Macnamara (1967) considers that education through a weaker language
has negative consequences for a child's academic progress, which Cummins
(1976) in turn interprets in terms of a threshhold of linguistic competence
which has to be attained if a child is to have any benefit from education in a
certain language. For a child to be able to cope with two languages, he needs
a proper education in Ll, as experiments, for example in the French immersion
programmes in Canada, show that children having difficulty with L2
leap forward once Ll is properly taught. H education is to be partly in L2,
this can only be in a bilingual situation where the child has achieved the
necessary threshholds in both languages. Bilingualism itself is also considered
positive as it seems to accelerate the development of a child's verbaland non-verbal abilities and there is a positive association between biIi
ngualism, cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking.