On the relationship between bilingualism and mathematical performance: a systematic review

Resumen

As part of the demands of a globalized and interconnected world, studying second languages has become a major priority. Bilingual programs implemented in recent decades have motivated an educational strategy in which content area courses are taught through L2. The potential costs of this strategy in academic performance are debated, especially in challenging areas such as mathematics. The present work systematically reviewed 71 papers based on experiments measuring mathematics performance in bilinguals in order to establish if bilinguals show a (dis)advantage in mathematics compared to monolinguals. The results of a total of 305,136 participants (57,703 bilinguals and 247,503 monolinguals) show that bilingualism does not seem to affect mathematical performance, but this is dependent on whether subjects are highly proficient bilinguals. This type of bilingual may only be affected by lower reaction times depending on the testing language. On the other hand, low language proficiency negatively impacts mathematical performance. Lastly, bilingualism enhances mathematical encoding and processes in non-language-related tasks.