Virginia Collier has done a great deal of research on language
acquisition on school-aged children and teenagers. The issue is more
complicated than just "younger students learn a second language
faster." She identifies four components which interact to determine
the rate at which a student learns a second language. Language
development in the first language, academic development, cognitive
development, and sociocultural processes all have an effect on
language learning. I can't do justice to her findings here, but a
paper of hers is available at http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/ncbepubs/directions/04.htm.
It is tempting to say that young children learn a language quickly,
but that may be an erroneous assumption. A five-year-old child may
quickly pick up a command of basic conversation (Cummins' BICS), and
at this point it may appear that the student has mastered the second
language. However, the academic register (CALPS) of language is far
slower in developing, and without a solid mastery of this level of
language which allows a student to communicate in a context-reduced
situation, the student's academic preformance will begin to decline
as their classwork becomes more abstract.
Collier says:
"In our examination of large data sets across many different research sites, we have found that the most significant student background variable is the amount of formal schooling students have received in their first language. Across all program treatments, we have found that non-native speakers being schooled in a second language for part or all of the school day typically do reasonably well in the early years of schooling (kindergarten through second or third grade). But from fourth grade on through middle school and high school, when the academic and cognitive demands of the curriculum increase rapidly with each succeeding year, students with little or no academic and cognitive development in their first language do less and less well as they move into the upper grades. "
Consider this graph, also by Collier and Wayne Thomas.
http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~spn478/bilingual2c.html
It compares program models for LEP students over the twelve year span
of their education. You'll notice that until about the fourth grade,
students in ESL programs make the most rapid progress, albeit only
slightly. Around the fourth year, however, these students show a
plateauing, then a drop in their achievement, while students in the
programs which continue to develop both languages continue toadvance.
Why? In fourth and fifth grade, schoolwork shifts from concrete,
context-embedded tasks to more abstract "bookwork." You may have
heard of the transition from "learning to read" to "reading to
learn." This might be more accurately stated to include all four
language modalities as "learning language" to "using language to
learn." Students who functioned well in the earlier grades often find
themselves without the linguistic tools necessary to continue to
succeed in the higher grades. Students in ESL and transitional
bilingual classes are often "exited" around the fourth grade,
depending on the program, and no longer recieve support. In contrast,
"maintenance" programs, which attempt to continue language
development in both languages, see their students _surpass_ their
monolingual counterparts around seventh grade. This demonstrates the
effectiveness of these developmental programs (which are not solely
for "LEP" students, BTW), and it suggests the positive that a solid
mastery of two or more languages has on cognitive development and
academic achievement.
I guess, in a nutshell, I'd say that it is easy to oversimplify the
situation of a second-language learner by saying that simple
immersion in the language environment will allow them to learn all
they need to know, and more quickly. Language development is a
serious business for all children. It determines what they'll be able
to achieve in their academic careers, and so it is crucial to
appreciate the true complexity of a student's linguistic needs.
There are bilingual programs which fail their students. Likewise,
there are reading, math, special education and physical education
programs which also fail their students. Before scrapping an entire
educational philosophy, we should look at programs which succeed.
Permission granted to educators to reproduce and distribute this document, provided no alterations are made to the content, and authorship is properly attributed. Any other use requires written permission of the author.
This article is available online at
https://members.tripod.com/~hamminkj/defBE.htm
Copyright © 1999 by Julianne Hammink.