The Construction of Meaning in a Second Language: The Polemics of Family and School

Abstract

U Preliminary results from a study the author is currently conducting in an urban area of western Massachusetts demonstrate that most Puerto Rican children have difficulty relating the English language sociocultural reality to that of their native language and home. As Elam (1972) explains, differing rates of language learning act as cues to the general level of a child's emotional adjustment and the resolution of cultural identification and conflicts. Because many Hispanic children are monolingual when they enter schools in the United States, the educational system provides the physical and psychological setting for English language acquisition. As both the language of instruction and the language of communication with in-school peers, English occupies a major part of the child's speaking and listening day. The child's parents, who previously played the primary role in socializing and transmitting culture and language to the child, can no longer command the child's involvement. In time, the native language assumes only an intimacy or family-related function, while English becomes the language of education and general social use. The child is placed in the middle of two very different realities; the acquisition of the new culture and language has as much the potential of bringing psychological stress and the destruction of the child's sense of self and well-being as it does of creating a bilingual-bicultural individual. The primary focus of this study is to investigate how semantic memory (and, in turn, the lexicon) deals with the development of this two-language, two-culture creation. In acquiring a second language, an individual structures and interprets experiences in the second-language world in terms of categories derived from the native language and culture together with perceptions of linguistic and cultural phenomena in the second-language environment (Strick 1980). The process involved in the interrelation of the bilingual's two languages is dependent upon the use of context (the immediate linguistic context, the discourse context, and the situation in which communication occurs) to enable