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GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING

On Second Language Acquisition

By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist
31-Jul-14


Issues of second language acquisition are critical in international schools. Our understanding of how students acquire a second language informs a multitude of decisions across the school: At what age is it best to introduce a second language? What kinds of pedagogy best support language learning? What kind of teachers should we be hiring to teach language? Should our students from non-English-speaking backgrounds receive separate language classes in English grammar, or should we be using our ESL resources to better support them in mainstream classes? How long should students be kept in an ESL program?
The way we answer these questions will ultimately affect our students’ likelihood of success both in school and beyond, but we need to ground these decisions in research. A team of researchers in the USA and China has summarized recent research (conducted between 1997 and 2011) into second language acquisition, and their findings may help us go at least some way towards making more informed decisions regarding language issues in our schools.
What did they find?
The findings are organized under the questions investigated. The researchers identified two distinct contexts for learning language: (a) L2 learners in L2 majority situations, and (b) L2 learners in foreign language situations. The findings were often dramatically different, depending on which of these contexts was being investigated. The results will therefore be reported separately wherever there was a major difference.
Research question 1: What are optimal conditions for L2 acquisition?
For L2 learners in L2 majority situations:
• The maternal level of education and parental L2 skills were significant predictors of L2 proficiency in children.
• The opportunity to use L2 in informal settings had the largest effect on oral proficiency.
• Increased use of L2 in the home may not always help children’s L2 development, and can depress the child’s L1 vocabulary.
• Home literacy practices in L1, such as book reading with children and visits to the library, correlate with later L2 achievement.
• Mothers’ use of labeling questions and questioning during reading with young children in L1 contributed to a higher level of vocabulary in both L1 and L2.
• Instruction may need to include well-implemented specialized instruction for L2 learners.
For L2 learners in foreign language situations:
• Explicit instruction in grammar coupled with repeated contextualized practice seems to be beneficial.
• Students studying one mainstream subject through L2 show a greater degree of incidental vocabulary learning than students given the same number of hours of L2 language instruction.
Research question 2: What are the characteristics of excellent or unsuccessful L2 learners?
• Memory for text was found to be the strongest predictor of L2 vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension in younger learners (Grade 1).
• In contrast, with older learners (Grade 7) memory for text was not a significant predictor of any L2 outcomes. For older students, analytic ability was the only significant predictor of vocabulary knowledge and writing skills.
• Motivation to learn the L2 was found to account for nine percent of the variation in L2 reading comprehension and four percent of the variation in listening and speaking skills. Motivation correlated very strongly with intended effort.
• L2 anxiety accounted for a small percentage of variation in L2 achievement.
• L1 skills, particularly literacy skills, are a strong predictor of L2 achievement.
Research question 3: What are the characteristics of excellent or unsuccessful L2 teachers?
• A competent L2 teacher must have adequate proficiency in the language being taught.
• Teachers with greater metalinguistic awareness are more able to assess student output and use it to adjust instruction. Teachers with less metalinguistic awareness tend to provide more formulaic (and sometimes confusing) input to learners.
• Teachers who are reflective and who have a greater sense of efficacy tend to be more successful in supporting their students to achieve.
• Teachers who have some proficiency in the students’ L1 and who know how and when to use it can support students ( particularly beginners) in learning L2.
Research question 4: What are reasonable expectations for speed and accomplishment for L2 learners of different ages?
L2 learners in L2 majority situations:
• One major study found it took around seven years for 80 percent of learners to become proficient in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with 80 percent testing as intermediate within two years.
• A separate study of a well-implemented bilingual program with young learners found that 21 percent of children achieved proficiency in L2 within two years, 69 percent by the end of four years and 92 percent by the end of five years.
• The younger children start learning L2 in a majority L2 context, the greater their chance of achieving ultimate proficiency. There seems to be a gradual decline according to age of arrival in the L2 majority context.
• Younger learners tend to have a distinct long-term advantage in achieving native-like pronunciation and in achieving native-like grammatical accuracy. However, some learners are able to achieve both native-like pronunciation and grammatical knowledge even if they arrive after age 12.
• Older children tend to learn more efficiently and more quickly.
• Younger learners switch to an L2 language preference more quickly than older learners.
• Older children tend to make more friends who mostly use L1 than younger learners, which suggests that some of the advantages younger learners have may be due to increased opportunities to use the language informally.
• Quantity of input is a positive predictor of L2 acquisition.
• The typological distance (e.g., Japanese and English are further apart than German and English) between the L2 and the students’ L1 is a negative predictor of performance in L2.
L2 learners in foreign language situations:
• The advantages that younger learners seem to have in L2 majority contexts do not reveal themselves in foreign language contexts. In fact, most studies seem to show that older learners with more cognitive maturity and analytical ability have distinct advantages in foreign language contexts.
What are the implications?
Much of this research merely confirms what we already know, but a few trends seem to come out clearly for which it may be worth considering the implications for our language programs.
It seems that we should not be encouraging parents of children from non-English-speaking backgrounds to speak English with the children at home. The research would suggest that it would be much more valuable for them to spend their time establishing solid home literacy practices in their mother tongue. To support this perhaps we could ensure that our libraries have a good range of both fiction and non-fiction relevant to our curriculum in a range of languages.
The stark difference between learners of different ages in majority L2 contexts and those in foreign language contexts also raises some questions. There is little we can do about the age at which learners from non-English-speaking backgrounds come into our schools beyond helping parents, who sometimes believe that language learning is “easy” for children, develop more realistic expectations about the length of time their children may take to become proficient in academic English.
When it comes to foreign languages, however, we do have some control over the age at which learners are able to begin their study. Three of these findings in particular may be worth considering as we make the choice of when to offer a third language, beyond the student’s mother tongue and English, as the language of instruction of the school:
• A strong mother tongue supports future L2 learning.
• Older learners seem to have distinct advantages in foreign language contexts.
• The quantity of input is strongly correlated with language learning success.
The fifth and final question investigated in this research summary was whether language policy in the United States has been influenced by the findings. The answer was no. In international schools we have the unique opportunity of shaping our policies around research where solid evidence exists.
Reference
Dixon, L. Q., Zhao, J., Shin, J.-Y., Wu, S., Su, J.-H., Burgess-Brigham, R., Gezer, M., and Snow, C. (2012) “What We Know about Second Language Acquisition. Review of Educational Research 82 1, pp. 5-60.
From October 2012.




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