Second Language Acquisition in Childhood

Volume 2: School-age Children

B. McLaughlin, B. McLaughlin

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135884994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1987. Throughout human history, learning a second language has been an important part of the educational process. From ancient times to the present, school children have had to struggle to learn a second language (and in many cases third and fourth languages). To be educated meant to know a language other than the language of one's family and community. The contemporary American educational system is one of the few in recorded history that allows its products to remain monolingual.

1	Second-Language Teaching and Learning

Ruben is eleven years old. His family moved to the United States from Mexico when he was nine. He knew no English when he entered his first American classroom. He was put in a bilingual class where part of the instruction he received was in Spanish. In two years he has become fluent in English and is almost indistinguishable from his native English-speaking classmates. But school is difficult for him. He does poorly in reading and writing. The other students laugh at his spelling. Ruben does not enjoy school and plans to drop out as soon as he is old enough to get a job.

Mario is twelve. His family is Italian, but they have lived in Sweden since before Mario was born. He speaks both Italian and Swedish fluently and does well in school. He is the best soccer player in his class and is very popular. Mario plans to go to the University and study architecture.

Maria was born in America but heard only Spanish at home and in her neighborhood. When she went to school she was put in an all-English classroom. The experience was a traumatic one for her. After three years she still speaks very little English. She does poorly in school and has had to repeat a grade. Her sister, Esperanza, however, does very well in school and has learned English without any problems, although she too was put in an all-English classroom.

Why does one finds these differences? Why is it so difficult for some children to learn second-languages in school and why do some children, who seem to have learned the language, nonetheless do poorly in their academic work? These questions have long puzzled educators, but they have become more salient in many parts of the world as millions of children enter school each year with limited knowledge of the language of instruction.

In Europe and the United States alone it is estimated that ten million children come from families where the language of the home is different from the language of the country in which they live. In many parts of Asia and Africa it is assumed that an educated person will know one or more languages beyond the language of the home. Yet learning a second language in school is a slow and tedious task for most children—some of whom never succeed in becoming bilingual.

One reason why children find learning second languages in school difficult may be that they are taught in the wrong way. This is a perennial argument made by educational innovators who periodically announce some new technique that will revolutionize language teaching in school. Indeed, the teaching of second languages is a long and fascinating tale. A brief review of various developments will be presented in this chapter (for fuller treatments, see Kelly, 1969; Lewis, 1977; Titone, 1968).

Another reason why children fail to learn second languages well in school relates to our understanding of what it is that they have to learn. There may be more to learning a second language in a school setting (especially when that language is the language of instruction) than simply learning how to speak the language well. This point has been made by several authors in recent years and deserves discussion in this introductory chapter.

In addition to the question of what must be learned (the product of learning), there is the question of how learning takes place (the process of learning). The final section of this chapter will deal with the cognitive and linguistic processes that the child uses in learning a second language in the classroom.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF SECOND-LANGUAGE TEACHING

The teaching of a second language has been part of the curriculum of many forms of educational institutions for centuries. As early as the third millennium B.C., in what was probably the world’s first great civilization, the Sumerians had scribes devoted exclusively to education. When the country was conquered by the Akkadians in the last quarter of the third millenium, these scribes compiled the oldest known bilingual dictionaries. Long continuous passages were translated from Sumerian into Akkadian, line by line. Emphasis appears to have been on sense and not on achieving a strict literal translation (Kramer, 1963). School children used bilingual tablets, many of which are still preserved.

Second-language training in Babylon and Assyria must have been fairly effective, because young students of the Royal Colleges were expected to be proficient in several languages after three years (Lewis, 1974). There is some evidence that the methods used in these schools varied depending on the type of education the students were receiving. But even those whose literacy skills were restricted to business documents received a thorough grounding in the ancient Sumerian languages as well as in their first language (Lewis, 1977).

Like the Akkadians, the Egyptians had scribes who taught them the languages of their conquered subjects. As early as the 18th dynasty (1500 B.C.) multilingual tablets existed. Although little is known about how languages were taught, there is considerable evidence that Egyptian scribes in the Middle and New Kingdoms were familiar with the languages of other countries. In the Ptolemaic period, the upper classes in Egypt received their education in Greek. Similarly, in Asia Minor, the majority of people in Hellenistic times who could read or write could do so only in Greek, their second language. Greek was also used widely among the Jews in Egypt and Asia. Jewish scholars were the first to develop comparative linguistics, through the study of Semitic and non-Semitic languages.

Classic, Medieval, and Renaissance Periods

In the Roman Empire, Hellenistic models of speech and culture were widely adopted. Most well-educated Romans were able to speak Greek, and even the less educated understood enough Greek to cope with Greek phrases and expressions in works of such popular playwrights as Plautus. Roman children usually had heard Greek in infancy from a Greek nurse or slave, and as they grew up they were educated bilingually, often by Greeks who had come to Rome and served as tutors or opened bilingual schools. In the school, pupils followed the parallel courses of study of the Greek Grammaticos and the Latin Ludi Magister. Later they were tutored by a Greek rhetor and by a Latin orator.

Thus Greek language was introduced to Roman children before they had any formal instruction in their first language, indeed before they had any marked control of Latin. By the time children started their formal education, they were bilingual in both languages, although some children spoke Latin with a Greek accent. This led to occasional patriotic outcries against the emphasis on Greek in the education of Roman children. Moreover, there was some fear that two languages were too great a burden for many children. Nonetheless, as late as the 4th century A. D., bilingual education was an important part of the curriculum of Roman children, even children of the middle class, such as Augustine (Lewis, 1974).

At the beginning of the 3rd century A. D., the Romans developed bilingual manuals called Hermeneumata Pseudodositheans, comparable to modern conversational handbooks. They contained a Greek-Latin vocabulary and a series of simple texts of a narrative or conversational character. The narrative consisted of materials such as Aesop’s fables, an elementary book on mythology, or an account of the Trojan War. The conversational material consisted of dialogues in Greek such as the following:

The paterfamilias moves towards his friend and says:

“Good morning, Cams,” and he embraces him. The latter returns the greeting and says:

“Nice to meet you. Would you like to come along?”

“Where?”

“To see our friend Lucius. We are going to pay him a visit.”

“What is the matter with him?”

“He is sick.”

“Since when?”

“Since a few days ago.”

“Where does he live?”

“Not far from here. If you like we can go there.” (cited in Titone, 1968).

In these handbooks the attempt was made to introduce grammatical features systematically, beginning with simple structures and advancing to more complex ones.

In medieval Europe, Latin was the international language of communication and culture. It was a living language and was taught orally through reading and composition (Titone, 1968). Every educated man was bilingual, having studied Latin from the time he was a young child. This tradition persisted until well into the Renaissance period.

Toward the end of the Renaissance, emphasis began to shift from the learning of language as a practical tool to the learning of language as a means to an end— that of developing the mind. Latin and Greek were taught because it was thought that the study of grammar was good mental discipline. Because these languages were no longer living languages, little attention was given to oral communication. Texts were read and translated, and this—together with the study of grammar—became the essence of language training.

In spite of this trend, some textbooks used during the Renaissance period were surprisingly modern in their approach. They encouraged extensive oral practice through conversation; the first language of the student was to be avoided, and all instruction was to be given in the target language; grammatical forms were to be assimilated through practice in conversation (Titone, 1968). Such texts, however, were relatively rare exceptions to the general rule of grammatical training with little or no emphasis on oral skills.

The 19th and 20th Centuries

By the 19th century, grammaticalism predominated. Languages were taught via the systematic learning of paradigms, tables, declensions, and conjugations. Modern languages were taught as Greek and Latin were taught—as dead languages whose rules of morphology and syntax were to be memorized. Oral work was reduced to a minimum and conversational drills were abandoned. Students spent their time translating written texts line by line. This tradition, which can be called the grammar-translation method, continued to prevail in many schools until the middle of the present century.

There were some dissenting voices, however. The American educator, George Ticknor (1833) emphasized the need to learn a language by speaking it, if possible in the country where it is spoken. He argued that no one method was suitable for all learners and that the language teacher must adapt methods to individual needs. Nor should individuals of different ages be taught a language in the same way. The oral approach and the inductive method were more suitable for younger learners, Ticknor believed; whereas, older students generally prefer to learn by analysis of the particular from general principles.

Other authors also rejected exclusive reliance on the grammar-translation procedure. Heness, Marcel, Sauveur, and Gouin all de-emphasized composition and translation and stressed oral exercises in the target language (Titone, 1968). Gouin, for example, encouraged teachers to dramatize sentences in a series of exercises based on actual classroom situations. For him, association, mimicry, and memorization were the pivotal activities of language learning. The text for written and reading exercises should be anchored in real-life situations rather than made up of fragments of speech taken out of living context.

Emphasis on oral speech and the rejection of translation were the hallmarks of what was christened the direct method at the end of the 19th century. Its primary advocate in the first half of the 20th century was Maximilian Berlitz, whose schools now exist in all parts of the world. Berlitz argued that the learner must be taught as quickly as possible to think in the second language and for that purpose must use that language constantly without reverting to the first language. Exclusive stress is placed in the Berlitz method on the oral aspects of the language. Teachers must be native speakers, and classes must be small (never more than 10 pupils) so that instruction is as individualized as possible. No grammatical rules are taught; instead, grammar is conveyed to the student by example and by visual demonstration. Reading and writing are skills that one acquires only after the spoken language has been mastered.

Other advocates of the direct method took a similar point of view. The pupil should be steeped in the target language and should learn grammar inductively (Jespersen, 1947). Listening, practice, and repetition are the means by which children learn their first language, and these processes should be employed in second-language learning as well (Palmer, 1940). Linguistic principles, especially phonetics, were emphasized in an effort to assure that the speaker’s oral pronunciation approximated as closely as possible that of native speakers in the target language.

Linguistic principles and phonological accuracy were especially important in the audio-lingual era. The linguistic principles derived from structural linguistics, with its emphasis on the contrastive analysis of linguistic structures of first and second languages. This was linked to behavioristic notions of the learning process, which viewed language learning as involving the formation of habits via pattern practice. The goal of phonological accuracy was to be achieved through repetitive drills with audio-feedback in language learning laboratories.

Like the direct method, the audio-lingual approach stressed the learning of second languages in a manner that approximated first-language learning—through hearing and speaking rather than by translating and learning rules of grammar by rote. As we shall see in Chapter 4, structural linguistics and behav-ioristic psychology became the theoretical foundation and audio-lingual techniques the methodological basis for the Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

The audio-lingual approach came under fire in the last two decades for a number of reasons. Its theoretical foundation proved to be suspect. The behavorist assumption that language learning comes about merely through repetitive drills and pattern practice came under sharp attack. Contrastive analysis did not prove to be of much practical use to the language teacher, because learners did not make the errors that contrastive analysis predicted. Furthermore, structural linguistics had been put to rout by transformational grammar and its successors.

The audio-lingual t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Second-Language Teaching and Learning
• 2. Second-Language Education: International Contexts
• 3. Second-Language Education: The Canadian Experience
• 4. Second-Language Education: The United States
• 5. Instructional Practices
• 6. Classroom Organization and Interaction Patterns
• 7. Individual Difference Variables
• 8. Social Factors
• 9. Assessment
• 10. Evaluation
• 11. Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index