Bilingual Learners Research Articles

Genre Pedagogy: A Framework to Prepare History Teachers to Teach Language

This qualitative research study examined how two novice secondary teachers drew on preservice preparation to teach language demands of their content area to bilingual learners in urban high schools in a city in the northeastern United States. Data sources included videotaped class observations, lesson plans and teaching materials, and semistructured interviews to elicit participants' perspectives on how they taught language. Findings suggest that participants integrated significant components of language teaching into content instruction, such as explicit vocabulary instruction and group activities organized around structured interactions with classmates and texts, but did not consistently teach language. The implication is that novice teachers need more guidance to identify and teach linguistic features of content tasks and texts. Accordingly, this article proposes a genre-based framework to teach language illustrated with classroom scenarios that demonstrate how linguistic analysis and cognitive scaffolds can be incorporated into brief targeted activities that support both language and conceptual development. Although recommendations are based on history genres, implications of this analysis may be relevant to a broad group of researchers, teacher educators, and teachers focused on promoting disciplinary literacy in secondary content classes for bilingual learners.

Compilation Techniques for Pedagogically Effective Bilingual Learners’ Dictionaries

Chinese, Japanese and Arabic bilingual dictionaries suffer from shortcomings rarely seen in works of other major languages. These include archaic headwords and senses, inappropriate examples, an overly prescriptive approach, learner-unfriendly sense ordering, and the omission of important multiword expressions, among others. This paper describes how three bilingual learners’ dictionaries address these problems, focusing on compilation and design innovations that increase learner usability, and compares them with other dictionaries that do not meet these goals adequately. Specific issues to be addressed include sense ordering, the logical interrelatedness of senses, the semantic transparency and morphological productivity of Chinese characters, lexical categories, headword selection criteria, and the treatment of multiword expressions.

Duolingo as a Bilingual Learning App: A Case Study

Due to the evolution of technology, this study focuses on the use of technology in order to promote language learning. Duolingo is one of the modern applications that facilitate acquiring a second language. Hence, the study aims to confirm the hypothesis that Duolingo helps promote acquiring two languages simultaneously for beginners. It is a mixed-method study including observation, assessment, and interview. It is also a case study that involves one participant who used Duolingo to learn Spanish and English simultaneously for two months. The participant is a male school student whose age is 12 years old, and he lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. After collecting the data, they were analysed and described to have the final results. At the end, the results displayed that Duolingo can promote acquiring two languages for beginners, but it has limitations. Thus, it is recommended to develop Duolingo for advanced levels as well as for English language learners.

Sketch Engine for Bilingual Lexicography

Sketch Engine is a leading corpus query and corpus management tool that has been used for many large dictionary projects. The paper summarizes its features supporting bilingual lexicography and the creation of bilingual learner’s dictionaries. Some of these features have been added recently; some of them have been part of the software for a rather long time, but they have been recently improved.

At home with language

In this extract from her book, Child Development, Linda Pound examines the importance of communication-friendly spaces for bilingual and multilingual learners, and suggests ways to include support for parents.

Syntactic Complexity at the Intermediate Level in EFL Writing by Early Balanced Bilinguals

Syntactic Complexity at the Intermediate Level in EFL Writing by Early Balanced Bilinguals

Comparing Bilingual to Monolingual Learners on English Spelling: A Meta-analytic Review.

This study reports on a meta-analysis to examine how bilingual learners compare with English monolingual learners on two English spelling outcomes: real-word spelling and pseudo-word spelling. Eighteen studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2014 were retrieved. The study-level variables and characteristics (e.g. sample size, study design and research instruments) were coded, and 29 independent effect sizes across the 18 retrieved studies were analysed. We found that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on real-word spelling overall and more so in early grades, but monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on pseudo-word spelling. Further, bilinguals at risk for reading difficulties did better on real-word spelling than monolinguals at risk for reading difficulties. Having investigated systematic sources of variability in effect sizes, we conclude that in comparison with their monolingual peers, bilingual learners, especially those from alphabetic L1 backgrounds, are able to master constrained skills, such as English spelling, in the current instructional context. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Duolingo as a Bilingual Learning App: a Case Study

Duolingo as a Bilingual Learning App: a Case Study

Language learning impairment in sequential bilingual children

We review and synthesize empirical evidence at the intersection of two populations: children with language learning impairment (LLI) and children from immigrant families who learn a single language from birth and a second language beginning in early childhood. LLI is a high incidence disorder that, in recent years, has been referred to by researchers and clinical educators as specific language impairment (SLI), primary language impairment (PLI), developmental language disorder or language disorder not otherwise specified. Over the past two decades, significant international attention has been directed at the LLI-sequential bilingual learner interface. Researchers have developed linguistic profiles of children with LLI who are learning different language pairs, investigated the diagnostic accuracy of various measures and, more recently, examined the relative efficacy of different treatment protocols. Participants in these studies range in age from 3 to 12 years. A main goal of this review is to relate available evidence to key theoretical and pedagogical issues. An additional aim is to indicate main areas of need for future research.

Word recognition strategies amongst isiXhosa/English bilingual learners: The interaction of orthography and language of learning and teaching

Word recognition is a major component of fluent reading and involves an interaction of language structure, orthography, and metalinguistic skills. This study examined reading strategies in isiXhosa and the transfer of these strategies to an additional language, English. IsiXhosa was chosen because of its agglutinative structure and conjunctive orthography. Data was collected at two schools which differed with regards to their language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the first three years of schooling: isiXhosa and English respectively. Participants completed a wordand pseudo-word reading aloud task in each of two languages which hypothetically impose different cognitive demands. Skills transfer occurs to a limited extent when the language of first literacy uses a transparent orthography, but is less predictable when the language of first literacy uses an opaque orthography. We show that although there is transfer of word recognition strategies from transparent to deep orthographies, felicitous transfer is limited to sublexical strategies; infelicitous transfer also occurs when lexical strategies are transferred in problematic ways. The results support the contention that reading strategies and cognitive skills are fine tuned to particular languages. This study emphasises that literacies in different languages present readers with different structural puzzles which require language-particular suites of cognitive reading skills. Keywords: Foundation phase education; multilingual education; reading; word recognition; automaticity; isiXhosa reading

Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

ABSTRACTSingapore’s bilingual policy legitimises English not only as the language of governmental administration and interethnic communication, but also as the medium of instruction in all schools on all levels and across all subjects except mother tongues (MTs). As a result of these politics of language recognition, a visible shift has occurred in all ethnic groups away from MTs towards English. To rectify the language shift situation, the government has emphasised that developing bilingualism and raising bilingual children should begin in preschools. In this paper, we examine two top-down official documents: Review of Mother Tongue Languages Report, issued in 2011, and Nurturing Early Learners Framework for Mother Tongue Languages, developed in 2013. Attempting to identify some of the complex factors that influence language shift, we present an intertextual analysis of the Report and the curriculum Framework. In doing so, we compare the consistencies and locate the implicit inconsistencies in the policy position on bilingual education in preschools. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for changing the current bilingual educational models and providing teacher training programmes that maximise the learning opportunities of young bilingual learners.

Limits on Monolingualism? A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Infants' Abilities to Integrate Lexical Tone in Novel Word Learning.

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language.

Language attitudes of adolescent Filipino bilingual learners towards English and Filipino

The current study explored the different attitudes of bilingual high school students towards English and Filipino and examined the relationship of language attitudes in terms of gender, age, and socio-economic status (SES). A total of 473 Filipino participants, randomly selected from three secondary learning institutions (two public, one private), answered a three-part questionnaire (Language Background Questionnaire, General Language Attitudes Survey, and Language Orientation Survey). Descriptive analysis and Pearson correlation revealed the following: in general, students have very high positive attitude towards English and Filipino; females have significantly higher positive attitudes towards English than males; SES is significantly related to positive attitudes towards English language; gender is significantly related with instrumental language orientation in Filipino; age is significantly related to instrumental language orientation in Filipino and integrative language orientation in English; and SES is significantly related to all language orientations.

“I write to show how beautiful my languages are”: Translingual Writing Instruction in English-Dominant Classrooms

This is a generative time in the study of language, literacy, and education as scholars theorize and examine the possibilities of leveraging students’ linguistic repertoires as pedagogical resources. In this cross-case analysis, we share how three elementary language arts teachers in different regions of the United States developed translingual contexts for writing and how those practices served English learners’ composing practices. Findings suggest that community languages and literacies, teacher modeling, and the use and study of linguistically diverse texts are integral to building translingual writing contexts for bilingual learners, including those in English-dominant classrooms.

What to do if we have nothing to rely on: Late bilinguals process L2 grammatical features like L1 natives

Abstract It is predicted that bilinguals rely on their first language (L1) to process the second language (L2). However, it remains largely unknown as to how the brain processes unique grammatical features of L2. To answer this question, we explored how Chinese-English bilinguals recognized English inflected verbs that are lacking in Chinese. By using a semantic consistency judgment task, we found that highly proficient late bilinguals processed dichotomic regular and irregular inflections the way English monolinguals did. Behaviorally, regular past tense verbs significantly primed recognition of verb stems, but irregulars did not enhance recognition of their simple forms. Brain imaging results showed that, in contrast to irregulars, late bilinguals additionally employed the procedural memory system of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), middle temporal gyrus (MTG), supramarginal gyrus (SMG), cerebellum, and basal ganglia (BG) to process regulars. Such a differential brain activity pattern elicited by L2 syntax and semantics was distinctive from the way Chinese-English bilinguals processed their L1 syntax and semantics, which supported Ullman's declarative/procedural model. Native-like brain activity elicited by L2 grammatical features suggested that unique language features were processed through specialized neural substrates by late bilinguals either. Meanwhile, we also found that late bilingual learners with a high L2 proficiency still employed the cognitive control system (the BA47 and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, DLPFC) more heavily to process L2 syntax than L2 semantics. It supported the sensorimotor/emergentist (S/E) model which emphasized that cognitive control must be involved in L2 processing, and ran contrary to the fade-away prediction of the cognitive control process of the Convergent Hypothesis.

Explaining bilingual learning outcomes in terms of exposure and input

I had several goals in writing my keynote “Exposure and input in bilingual development”. The first was to emphasize that there are two components to the study of environmental effects on language learning. The first is the stuff ‘out there’ (exposure) that we want to observe and count and whose effects we want to assess; the second is the internal, mentally represented stuff (myinput) that is logically related to a particular learning problem. Both exposure and input are indissociable from assumptions about what language acquisition mechanisms do and the nature of linguistic cognition. Accordingly, for example, a decision to count ‘words’ in child-directed speech (CDS) or via a parental questionnaire is not an innocent one. Not only can one find radically different views on what a ‘word’ is (Krause, Bosch & Clahsen, 2015), one can find work that questions the need to postulate such a unit at all (see discussion in MacWhinney, 2000). It follows that adopting a clear position, about which abstract mentally represented elements are crucialcuesto learning some phenomenon, is an essential step in deciding what to count in CDS.

What can errors tell us about differences between monolingual and bilingual vocabulary learning?

ABSTRACTError patterns in vocabulary learning data were used as a window into the mechanisms that underlie vocabulary learning performance in bilinguals vs. monolinguals. English–Spanish bilinguals (n = 18) and English-speaking monolinguals (n = 18) were taught novel vocabulary items in association with English translations. At testing, participants produced English translations for the newly learned words. Findings revealed broad learning advantages in the bilingual data. Moreover, bilinguals made proportionately more deep (within-category) semantic errors than monolinguals when tested immediately after learning. We interpret these data to suggest that bilingual learners may encode the information associated with the novel words to a deeper semantic level than monolinguals.

The untouchables

Carroll's critique (Carroll) of the field of bilingualism yields strong directives. Let us not study specific groups of bilinguals, and make big claims about bilingual learning. Let us not study one domain, say vocabulary, and generalize to bilinguals’ language. These are all valid points. She also voices strong skepticism about how current literature deals with language experience: “Much of the bilingual exposure literature making claims about quantity or quality of exposure is little more than speculation, built from a ‘logic’ about amounts of exposure that will not bear close scrutiny.” (8)

The hierarchies of phonetic realization of focus in second language speech

Two experiments were conducted to examine the phonetic realization of focus in L2 Mandarin by L1 American English speakers and in L2 English by L1 Beijing Mandarin speakers. The production data in both experiments indicated an acoustical hierarchy of duration > intensity > F0 at the sentential level. This hierarchy was correlated with another hierarchy in sentence location relative to focus: pre-focus > in-focus > post-focus. In other words, L2 learners tended to produce more nativelike patterns of duration than intensity, and intensity than F0, to code focus. These patterns were more salient in pre-focus condition than in-focus condition, and in in-focus condition than post-focus condition. These findings are consistent with Wu and Chung (2011, ICPhS) and Chen, Xu and Guion-Anderson (2014, Phonetica) that bilingual learners used more duration and intensity than F0 and more in-focus expansion than post-focus compression to code focus in L2 speech. Post-focus compression of F0 was the most difficult acoustic cue in phonetically realizing L2 focus. The nativelikeness of focus realization in L2 speech increased with the increase of L2 experience. [This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China #61573187 and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China NJUSTWGY14001.]

Complementing the Common Core with Holistic Biliteracy

In this article the authors propose that biliteracy is a more challenging and rigorous form of literacy than the English-only orientation of the Common Core State Standards (NGACBP & CCSSO, 2010). Because learning to read and write in two languages differs from learning to read and write in one, we argue that biliteracy requires its own pedagogies, methodologies, and assessment systems. Data derived from the reported study support a trajectory toward bilingualism informed by a framework that capitalizes on theories of integrated and holistic biliteracy in order to re-conceptualize the ways educators can interpret biliteracy assessments of emerging bilingual learners in Spanish and English.