain or Francophones in Canada; Wodniecka 2007), poor, deprived of rigorous education, and plying the simplest of trades – while their monolingual peers were typically raised in families of higher socioeconomic status – it came as no surprise that incipient research, which completely ignored these socioeconomic factors, would most of the time work out to the disadvantage of the former, not extending beyond corroborating the prevalent pernicious stereotypes Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits333 that being bilingual equalled being a second-class citizen .

T o make matters worse, the intelligence tests used in these studies were primarily phrased in the language that was more convenient for the researchers, which did not necessarily accommodate the testees (Wodniecka op. cit.) .

It was only with Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert ’s seminal 1962 study that this prevailing unfavourable outlook on the mental abilities of bilinguals was reversed . Surprisingly at the time, in a comparison of two carefully selected groups of children, the bilingual ones significantly outperformed monolinguals on the majority of both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests . In the boom of studies that followed, bilinguals have been found to outscore individuals speaking only one language on a variety of tasks measuring flexibility in thinking and effectiveness of attention, and focusing on one thing while ignoring others . 3. Bilingual speakers’ verbal abilities One difference between the child who grew up bilingual and the post-pubescent acquirer of another language is the lag time in switching between languages, which implies differences in the speed of access of the relevant linguistic representations. Some researchers (e.g. Kuhl 2004) also believe that children who have not been exposed to more than one language by the age of one, lose the ability to distinguish between the phonemes of their vernacular and other languages, hypothesising that from then on the brain hones in on sounds of the mother tongue and battles against alien pronunciations . Barring these considerations, many of the findings from studies on ‘naturalistic’ bilinguals have been confirmed by research focusing on learners in the foreign language classroom context .

Just as ‘it is through comparison that one becomes aware of one’s own culture, much of which is unconscious and taken-for-granted’ (Byram 1997: 113), children and older persons learning foreign languages have been demonstrated to have enhanced metalingual abilities (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow 1990; Ewert 2006, 2008), that is, a keener awareness of the language’s meaning and structure (manifested for instance in the detection of anomalous sentences (Bialystok 2001) or judging how many words there are in a sentence, whatever the practical utility of this skill) .

Foreign language learning ‘enhances children’s understanding of how language itself works and their ability to manipulate language in the Michał B. Paradowski 334 service of thinking and problem solving’ (Cummins 1981), for instance, they develop more grammatical awareness (Kemp 2001) and are more capable of separating meaning from form (Ben Zeev 1977; Bialystok 1986) . They exhibit a markedly better sensitivity to, and perception and understanding of, their mother tongue, tending to use new vocabulary more accurately because – knowing that there exists more than one word for everything they know – they pay more attention to word meanings (Baker 2000) . They thus give credence to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1821) conviction that ‘Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen’ [‘Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own’] .

Bilinguals also display demonstrably better proficiency and accuracy (e .g .

Bastian 1980; Dumas 1999; Van de Craen et al. 2006; Ewert 2008), an increase in expressive L1 oral productivity (Nespor 1969) and stylistically more complex writing (Kecskes & Papp 2000), ostensibly regardless of race, gender, or academic level . One speculative explanation is that multilingual children receive more linguistic input, which requires them to undertake a greater amount of language analysis .

Foreign language study, use and proficiency have also been shown to significantly positively correlate with faster acquisition of reading (Yelland et al. 1993) and improved reading scores (for children of both average and below average intelligence, see e .g . Horstmann 1980; Garfinkel & Tabor 1991; Hong & Leavell 2006) . This linear correlation (though a note should be made at this point that mere correlation need not always imply causation) has been explained by bilinguals’ increased ability to effectively apply more reading strategies due to their greater experience in language learning (and reading in different languages; Nayak et al. 19 9 0) .

Also, contrary to the fear that bilingual children may be ‘late talkers’, some studies (cf . Johnson et al. 1963; Kosmidis 2006) have shown that they develop a greater vocabulary size over age, including their L1 (particularly when the language studied had Latinate roots; Masciantonio 1977; but see Oller & Eilers (2002) for a disparate view) .

More complex linguistic knowledge and higher language awareness of bilinguals translate into better-developed language-learning capacities, including use of significantly more grammar learning strategies (Kemp 2007) . Foreign language practice both reinforces the L1 content of the general classroom (Curtain & Dahlberg 2004) and makes learning further languages quicker and more efficient than for hitherto monolingual peers (Cummins 1981), particularly in institutionalised learning contexts (Wolff Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits335 2006) . Additionally, participants with knowledge of more than two languages report lower levels of communicative anxiety and foreign language anxiety from L1 to L4 (Dewaele et al. 2008; but see Dewaele (2007) for a different result) . One possible explanation why tri- and quadrilinguals are generally less anxious than bilinguals when speaking is that as a consequence of their multilingualism, they have become better communicators (cf . Baker 2000) and their self-confidence – as well as self-perceived competence – has grown accordingly (Dewaele 2007: 404).

4. Bilinguals’ nonverbal skills Charlemagne (c. 742–814 A.D.), King of the Franks, is known to have claimed that ‘to have another language is to possess a second soul’ . And, indeed, the advantages that multilinguals exhibit over monolinguals are not restricted exclusively to the linguistic domain, but extend outside the area of language, and the substantial long-lived cognitive, social, personal, academic, and professional benefits of enrichment bilingual contexts have been well documented (Thomas & Collier 1998) .

Language processing and cognitive development proceed differently in monolinguals and bilinguals in a number of ways . Psycholinguistic research has shown that in bilinguals, all known languages (and lemmas) are always active to some degree . It seems that, preparing an utterance in one language, a bilingual never ‘switches off ’ the others . The phenomena of code mixing and code switching (e .g . Muysken 2000) further imply that languages are by no means stored as clearly delineated, isolated entities, but are permeable and interconnected . A bilingual is not the sum of two complete or incomplete monolinguals; s/he rather has a specific linguistic configuration characterised by the constant interaction and co-extistence of the two languages involved. (Herdina & Jessner 2002: 59) Learning another language is not just adding a separate annex to an already existing construct, but it affects different aspects of the user’s cognitive structure in subtle ways .

Once, Latin used to be taught as an academic exercise or mental gymnastics with the aim of cognitive training . Over the past five decades, a growing body of research has demonstrated that owing to the continual mental exercise involved in speaking two or more languages, bilinguals more precociously than monolinguals develop several cognitive abilities, ranging Michał B. Paradowski 336 from creativity, cognitive flexibility, better reasoning and problem solving skills to perceptual disembedding . Peal and Lambert (1962), accounting for the observed advantage in bilingual children, posited that they are better at concept formation, find it easier to break free of well-trodden patterns of thought and to offer non-standard solutions to problems . Learning multiple languages early on leads children to realise that there exists more than one way of expressing something, and – consequently – more than one way to look at a problem, eventually training them in ‘scan[ning] rapidly a host of possible solutions’ (Lambert 1977: 15) .

The advantage of speaking another language has been proven not only in naturalistic bilinguals, but also in foreign language learners, who display consistent improved performance over their monoglot schoolmates in core subject areas on standardised verbal and nonverbal tests (for an overview see Paradowski 2008), particularly in problem-solving and math exercises (Rafferty 1986; Andrade et al. 1989; Greene 1997; Van de Craen et al. 20 0 6) .

In one experiment (Armstrong & Rogers 1997), after one term of 90-minute weekly language study, one experimental group actually received 1 .5 fewer hours of math instruction per week and still outperformed controls .

Bilingual speakers also develop better spatial abilities (Diaz 1983) .

Moreover, it has been demonstrated that learners who make the greatest proportional gains owing to participation in foreign language programmes are students of average intelligence, who may have been struggling in other subjects, and who thanks to extended FL study gain ‘a kind of enrichment they may not be getting from other studies or experiences’ (Garfinkel & Tabor 1991) . Thus, when pupils not accustomed to success in school excel in language study, it results in their developing a significantly higher self- concept and self-esteem (Masciantonio 1977; Andrade et al. 1989; Saunders 1998), which helps them reverse underachievement and may motivate to alter the performance trajectory also in other subjects .

Enhanced cognitive flexibility also means moderated perseveration, i .e . reduced difficulty in quickly switching between perspectives, tasks or different task criteria (e .g . from matching objects by colour to matching by shape or location in the Simon task, where reaction times increase when the location of the stimulus is incongruous with that of the button to be pressed) and ignoring distractions (Bialystok 2001; Bialystok & Shapero 2005; Bialystok et al. 2004, 2005; Mezzacappa 2004; Yang 2004; Kovács 2009).

This beneficial effect of more agile attentional efficiency and inhibitory control has been observed for all age groups Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits337 • helping preschoolers and young children develop task control precociously (Bialystok & Martin 2004; Bialystok 2010; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok 2008; Carlson & Meltzoff 2008; Feng et al. 2007), • enhancing performance of 20-year-olds (Green 1998; Costa et al.

2008), • preserving the success rate in persons advanced in years at nearly that of 30-year-olds (where monoglots were slower and less accurate; Bialystok et al. 2004, 2006; but see Morton & Harper 2007 for lack of such a language-based performance difference), • delaying deterioration of attentional control mechanisms associated with cognitive decline (cf . Craik & Bialystok 2006) and ‘demonstrating that the bilingual advantage extends well beyond childhood’ (Wodniecka & Cepeda 2007: 4). Multilinguals’ enhanced performance is accounted for either by their ability to hold two languages in the mind concurrently without allowing words and grammar to leak from one into the othe r, or by superior memories for information storage and processing (Bialystok et al. 2 0 0 4).

An alternative interpretation (Colzato et al. 2008) is that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition (whose aim is to exclude particular information from processing), but have acquired a better ability to build up and maintain action goals in working memory: learning to keep two or more languages separate leads to a general improvement in selecting goal-relevant information from competing, goal-irrelevant stimuli . Bilinguals are also better at resolving conflicting information (Costa et al.

2008), an asset due to bilingualism helping to ignore information irrelevant for the task at hand, to take more advantage of cues when giving a response, or to reach and /or maintain a state of alertness allowing them to prepare for monitoring and conflict resolution (Costa et al., op. ci t .) . It is believed that bilinguals should have fewer problems with concentration, the capability to effectively monitor their actions, or multitask (Wodniecka 2007) . Individuals speaking more than one language also have a better ear for listening and sharper memories (at least in the case of immersion programmes; Ratte 1968; Lapkin et al. 1990) . Recent evidence saw bilinguals outscore monolinguals on controlled recall tests; for instance, they proved more accurate at remembering episodic information (the context in which they have come across a fact; Wodniecka, Craik & Bialystok 2007; Wodniecka et al . 2010), showing similar levels of recollection to younger monolinguals, ‘suggesting that bilingualism may help offset age-related Michał B. Paradowski 338 memory decline [and] that individuals can benefit from becoming bilingual and actively using both languages, even if they learn a second language later in life’ (Wodniecka & Cepeda 2007: 5) . There is also evidence that bilingualism may help significantly boost working memory (Bialystok et al.

2004), on tasks requiring mere maintenance of information in the mind, re-sequencing of visual-spatial information held in the mind, and temporal order memory (Feng et al. 2007) . Working memory is crucial to all aspects of cognitive development and academic achievement – to hold in mind the facts already read and to relate them to the current reading, to mentally manipulate numbers and update the result after each operation, or to translate instructions into action plans (Feng et al., op. cit. ) .

Early FL study also results in substantial and long-lived neurological benefits to the developing brain: ‘[t]he learning experiences of a child determine which [neural] connections are developed and which no longer function’ (Dr . Michael E . Phelps, Chairman of the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, UCLA School of Medicine, quoted in NNELL 1996) .

Language helps characterise and evaluate objects and phenomena from a given perspective (Potter & Wetherell 1987) . In different languages, the relation between words and the concepts they signify may follow different patterns; sometimes requiring focusing the concept, sometimes leading to its diffusion (Pavlenko 1999) . Two different languages not only differently describe ‘the same reality’ due to the lexical and semantic differences, but also contain manifold discourses related to diverse contexts (Pavlenko 2005) . Therefore, mastering a second language and using multiple languages in parallel involves the assimilation of new perspectives and a conceptual restructuring and rearrangement of knowledge (Whorf 1956; Caramazza 1999), extending the available categorisation of objects and concepts (Kronenfeld 1996; Malt et al. 1999) . Wierzbicka (1996), Paradis (1997), and Athanasopoulos (2001) showed that bilinguals parcel up and categorise meanings (e .g . colours 1) in their respective languages 1 For instance, Latin lacked generic gray and brown , Navajo collapses blue and green, Shona speakers split green between blue and yellow (Pinker 2000: 51), French has a word to name a hue that is not brown yet no longer grey ( taupe), Polish and Russian make a distinction between sky blue and navy blue, while the phrase ‘to give someone the green light’ may be meaningless in Japan where the traffic light for right of way is blue . From another kettle of fish, Japanese has different verbs for putting on garments, headwear, and other pieces of attire, and two lexemes denoting ‘water’ depending on whether it is hot or Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits339 in different ways. Krupińska (2008) conjectures that bilinguals prove better at providing definitions of abstract concepts, and argues for a greater richness of their conceptual representations: bilinguals perceive objects and phenomena whose interpretation requires a creative input in a broader light, more clearly, or in a richer and more diversified way .

The higher results obtained in intelligence tests and problem solving by bilinguals compared with monolinguals may also be a consequence of this ability to acquire two cognitive perspectives (Pavlenko 1999) . Owing to this available array of perspectives, multilinguals are quicker to realise that the words we use are arbitrary and that thought is independent of language (Ackerman 2004: 8), which is a vital step towards the development of abstract thinking (Wodniecka 2007) . They find it easier to ignore the absurdity of a presented sentence or to temporarily forget the set meaning of a word and assigning a new one (e .g . Bialystok 2001) . Bilingualism not only enriches the subjects’ linguistic repertoires, but also offers alternative conceptualisations invaluable for flexible and critical thinking (Pavlenko 2005) . Able to gain multiple perspectives on an issue, multilinguals are also better problem-solvers (Kennedy 1994). As they expand their personal horizons, being simultaneously insiders and outsiders, they begin to see their own culture from a new perspective not available to monoglots, enabling them the comparison, contrast, and understanding of cultural concepts . As the learning of a new language usually brings with it a revelation of a new culture, it also leads to a better understanding and appreciation of people of other nationalities, thereby lessening racism, xenophobia, and intolerance (Carpenter & Torney 1974). FL study offers unique insight into other cultures and promotes intercultural competence – especially as ‘[t]he positive impact of cultural information is significantly enhanced when that information is experienced through foreign language’ (Curtain & Dahlberg 2004), which is becoming increasingly sought after in the age of global interdependence and increasingly multicultural and multi-ethnic societies . It has also been shown that children who know more than one language are better at picking up social cues, better respond to being corrected, and are more ready to take others’ advice .

not, Chinese has separate words for going to the cinema, theatre, or doctor, while Swahili has an assortment of greetings depending on the gender, age, and status of the person encountered . Michał B. Paradowski 340 Maintaining use of multiple languages has been shown to accelerate cognitive development with respect to social skills also in another domain .

Bialystok and Senman (2004) demonstrated that bilingual children do better than their peers in the false beliefs test and that they develop theory of mind, i .e . the ability to put themselves in somebody else’s situation, at an earlier age . They are quicker to realise that the knowledge they have access to owing to the experimenter’s tip-offs need not be available to others who see the object for the first time .

Last but not least, there are obvious social and employment advantages of being bilingual – the extension of one’s opportunities to express oneself and communicate with people one would otherwise not have the chance to interact with, and increasing job opportunities in many careers .

Increased foreign language proficiency is also believed to reduce the risk of developing ADHD or help children already diagnosed with the disorder moderate its severity through developing increased ability to control their actions (Toppelberg et al. 2002) . To boot, Paradis (2006), Roeper (2009), Armon-Lotem et al. ( 2 0 0 9 ) , C h i l l a ( 2 0 0 8 ) a n d C h i l l a et al. ( 2 0 0 9 ) d e m o n s t r a t e d the facilitative effect and instructive value of the organisation of a dual linguistic system in children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment, as reliance on the knowledge of their L1 promotes their language awareness and helps bootstrap the acquisition of a second language . The studies have shown that bilingual SLI children make significantly fewer errors in certain areas of both their L1 and L2 compared to age-matched monolingual SLI peers . The consistently better ability of multilingual speakers to deal with distractions may, in turn, also help offset age-related declines in mental dexterity (Bialystok et al. 2004). One of the most spectacular consequences of bilingualism has to do with long-term health benefits . Although bilingualism cannot act as a remedy against senile dementia or slow down its progression, preliminary findings reveal that individuals who make use of multiple languages on a daily basis exhibit a delay of 4.1 years in the incidence of the first symptoms of the disease in comparison to monolinguals . According to the researchers, ‘there are currently no pharmacological interventions that have shown comparable effects’ (Bialystok, Craik & Freedman 2007:

462). The speculative conclusion (following Fratiglioni et al. 20 04; Sca r mea s & Stern 2003; Staff et al. 2004; Valenzuela & Sachdev 2006a, 2006b) is that extra sustained complex mental effort expended in speaking another language, which means upkeep and exercise of different areas of the brain owing to boosted blood supply, may lead to biological changes, such as Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits341 increased generation of healthy neurons, synapses and dendrites, or a more efficient functional reorganisation of neural networks (Valenzuela & Sachdev 2006a), which can more easily take over functions previously carried out by the cerebral regions already affected by the disease, thereby enabling the brain to better tolerate accumulated pathologies (Bialystok, Craik & Freedman 2007; Cepeda & Munakata 2007) .

5. The price of bilingualism Despite bilingualism’s numerous benefits, there are skills where individuals speaking more than one language lag behind their peers . A recent series of studies showed a disadvantage in their vocabulary, both receptive (e .g . Oller & Eilers 2002) and productive (e .g . Gollan et al. 2002, 2005) . Bilinguals may have greater difficulty recalling words in each of the languages at their command (in a task requiring enumeration of words from a given category, they achieved lower scores than monolinguals in terms of quantity and speed), which could potentially mean statistically lower speech fluency . In addition, they have been found to more frequently experience the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon, i .e . forget the word they wanted to use in conversation (Gollan & Acenas 2004). This deficit may be caused by a disturbance connected with the necessity to hold back other languages (hence the negative consequence of a slower access to the lexis), or the rarer use of each language individually (hence a lower frequency and accessibility of each word; Wodniecka 2007) . Nonetheless, this deficit may be overcome and is usually imperceptible for the interlocutors – great orators had bilinguals in their ranks: Cicero spoke Latin and Greek, Pope John Paul II proved himself a skilled polyglot (Wodniecka op. cit.), while celebrated bilingual writers, such as John Milton, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Barclay Beckett, or Iosif Brodsky, attest that knowing a second language enhances the use of the first (Paradowski 2008) . 6. Coda and implications Currently, few need convincing about the utility of foreign language learning . But is it worthwhile to develop and cultivate the knowledge of minority languages in mixed couples, despite meagre practical profits? Michał B. Paradowski 342 Should migrants who want their offspring to integrate with their new community as fast as possible insist on preserving the mother tongue at home? (Wodniecka 2007) . Should children be encouraged to learn and speak the regional dialects of their grandparents, even if they will use the national ‘standard’ in the street and at school? Hopefully, the readers of this chapter will respond in the affirmative . We have seen that learning (and regularly using) another language not only enhances linguistic and cultural knowledge, but also has a beneficial effect on the development of the three core components of executive functioning (Diamond 2006):

– inhibitory control (withstanding a strong inclination to do one thing in order to see to what is most appropriate or critical, including the exercise of focused, selective attention despite distraction); – cognitive flexibility (‘the ability to nimbly adjust to changed demands or priorities, being able to change perspectives, or think outside the box’; Feng et al. 2007); – working memory (as in mentally manipulating ideas, doing mental arithmetic, or relating new information to the already familiar); and exerts widespread salutary effects on other general cognitive abilities throughout the life of an individual, including longer preservation of intellectual efficiency and delay of cognitive decline related to ageing .

Some further research is needed to determine to what extent the results of research on the benefits of early bilingualism can be extrapolated to later (especially post-pubescent) learners of a foreign language . The author wishes to thank Zosia Wodniecka, Ellen Bialystok and Jean- Marc Dewaele for invaluable discussion and bibliographical suggestions . The author’s research is supported by a grant from the Polish Society for Social Psychology . BIBLIOGRAPHY:

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Her interests are currently focused on the development of reading skills and multiple intelligences in second language learning .

e-mail: malgorzata .pamula@gmail .com Michał B. Paradowski (M .A ., Ph .D .) received his doctoral degree in linguistics from the Institute of English Studies, Warsaw University, where he defended his dissertation on the language interface model of pedagogical grammar . He is currently an assistant professor at the UW Institute of Applied Linguistics . His interests include issues relating to SLA research, the availability of UG, the effects of formal instruction, and ELT pedagogy in general; his second concentration is syntax, especially the relations between Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, linguistic development, and language contact phenomena . He has authored a number of journal articles and book chapters, refereed submissions to international linguistics quarterlies, and been an invited speaker at several domestic and foreign scientific events . He also acts as an ELT consultant for television . e-mail: m .b .paradowski@uw .edu .pl Dominika Szmerdt-Chandler (M .Sc ., Ph .D .) received her doctoral degree in applied linguistics from Warsaw University, and a Certificate in Educational Leadership from The George Washington University and Georgetown University, USA . She worked as a teacher of English at all levels of the Polish education system and as a teacher trainer in pre- and in-service teacher education . Her particular field of interest is language testing . She delivered language testing modules at postgraduate ELT courses and participated in several test development projects . Currently, she works for the Educational Research Institute in Warsaw, is a freelance English teacher, item writer for City and Guilds International ESOL examinations, and textbook author living in Bournemouth, UK.

e-mail: dominikasz@poczta .fm