While it is obvious that the ability to speak a second language can be of immense benefit personally and professionally throughout ones life, academics have also found that the process of learning another language may have a significant effect on a child’s overall educational attainment.
US Economists Albert Saiz and Elena Zoido, initially carried out a study comparing salaries between bilingual and monolingual professionals. Although the results showed that there was indeed a wage premium affecting those who speak more than one language, their study showed something far more surprising: it would appear that, whether a person uses a language in the workplace or not, their overall educational attainment will have benefited from bilingualism…. Including in subjects such as maths and science.
Perhaps due to the extra cognitive development stimulated by learning say, French, Spanish or German, a study found that “SAT math and verbal scores increase with each additional year of foreign language study … and students who completed a foreign language course in high school tended to have higher scores on the ACT exams in English and math.”. Because language learning is largely an exercise in problem solving, the same study also found that even when students dedicate more time to language study than they do to maths, that mathematical ability improves: “children who study a foreign language, even when this second language study takes time away from the study of mathematics, outperform students who do not study a foreign language and have more mathematical instruction during the school day.” Once again, the benefits of a bilingual upbringing are clear, making the choice of a bilingual nanny a very wise one indeed!