Summary and reflection of week 2 (by Merica)

Tuesday, August 28

* Foreword: Sorry it's perhaps a bit longer than expected, but I didn't want to leave anything out. Also sorry I didn't post earlier but my laptop is in the shop.

Reminder: We should post a photo of ourself on the blog site if we haven’t done so yet. It helps everybody match names and faces.

Instructions for group discussion: Students were provided with three different questions to discuss (each on different colored papers). The questions were from comments on the blog. Each group discussed the question on their sheet. Later, we formed new groups, with one student from each original group. In our new groups, we shared the main points from our first group discussion.

Personal note: I really liked the group dynamics and the discussion topics in this activity. I might borrow this idea sometime...

Comments from the blue group (from Megumi’s comment to Anne’s chapter 2 preview):
- If there is no guarantee that early start works, the philosophy of teaching should be to have fun to increase students motivation.

- Outside of school, some parents start even at a young age sending students to cram schools to prepare them for tests.

- Masaki: In Japan, many elementary school teachers don’t feel comfortable teaching English, so some junior high teachers sometimes come in to elementary schools to do the English lessons. In junior high, the English teachers are already doing test preparation, so these teachers’ philosophy of teaching doesn’t match the needs of the elementary school students.

- Ky: There should be a clear distinction between ESL and EFL. He thinks it’s very difficult to teach EFL intensively in his country (Vietnam) at that age. But with ESL, students can have access to much more exposure to English through people and media. Earlier may be better if the environment supports it.

Comments shared in the class discussion:
- Ben shared about some of his experiences teaching ESL students in the US. He said he had two Russian brothers, one was 9 and the other was 5. The older brother had problems with grammar and pronunciation, but the younger one sounded like a native speaker and didn’t have grammatical problems. Pronunciation is one of the easiest aspects of L2 learning to notice.

- Lourdes: Reading chapter 2 points out overwhelming tendencies about L2 learning being easier before a certain age, but there are some exceptions in both extremes, i.e. there are cases of some children who arrive early and have an accent, and there are some people like Julie who can pass as a native speaker.
- The critical period explanation is a biological one.

- Jongmin mentioned tongue surgery in Korea (She added that it is rare. Hmm. Curious.) Nevertheless, Lourdes pointed out that even if that does help in pronunciation, perception, vocabulary, and syntax are totally different aspects.

- Ben mentioned that the case study of Julie learning Arabic is oft sited. Lourdes added that there are also other cases of extremely successful learners in Arabic, German, French, and English.

- Lourdes mentioned that when David Birdsong said 5-25 percent of language learners are “amazingly successful late language learners,” perhaps that is an exaggeration.

- 1.5 generation: Oftentimes they are great with peers chatting, but not competent in English when it comes to academic content (Note: This happens with “native speakers” in their L1, too.

- In favor of bilingual education: If students get support in their L1, they do better in both languages. Myth that Ss pulled into English only will help them.

- Yellow group: What other consideration should be taken into account to decide whether earlier is better?

- Ben: Most EFL contexts don’t spend enough time to make a difference and it takes a lot of money, so is it worth the money? There should be more hours and do it effectively or cut it out altogether.

- Jongmin: Oftentimes the English teaching focuses on grammar.

- Lourdes: If they start teaching students when they're young, it’s important for the it to be age appropriate, with pictures, hands on activities, fun, appropriate vocabulary and methodology.

- Jongmin: Children are shy and will try to talk. On the other hand, adults are more afraid of making mistakes.

- Early learning: Shay thinks parents should support the kids learning English, e.g. reading English to their kids.

- Lourdes: Is “bad pronunciation” contagious?

- Another issue is maybe at home they need support for the L1 language and culture.

- When parents try to be teachers to their kids there are sometimes problems. (e.g. sometimes kids resent it).

Thursday, August 30

- Announcement: On the Thursday when Dr. Ortega is away at a conference (Sept. 13), we’ll go into the computer lab. Ky, Nick, and Ben can assist other students who need technological help in posting their profiles and/or pictures. We will also have a synchronous chat in which we will discuss some questions which Lourdes’ provides.

- A couple of interesting points about age and L2 learning:
- accent likely after age 4-5
- subtle grammar differences if learn English as late as 15 years old

- Forecasting L2 attainment: I liked the analogy she made to weather forecasting, i.e. we can say what is probable, but we don’t know for certain because there are exceptions. In other words, starting late doesn’t necessarily preclude success and vice versa.

- When is puberty? A point that I found interesting was the variable of puberty. Lourdes pointed out that many researchers refer to the differences when learning an L2 prior to or after the onset of puberty. However, puberty occurs at different times for different individuals. Therefore, this introduces some error. Would it be better if researchers included a question about when the participants experienced puberty?

- The monolingual bias: In the case of the phenomenal language learner Julie, the British woman who attained possibly a native level of proficiency in Arabic whilst living in Cairo, Egypt with her husband, we don’t know whether Julie had studied another language prior to learning Arabic. From what Lourdes said, I don’t think that the research report actually states this specifically, but there seems to be a monolingual bias, i.e. we assume that she was a monolingual person with English as her L1. Although, as an educated woman from the U.K., she probably had some prior language learning experience, e.g. at least some French in school.

- Is younger better? A comment which Dr. Schmidt mentioned in his Brown Bag on Thursday and Lourdes agreeably reiterated in our class is that the idea of younger is better has been oversold. When a student asked why this is the case, Lourdes explained that it seems intuitive that if you start learning a language younger, that you would acquire greater competence. As we know from research, however, this issue is rather complex and involves many variables. Although Muñoz’s recent research in Cataluña showed that the foreign language learners with a young start did not have an advantage even after several years, Lourdes added that we need more research and that it would be beneficial to do the same study in Japan and Korea.

- A call for research: This reminded me that research from professors and graduates of our program are expected to undertake groundbreaking research in the field of second language studies.

- Long-term language planning: It was also pointed out that long term language planning is essential in order to reap the benefits. For example, young learners might initially gain foreign language skills, but if instruction is not sustained throughout the student’s education, what was learned could gradually evaporate. Providing appropriately challenging material throughout is necessary as well because it would be demotivating if some students had already learned the material covered in class.

- BICS and CALP: BICS = Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and CALP = Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (Cummins ’79). CALP actually takes about 5-7 years to attain. Such research provides support for the importance of multiple years of academic assistance for English language learners and warns against mainstreaming them too soon.

- Academic English in elementary school: Lourdes mentioned that the fourth grade in U.S. schools suddenly becomes more academically demanding. Consequently, at this time, English language learners’ deficiency in CALP may become more apparent.

- Biased linguistic expectations: Lourdes brought up an interesting point about how there are different expectations for a Japanese person learning English versus a person with English as their L1 learning Japanese. Interesting point. Many people think this way. Why? And is it fair?

* A note about formatting on this site: Don't spend too much time making your text look fancy on Microsoft Word because when you copy and paste it onto the blog site, it did not show what I had underlined and made bold. However, there are useful and easy to use editing options on the window where you edit your posting.