aglew@mcdurb.Urbana.Gould.COM (03/22/89)
>Your contentions may be merely biased opions!! We do not know, in the absence >of emprical, experimental data, done with perhaps double blind experiments, >that learning a foreign language itself is EVEN a factor in the purported >ehnhaced learning of the native language (for many of us here, English). There is much empirical data from Canadian studies of bilingual (French/English) education that tends to indicate that bilingual education improves native language ability, and, indeed, general scholastic ability. [My younger sister was in one of the early French Immersion classes that participated in one of these studies]. These were _observational_, rather than experimental, studies in that they observed progress of ongoing classes, rather than forming proper control groups - but the studies have attempted to isolate features like socioeconomic status, etc. Now, to which newsgroup shall we adjourn this discussion to?