Language Diversity, School Learning, and Closing Achievement Gaps A Workshop Summary (2010) / Chapter Skim
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4 Learning Across Languages: Second-Language Learners and Dialect Speakers
4 Learning Across Languages: Second-Language Learners and Dialect Speakers
Pages 49-68
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From page 49... ...
Participants also considered research with implications on how to develop new curricula that would support language and reading in a second language or dialect, as well as how to organize instructional time and structure classroom interactions to maximize learning. A key question participants were asked to address was what teachers need to know about language to deliver instruction that develops both language and academic knowledge for language minority students.
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From page 50... ...
refers to teaching grammatical forms in isolation, outside of communica tion, and sequencing the order of instruction according to degree of linguis tic complexity. A third approach, "focus on meaning," refers to instruction that assumes exposure to substantial input in meaningful contexts will lead to acquiring the grammatical structure of the second language.
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From page 51... ...
Since most studies of explicit instruction and orallanguage development have focused on international students in North American universities or middleclass stu dents in immersion programs, there has been relatively little examination of secondlanguage acquisition by those immigrant learners. Yet those learners begin attending Englishlanguage schools at all ages, and they are the ones who are most at risk for academic failure.
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From page 52... ...
. EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION FOR DIALECT SPEAKERS John Rickford explored the state of research on explicit English instruction for students who speak vernacular varieties of English or nonstandard dialects and speculated about instructional changes that could benefit students' language and academic learning.
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From page 53... ...
. For instance, second dialect speakers experienced gains in standard English oral language and writing when taught with the dialect awareness and contrastive analysis approaches described above (reported in Maddahian and Sandamela, 2000; Sweetland, 2006)
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From page 54... ...
show curvilinear trajectories such that children lose their vernacular from 1st through 4th grade as they learn standard English, but by middle school they begin to choose whether to keep their vernacular, suggesting that early instruction in the standard English needs to continue through later grades. With respect to code switching, said Rickford, research suggests that the ability to switch grammatical codes across languages correlates with academic achievement and the acquisition of literacy skills, and so teachers might encourage code shifting for those children who have yet to develop that ability.
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. The model predicts that language compre hension becomes relatively more important for reading comprehension as decoding is mastered, and this result has been shown with children and older adolescents in adult education (for details, see Durgunoğlu, 2009)
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Thus, having Spanish phonological awareness may help to recognize English words through supporting the development of English phonological awareness. A simi lar pattern has been observed for reading comprehension.
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in a first language predicts the ability to do so in a second language. Finally, findings for reading comprehension show correlations between first and secondlanguage reading comprehension not only for phonological awareness, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and lin guistic knowledge beyond individual words but also for the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of language processing, such as using strategies to aid comprehension and making inferences for text meaning by using background knowledge (for details, see Durgunoğlu, 2009)
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Research is needed to design instructional interventions that target comprehension skills beyond the word level that overlap between listen ing and reading comprehension. Whether facility in a first language with what Schleppegrell (2009)
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From page 59... ...
hypothesis that when learners outnumber native speakers, the environ ment is not conducive to acquiring a second language. Valdés' observations about the configuration of French immersion programs and the effects of such programs on developing language raises a larger question about the limits of language learning within the confines of the classroom, Genesee noted.
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From page 60... ...
A serious problem to address with respect to transfer lies with children who have neither sufficient oral language nor reading skills in English. Since reading depends on oral language, one might question whether phonics instruction is the only important starting point for reading.
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From page 61... ...
In addition, students are likely to be supported by accommodating regional pronun ciation, lexical items, and grammatical patterns, but that language items with general social significance across the United States should take pre cedence over regional items, and emphasis on grammatical forms should take precedence over phonological ones. Little is known about how language is used differently across
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From page 62... ...
Another area to explore is the effect of teachers' beliefs about language, particularly on teaching and learning language linked to learn ing in subject areas and how these beliefs can be influenced to enable teaching standard English using the most effective approaches. It would be valuable, according to Dutro, to identify pedagogical approaches that balance focus on form and focus on meaning, and as Valdés stressed, to support learning that generalizes and becomes "por table." Does teaching grammatical features as tools to be applied to varied communicative purposes have an impact?
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From page 63... ...
There is likely to be an age below which explicit instruction about lan guage would not be effective. Dickinson expressed concern that a focus on explicit instruction might lead to language drills to correct grammatical features to the exclusion of engaging in rich conversations for preschool ers and for students of all ages around curriculum content.
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All children could benefit from language awareness, regardless of the dialect spoken, Hoff agreed. For the purpose of boosting school achievement, the classroom goal is probably not to try to get speakers of vernacular language to sound like native speakers of standard English.
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From page 65... ...
The lack of systematic study to date of the full range of linguistic structures and the lack of evidence about which are most important to focus on and at what point poses a problem for applying existing research to instructional design. Another limitation of existing research, Genesee noted, is that studies tend to focus on learning forms within a specific kind of communicative context, such as learning conditional verb forms in the context of planning for a future lunar trip, an activity that calls for heavy use of conditional verbs.
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From page 66... ...
For instance, the accuracy with which 22monthold children repeat Spanish and English nonwords, a measure of phonological proficiency, is highly correlated between the two languages; this kind of correlation is not true for other aspects of language, such as vocabulary and grammar. Other data suggest, Hoff said, that aspects of phonological capacity may be less affected by the particular language they hear: the amount of language input children experience in Spanish versus English relates less strongly to differences in children's nonword repetition in the two languages and more strongly to differences in vocabulary and grammar.
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From page 67... ...
6 LEARNING ACROSS LANGUAGES that try to redirect or refer to something else. So, for instance, saying, "Look at your cup and try stirring it; it will dissolve" is different from saying, "Don't sit there.
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