Benefits of Bilingualism

This VL2 research brief presents important findings about the impact bilingual education has on deaf and hard of hearing children. Among them: There is no language delay or language confusion associated with concurrently learning ASL and English. When two languages are combined, bilingual students have larger vocabularies than monolingual children. Larger vocabulary size leads to stronger grammar and complex language skills down the road. A systematic approach to connect both ASL and English and using fingerspelling through chaining and translation helps develop literacy skills in both ASL and English. Bilingualism supports complex reasoning skills in addition to language skills.