3
Kamusta
Bonjour
Ciao
Hello
Factors Influencing Second Language Acquisition
Bayley Mann John Bitancor Roan Desiree Disu Malicdem Lujie Wang
A Bilingual World
- Globalization has led to an increase in international business and immigration, which caused the prevalence of bilingualism (Dixon, WU, et al., 2012).
- Bilingualism refers to the ability to use two languages in everyday life.
Why do we learn a second language ?
Why
Learn a second language to pursue a better life (immigration or study abroad)
Statistic Canada
Why do we learn a second language ?
Language is now treated as a cultural capital that is required for success in the globalized world (Shin, 2017).
Why
World Trade Organization
Dynamic Interaction Between L1 and L2
- One-parent-one-language families,
- Immigrant communities where only the minority language is spoken at home, and
- Multilingual communities where different languages are spoken in different contexts.
SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUALISM
“Children learning two languages, from birth or shortly after. They are learning two separate language systems that also interact together. Exposure to two languages does not cause a language delay.“ (Bélanger, 2018)
SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUALISM
PASSIVE BILINGUALISM
- only one language is produced.
- This is a phase where they reject one language and only produce the other.
PASSIVE BILINGUALISM
REPLACIVE BILINGUALISM
occurs when a child picks up a new language and no longer has the occasion to use the old language.
REPLACIVE BILINGUALISM
ENGLISH MONOLINGUALISM BY 3RD GENERATION
ALBA, ET AL, 2002
SEQUENTIAL BILINGUALISM
“Individuals with consistent experience in one language beginning at birth, who then acquire L2 at some point in their lives.” (Bélanger, 2018)
SEQUENTIAL BILINGUALISM
SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS
held the notion that the bilinguals acquiring two languages would internalize and acquire the two languages separately.
SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS
INTERDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS
INTERDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS
reveals the relationship of the first language to the learning of another language. What appears to be two very different phenomena on or above the surface is actually interdependent psychologically.
English Reading Scores of Spanish-English Bilinguals Across Time
STRONG FIRST LANGUAGE BASE AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
The Effects of Age
“An old dog can’t learn new tricks.”
You probably heard this expression a lot, especially in the context of learning a second language. But mostly, in its basic form, older populations just can’t seem to learn a new language. This is generated in the discourse of second language acquisition from the Critical Period Hypothesis by Lenneberg (1967). It postulates that the automatic acquisition of a language in the natural setting takes place only during a critical period. This formulation explains the phenomenon that children are better language learners than adults.
However, we are here to tell you otherwise!
Counter-evidences against Critical Period Hypothesis
Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978) experiment
- Native speakers of English learning Dutch in the Netherlands were separated into age groups of 3 years of age to 15 years of age to examine the difference among them in learning the L2 which is Dutch.
- The experiment showed that the adolescent group made the biggest progress in learning Dutch
Biological evidence
Counter-evidence
Brain lateralization shows that language becomes more associated with areas in the left hemisphere. It was proposed that lateralization has finished by the age of 12 but more recent research has found that lateralization occurred much earlier than previously known.
subtopic
Age Effects in L2 Acquisition
In an increasingly, globalized world, knowing two or more languages offers distinct social, economic and even cognitive benefits.
Throughout the years, there have been countless studies that compare monolinguals and bilinguals and most of the time, the results that have a performance level attached to it, the bilingual group would always outperform the monolingual group.
Brief History of L2 Research
Saer (1923) used the Stanford-Binet intelligence test to find out the level of cognition abilities of samples of English monolingual children and a different sample consisting of Welsh-English bilingual children. In this experiment, the bilinguals performed worse than the monolinguals and with these results, it has been interpreted as a sign of “mental confusion” from the intelligence test.
The fact of the matter is that the test the bilinguals took is in English and the bilinguals were not tested if they are proficient enough to take an English-based intelligence test.
Brief History
Counter-evidences! Peal and Lambert (1962) assigned multiple intelligence tests to French-speaking children in Montreal who are fluent in English as well. The results in these tasks showed a better performance than their monolingual counterparts including tests of nonverbal intelligence.
Counter-evidence of early research about bilinguals
The assumption that bilinguals were cognitively inferior compared to monolinguals have been debunked through the years together with controlling such variables as English proficiency, socioeconomic status, etc.
More good news!
Nowadays, there are a lot of benefits and advantages that have been found through research comparing bilinguals vs. monolinguals:
- Executive function, bilinguals have an advantage in the ability to switch tasks, to switch rules to inhibit irrelevant stimuli or selecting stimuli that is perceived as relevant.
- Meta-cognition, an advantage in the capability of thinking about thinking. In this context, being able to think about the differences in attention to language form, metalinguistic knowledge. For instance, the knowledge of language rules that will be shown in the upcoming units.
Advantages of being Bilingual
Executive Function
- bilinguals have shown the mastery of inhibition thus displaying mental flexibility and the ability to update information learned and be consistent with new information
Embedded Figures Test by Bialystok (1992) - the participants in this test are shown a complex shape, which is easily visible and the goal is to find the hidden or embedded shape in the visible complex shape.
- The experiment concluded that superior ability of bilinguals to attend to information that is wanted and to ignore irrelevant stimulus which is reflected in the better executive control of bilinguals compared to monolinguals
But wait there's more!
Executive Function
Dimensional Change Card Sort task performed by Bialystok (1999)
Another advantage!
The experiment is presented as a game in which images that vary on two dimensions, usually shape and color are sorted according to one of them. For instance,
- there are cards containing either red or blue circles or squares are put into containers marked by an image of either a red square or a blue circle
- the participants are then asked to follow the rule of sorting the cards by one characteristic first
- blue in one box and reds in another box
- then the rule of sorting the cards changes every time
The test showed favorable results to the bilingual group of participants reflecting in their effective use of the executive function to be able to adjust to changes and to switch between goals.
COMMUNITY AND EDUCATION
- Education institutions and community organizations are local environments that can influence both second language learning and retention of a first language.
- Additive bilingualism is a strong form of bilingualism where the acquisition of a second language is coupled with maintenance and retention of the first language.
Community and Education
Education in Schools
Education in Schools
- Education is plagued by underfunding especially for bilingual and cultural programming.
- Infrastructure, staffing and professional development often can't keep up in areas with an increasing diversity of immigrants and areas that are new immigrant destinations.
Study done by Hopkins, Lowenhaupt and Sweet 2015
- ESL teachers are usually classified as language arts teachers, but this limits content specific knowledge especially in areas like math.
Education in Programs
Anderson and Sidiq 2017
- Bilingual family literacy programs can benefit the child and their families even beyond literacy outcomes including parental assurance in maintaining their home language.
Gast 2016
- After school programs are an important site outside the classroom that have more capacity to foster cultural and language diversity with appropriate staffing and funding.
Neighborhood Majority Language
Community Neighborhoods
Berry 2006
- Living in a neighborhood where the majority speak your ethnic language is associated with lower national language proficiency and use, but high ethnic language use.
- Living in a neighborhood where the majority speak the national language is associated with lower ethnic language proficiency and use, but high national language use
- Neither of these contexts is associated with the principle of additive bilingualism and neither is correlated with an integration profile which is correlated with the most positive well being outcomes.
Community Workshop in Australia
Community Programs
Eisenchlas and Schalley 2019
- Busting bilingual myths is an excellent first step in educating the public especially in societies that emphasize monolingualism.
- One such myth is that second language learning and academics will be negatively impacted by at home first language use.
- This was tackled by the workshop whose main goal was to educate and empower parents to make informed decisions
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
- language requirements
- What is the purpose of those language policies?
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Social Function
Purposes
- The role of language -- communication
- information exchange and emotional exchange
- Individuals are grouped together -- society
A Equal Society
Equal Society
- Newman et al., (2012) found that direct contact with other languages is a perceived cultural threat for the local people, such cultural threat may cause them to experience some degree of emotional disturbance.
- language not only helps to communicate, more importantly it helps attenuate the perceived cultural threat for local people.
Conclusion
There are a multitude of factors that can affect second language learning in immigrant populations, and in our chapter, we have broken them down into four sections beginning with the individual and cognitive levels moving onto broader contexts like education and community as well as the larger social and political influences of the host country.
At each of these levels there are both barriers and facilitators of second language learning, and we also looked at the advantages of bilingualism. Second language learning often runs parallel to acculturation, with one helping the other along and it is important to look at the ways that this learning is impacted from several perspectives in order to help facilitate acculturation and the psychological well-being of immigrants.
THANK YOU
thank you
gracias
merci
감사합니다
salamat
grazie
ありがとう
danke
xie xie
mahalo
References
References
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