Teachers’ Perspectives on the Impact of English Immersion on Spanish Language Development in Primary Education

Role of Panchayati Raj Institutions in Development of Primary Education

Background. There are many factors that affect the development of speaking in a foreign language. Drawing on the theories that state that competencies established in a native language will transfer across foreign languages, this study examines whether there is a relationship between native and foreign language speaking proficiency. Purpose. Although literature research indicates that native and foreign language acquisition processes are interrelated, there is a lack of studies comparing proficiency levels of native and foreign language speaking skills in adult learners. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between speaking competences in English as a Foreign Language and Czech as a Native Language in university students. Methods. A between-group design was used to compare two groups of fifty university students at two different levels of their speaking proficiency in English. Both groups were tested in speaking in Czech. Each test was assessed by an analytical rating scale examining four speaking sub-skills: accuracy, discourse, content and paralinguistics. The scores were analyzed using the F-Test for Equality of Variances and T-Test for the Differences between the Means. Results. The results showed that the group with the lower level of speaking proficiency in English achieved significantly worse scores for their speaking sub-skills in Czech than the group with the higher level of speaking proficiency in English. Implications. The study offers another piece of empirical evidence in support of the theories that state that competencies established in a native language will transfer across foreign languages and suggests the importance of the development of native language competence with regard to later proficiency in a foreign language.

The article discusses the features of digital reading at the stage of search, relevance assessment and selection of information in native and foreign languages. The formation of skills to navigate information flows, understand what is read in a foreign language, and use the information to solve professional problems is one of the goals of teaching foreign languages at the present stage of development of higher education. However, the abundance of information sources on the Internet gives rise to problems in their choice. The author analyzes the difficulties faced by students in the process of searching and selecting relevant information both in their native and foreign languages. When using foreign sources, students experience more difficulties at the stage of information search, caused by differences between reading in their native and foreign languages. It is noted that most studies in the field of features of searching and selecting information from digital sources are limited to one language, most often native, and there is a shortage of works on the material of the Russian language. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the strategies for searching and assessing the relevance of a source of information in the native (Russian) and foreign (English) languages differ among first and second year university students of non-linguistic faculties. The article presents the results of a survey conducted among first and second year students of non-linguistic faculties. The results of the study indicate that the skills formed by students when working with Russian-language sources are generally transferred to English-language ones, but students prefer to work with information in their native language. The article reveals similarities and differences in the process of searching for educational and / or professional information and concludes that the skill of evaluating and verifying online sources is insufficiently developed.

Language learning motivation plays a critical role in a successful language learning process. Research into foreign/second language learning motivation has been a focal point in the field of foreign/second language acquisition for long. Over the past twenty years, there has been a substantial body of research dedicated to motivation, conducted across various social and cultural contexts. These studies have played a crucial role in exploring the factors that impact learners’ motivation to acquire a foreign language, as well as in examining the intricate relationship between motivation and other facets of foreign language learning. Foreign language proficiency is seen as the ultimate aim of foreign language learning. Some studies have delved into the relationship between foreign language learning motivation and foreign language proficiency, and no agreement has been reached yet. Nonetheless, there exists a notable dearth of research concerning the relationship between English learning motivation and English language proficiency of Chinese ethnic minority learners who have minority language as native language, Mandarin as national language, and learn English as a foreign language. To address this gap, a quantitative study was undertaken to identify if there is relationship between English learning motivation and English proficiency among ethnic minority learners in rural China. Pearson correlation coefficients were performed on the data which were collected from English learner questionnaire and English proficiency test. The findings revealed that there is no relationship between the participants’ English learning motivation and English proficiency. The findings can be treated as evidence that high level of English learning motivation may not always contribute to good English proficiency. Researchers should concern more about motivation in relation to English proficiency. The results of this study provide implications for both policymakers and English educators in ethnic minority regions of China.

In this study, we examine the Spanish proficiency progress of elementary Spanish-English bilinguals in three types of language program models: a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) model with a 90/10 language allocation, a DLBE model with a 50/50 language allocation, and an English as a Second Language (ESL) model over an academic year. In the domain of speaking, individual student characteristics were most predictive of progress. For listening and reading, time had the greatest impact on their Spanish language growth. With writing, the most impactful moderator was the teacher, and this was most predictive in the DLBE 90/10 model. Implications point to the need to provide immersive writing instruction and to arrange DLBE schedules to ensure the inclusion of writing. Oftentimes in 50/50 DLBE models, the domain of writing is least covered within the partner language with English taking precedence due to testing accountability. As provisions for dual language bilingual education are increasing, this study holds important implications for this model's impact on Spanish-English bilinguals’ Spanish proficiency. Future studies will examine outcomes across time among emergent bilinguals in their native language, along with the potential influences of the student, the teacher, and the demographics of the school and community.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Japanese government proposed a plan to increase Japanese people’s English proficiency in order to help Japan remain competitive in the international market after the “lost decade”, which was a difficult period for the country owing to the collapse of the bubble economy and numerous natural disasters. The lost decade has now become “the lost two decades” (The Economist, 2009; Okabe, 2010; Tamny, 2011); and after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, the coming decade is likely to be more challenging than ever. The calm and orderly way in which the tsunami and earthquake victims sought to cope with these disasters has been widely reported around the world in tone of both surprise and admiration (Belson & Onishi, 2011; Wakabayashi & Sekiguchi, 2011). While the nation has demonstrated solidarity during this crisis, the intense employment insecurity due to ongoing financial difficulties has tended to make Japanese youth more “inwardlooking” (Yamamoto & Iwaki, 2011); in particular, the business sector has expressed concern at the sharp decline in the number of students studying overseas, because this will eventually affect the performance of their overseas offices, which rely on overseas-educated graduates to join their workforce (Asahi Shimbun, 2011). While Japanese youth have been criticised for their negative attitude and lack of interest in overseas opportunities, their “inwardness” (内向 き志向) is not unrelated to the position of the nation itself at the beginning of the new century. As I have argued elsewhere (Hashimoto, 2009), a negative view of globalisation and an emphasis on the positive qualities of Japan and its people form the background to the Japanese attitude of self-reliance in tackling adversity. As Fairclough (2001) points out, the world has not suddenly globalised, but a new global order has gradually developed, prompting “the struggle to impose orresist the new order”, which is “in large part a struggle for or against a new language” (p. 205). English is certainly not a new foreign language in Japan, but the government’s approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language (TEFL) has been designed to assure that the language of the new order does not undermine the core identity of the Japanese nation and its people. Japan’s English language policies are one example of the reconstruction of national and cultural identity through the discourse of English in Asian contexts (Tsui & Tollefson, 2007). It has been pointed out that the unsuccessful delivery of English as a second (or foreign) language programmes in primary education in some Asian countries is a result of resistance or objections to the spread of English; even in countries where English is a required subject, students’ “demotivation for learning English is observed to derive from such resistance as well as from problems in instruction policies” (Baldauf, Kaplan, Kamwangamalu, & Bryant, 2011). “English education” (英語教育) has been one of the hotly debated educational issues in Japan precisely because it involves a balance between maintaining the national identity and legitimising the power of English in the society in order to achieve international economic success. It is indeed a complex matter to argue for either the success or the failure of “English education” in Japan, because it involves many parties such as policy makers, the education industry, children and their parents, and educational practitioners, including native speakers of English serving as teachers or assistants. While some blame the bureaucracy for the failure of government-initiated reforms (Aspinall, 2011; Cutts, 1997; Hall, 1998), others believe that English has been dehumanised and decontextualised (LoCastro, 1991), as well as deconstructed (Hashimoto, 2000) by the Japanese education system, or that the language has tended to be “Japanised” to some extent (Kachru, 2005). The recent focus on the treatment of native speakers of English in Japanese society (Houghton & Rivers, forthcoming) highlights the relative status of Japanese and foreign teachers of English in Japan, which differs from the “native speakerism” suggested by Holliday (2005). Indeed, there is a strong relationship between the cultural representations of teachers and curriculum delivery in the Japanese education system. This chapter examines the most recent curriculum changes in Japanese primary schools, junior high schools, and senior high schools for both English and Japanese subjects in order to identify elements of continuity in the changes that have occurred. I analyse language policy documents, and in particular the Course of Study, applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a methodological tool in order to uncover gaps and contradictions between policy texts available in English and in Japanese. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that TEFL policy in Japan is not fundamentally about furthering the learning of English, but instead functions to promote and shape the national language, Japanese.

ABSTRACTThe objective of this study was to clarify the relationship between developed abilities for graduate‐level study as measured in two languages, Spanish and English, for bilingual Puerto Rican examinees more proficient in Spanish than in English. The sample consisted of 451 persons who had taken both the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test and the Prueba de Admisión Para Estudios Graduados (PAEG), a test in Spanish used for admission to graduate study and law schools in Puerto Rico. The PAEG contains sections that measure verbal, quantitative, and writing ability in Spanish. The verbal and quantitative sections contain item types that are similar to those of the GRE. The existence of the PAEG provided the rare opportunity to compare test performance in the students' native language with their test performance in a second language.In addition there were two measures of the students' English language proficiency. Besides the aforementioned verbal and quantitative tests in Spanish, the PAEG contains a subtest in English that measures reading comprehension and vocabulary. The normative sample for this test were non‐native speakers of English. For a subset of 102 individuals in this data set, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was also available. The PAEG‐English and the TOEFL were used as measures of English proficiency to investigate how the relationship between the two aptitude tests was moderated by English proficiency.The analyses were patterned after the procedures followed by Alderman (1982) with undergraduate‐level English and Spanish measures. That is, several regression models were run in which a Spanish‐language measure (one PAEG ability test), an English proficiency measure (TOEFL or PAEG‐English), and a term for the interaction between the PAEG ability test score and the English‐proficiency test score were used to predict each criterion. The regression analyses had five different criteria: the GRE General Test verbal, quantitative, and analytic measures and two GRE Subject Tests, Psychology and Biology.The regression analyses revealed that each GRE General Test measure had approximately the same proportion of total variance explained by the predictors (63%‐67%; see Table 7), but the proportion of variance in test scores explained by the terms associated with measures of English proficiency varied substantially across tests. The proportion of variance explained by the English proficiency terms (both the main effect for score and the interaction) was highest for the GRE verbal test (34%), lowest for the quantitative test (8%), and intermediate for the analytical test (16%).Among the two groups with GRE Subject Test scores, the proportion of variance explained by the English proficiency terms for the Psychology and Biology tests was also intermediate between the values for the verbal and quantitative tests. The degree to which the variance in verbal scores was explained by the English‐proficiency terms was approximately double the corresponding value for the Subject Tests. Thus, students' test performance was affected by English proficiency on all tests, but these effects were largest by far on the GRE verbal test

ABSTRACTRecent research using scenarios such as the Asian disease problem has demonstrated a “foreign-language effect”, whereby the framing effect (tendency to be risk-averse in a gain frame and risk seeking in a loss frame) is not (or not as) apparent in the foreign language as the native language. The aim of the current study was to further investigate decision-making and the framing effect in a native language, Thai and a foreign language, English, using the Asian disease/Financial crisis problem (Study 1) and a novel financial decision-making task (Study 2). Results from Study 1 confirmed previous findings as a foreign-language effect emerged. In contrast, in Study 2, a framing effect emerged in both the native and foreign languages of the Thai participants. These contradictory results point to language factors as well as emotional and cognitive demands of the task contributing to the occurrence of the foreign-language effect.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has been implemented in Spain for more than two decades, and the number of schools that have joined CLIL initiatives has progressively grown in an attempt to increase students’ proficiency in English; all of these developments are indicative of the importance of foreign language learning (FLL) in this country. The aim of this paper is to analyse the promotion of cognitive skills by teachers in the subjects of science and social science in primary education in the Spanish Region of Murcia. A mixed methodology combining techniques for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data was implemented. The results show a tendency to lapse into low-order thinking skills, which can hinder the development of demanding cognitive skills and creative learning processes in CLIL lessons. Some factors might affect these teaching practices, such as the type of teaching staff position or the experience that teachers have gained over time. The article concludes with some suggestions for further research.

This article examines the development of primary English education from teachers’ and students’ perspectives; this is done by investigating environment, curriculum and teacher and students’ information. The study was carried out with 42 primary English teachers and 404 primary students from 90 urban and rural primary schools in 13 regions in the Hunan Province, China, the participants engaged in the questionnaire tasks to investigate the present status and problems with primary English education in the Hunan Province. Based on the assessment indicators through CIPP model, combining educational theory and sustainable development theory, the present study develops a primary school English education evaluation model and conducts a practical investigation of primary school English education in the Hunan Province, based on the established model. The findings indicate that the quality of teachers has improved, teaching methods and teaching equipment have become diversified, and student interests and English proficiencies have increased. However, there are still deficiencies in the implementation of Primary English Education in the Hunan Province. For instance, certain schools improperly implement national policies, resulting in imbalanced education. Additionally, educational inequality persists due to disparities in family economic status and importance. Moreover, regional, ideological, and management factors contribute to uneven allocation of educational resources. Furthermore, significant disparities exist between urban and rural areas in terms of teacher qualifications, teaching quality, and school operating hours. The article proposes enhancing awareness of sustainable development, strengthening supervision, and seeking educational and policy support to facilitate the sustainable development of primary English education.

Previous work has shown that moral decision making depends on whether moral dilemmas are presented in the native or a foreign language (Foreign Language effect). In that work, the focus was on bilinguals' final decision, but the tasks used, failed to capture the processes involved over time. The aim of this study was to examine the time course of moral decision making in bilinguals' native and foreign language prior to and after their moral decision. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 82 Dutch-English bilinguals listened to 20 moral dilemmas (e.g., would you kill one to save five?) in their native or foreign language, while looking at two pictures containing key people involved in the dilemmas. These pictures illustrated (1) the person/people that is/are sacrificed, and (2) the person/people that is/are not sacrificed, depending on the participants' decision which was measured with yes/no-questions. The Foreign Language effect was replicated for the decisions on the personal dilemmas. Importantly, the eye gaze data showed that in the native language, listeners looked at the person who they did not sacrifice, whereas in the foreign language, they looked at the people who they sacrificed. A speculative explanation is that bilinguals might have experienced guilt in the native language, and therefore focused attention on the person they did not sacrifice, while in the foreign language they might have experienced less guilt because they focused attention on the people they sacrificed. More research is needed to understand the influence of factors such as emotion reduction and cognitive load on moral decision making.

The disclosure of neurophysiological foundations of both native and foreign languages is an actual problem of modern science, since their understanding can have not only theoretical but also practical, including social significance. The Stroop effect, which allows to estimate the level of voluntary attention, is also widely used in the study of language functions. By the task of Poffenberger, it is possible to evaluate the interhemispheric transfer of information. The study used a combined test with the tasks of the Stroop, Poffenberger, Sperry with native (Russian or Ukrainian) and foreign (English) languages. Students studying English were the subjects surveyed, but the vast majority of them never lived in the English-speaking environment. Stimuli (the word "Green" or "Red" written in relevant or irrelevant color) were exposed on the right or left from the center of the screen. In the case of congruence the word and its semantic meaning should press one button by the ipsilateral hand ("yes"), while in the case of mismatch – the other button by the contralateral one ("no"). In previous studies, we found that the answer "yes" is faster than answers "no" for both right and left hands. Comparison of latent period of reactions of similar responses of both hands showed that answer "yes" is faster for the right hand and answer "no" – for the left one, so that the difference in latent period between "yes" and "no" for the left hand is shorter than for the right one. This points out to easily transfer of information from the left hemisphere to the right one than in the opposite direction. Current study found out that in case of performing the test in the native language, in comparison with the foreign one, latent periods of reactions were in the average 60-70 ms longer with the same number of errors, which can be hypothetically explained by fewer associations of words of the foreign language and simpler neural networks for their processing. When performing the test in native language, the number of errors for both hands is the same, whereas when performing the test in English the left hand carries fewer errors than the right one. Probably this indicates that the center of error control in the case of passing a test in a foreign language is situated in the right hemisphere.

Purpose Extending dual-process theory to negotiation contexts, this study aims to examine how using a foreign versus native language influences negotiators’ self-efficacy, strategy use and negotiation outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The authors used one face-to-face negotiation and two experimental scenarios studies (n = 650) with German and French dual-language speakers. Analyses included both individual-level and dyadic modeling (actor-partner interdependence models) to examine intra- and interpersonal processes. Findings Across studies, negotiators reported higher self-efficacy in their native language but achieved better joint outcomes in their foreign language. Lower self-efficacy in the foreign language condition predicted superior joint outcomes, greater insight into counterpart priorities and increased use of cooperative strategies (problem-solving and compromising) by both actors and partners. Mediation analyses supported that foreign language use improved joint outcomes via enhanced insight. Research limitations/implications Findings are based on controlled simulations; future work should examine high-stakes, real-world negotiations and other language combinations. Practical implications Training negotiators to strategically use foreign languages can enhance perspective-taking and analytical engagement, promoting cooperation, mutual gains and more equitable agreements in multilingual and diverse workplace settings. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has jointly examined self-efficacy and negotiation outcomes while distinguishing between native and foreign language use. This study addresses that gap by isolating the psychological effects of language, holding culture constant and applying dual-process theory to explain how foreign versus native language use shapes self-efficacy, cognitive processing and negotiation behavior.

The importance of primary foreign language education of younger school students for further study of a foreign language in secondary and high schools is emphasized. The concept of “primary foreign language education” is studied in detail, the aspects and specifics of primary foreign language education presented in methodological science since 1940 are identified, the terms “language learning” and “language acquisition” are analyzed. Within the framework of the article, we addressed the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard in the field of implementation of primary foreign language education and determined the role of the younger student in teaching a foreign language. It is substantiated that the skills and abilities of foreign language proficiency formed in elementary school are the basis for further mastering of a foreign language by students in order to implement full-fledged foreign language communication. The specific trait of primary education is a game activity that lays the foundations for the natural mastery of a foreign language by younger students. The main advantage of playing activities in comparison with other types of activities is the provision of natural motives for the implementation of basic speech actions by young students. Reliance on the native language and consideration of the patterns of mastering native speech when teaching a foreign language are the most important characteristics of primary foreign language education. The conclusion is made that learning a foreign language in elementary school occurs naturally and through the same channels as mastering the native language.

Native languages are acquired in emotionally rich contexts, whereas foreign languages are typically acquired in emotionally neutral academic environments. As a consequence of this difference, it has been suggested that bilinguals' emotional reactivity in foreign-language contexts is reduced as compared with native language contexts. In the current study, we investigated whether this emotional distance associated with foreign languages could modulate automatic responses to self-related linguistic stimuli. Self-related stimuli enhance performance by boosting memory, speed, and accuracy as compared with stimuli unrelated to the self (the so-called self-bias effect). We explored whether this effect depends on the language context by comparing self-biases in a native and a foreign language. Two experiments were conducted with native Spanish speakers with a high level of English proficiency in which they were asked to complete a perceptual matching task during which they associated simple geometric shapes (circles, squares, and triangles) with the labels "you," "friend," and "other" either in their native or foreign language. Results showed a robust asymmetry in the self-bias in the native- and foreign-language contexts: A larger self-bias was found in the native than in the foreign language. An additional control experiment demonstrated that the same materials administered to a group of native English speakers yielded robust self-bias effects that were comparable in magnitude to the ones obtained with the Spanish speakers when tested in their native language (but not in their foreign language). We suggest that the emotional distance evoked by the foreign-language contexts caused these differential effects across language contexts. These results demonstrate that the foreign-language effects are pervasive enough to affect automatic stages of emotional processing.