To mark Neurodiversity Week, British Council teacher and SEND Coordinator, Elsa O'Brien López, looks at neurodivergence and how bilingualism can benefit neurodivergent learners.
What is neurodivergence?
Neurodivergence - also referred to as neurodiversity - is an umbrella term that encompasses specific learning differences such as autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and ADHD among others. Neurodiversity Week is celebrated in the UK every March. It gives us the chance to talk about diversity and differences in the way our brains are wired, the way we perceive the world around us and the way we interact with it.
What are executive functions and how are they affected in neurodivergent people?
Executive functions are essential cognitive abilities for everyday life as they help us plan, organise, manage time, make decisions, and control impulses. They are also key in the classroom as they include: working memory, impulse control, cognitive flexibility, planning and organisation, emotional regulation and self-monitoring.
How can executive functions be affected in neurodivergent people?
Neurodivergent individuals often experience challenges with one or more executive functions. These difficulties can manifest in various ways depending on the specific condition.
Can neurodivergent people learn languages?
Unless there is a professional recommendation against it, the answer is: Yes, absolutely! Neurodivergent people can learn additional languages and, in fact, particularly benefit from it.
What are the benefits of learning a second language for neurodivergent learners?
Although the benefits of bilingualism are rarely contested, professional and educational benefits are the ones that usually first spring to mind. It is also becoming common to acknowledge the social and cultural benefits of learning additional languages. For instance, learning our family’s heritage language in a country where the majority language is a different one, will allow us to maintain contact with our extended family and learn about their culture and traditions. In the same way, learning a second language will allow us to travel and make connections with speakers of other languages.
However, there are also many cognitive benefits associated with bilingualism. Learning additional languages can have a direct positive impact on our brain’s executive functioning. For this reason, speaking more than one language can help neurodivergent people if they have a deficit or dysregulation in some of their executive functions.
The reason why bilingualism can help strengthen executive functions is the fact that both languages are active in the brain of the bilingual speaker even when only one of the languages is being used. The executive function system is fortified when bilingual individuals must select one language and inhibit the other one, or when they have to switch between them.
Research carried out by Ellen Bialystock observed how bilingual children outperform monolingual children in tasks that required ‘more effortful and controlled attention’. Overall, bilingualism seems to strengthen working memory, attention, inhibition and shifting. The researcher talks about ‘enhanced control’ of bilinguals over executive functions.
This means that learning languages can strengthen everyone’s executive functioning and be especially beneficial for neurodivergent learners.
What kind of support might benefit neurodivergent language learners?
The key to supporting neurodivergent learners is understanding the specific needs and strengths of each person, as well as tailoring the language-learning process to suit their learning style and support needs.
Young children, for instance, learn languages in a very intuitive way, using their right brain, which is the one related to emotions, intuition and musicality. In fact, this is how we all learn our mother tongue. Learning additional languages in a way that resembles how we learned our first language can be a way of overcoming barriers to learning. This is because difficulties maintaining attention, with working memory or with other executive functions might become more apparent when learning in more rigid and memory-based settings.