I read all the time that learning a second language at an early age could harm a child’s first language acquisition. How come that children of my friends all seem to be fluent in English, Chinese and Taiwanese? How come it seems that they don’t have any problems at all with any of these languages? Am I missing something?
Where did you read that? Could quote some facts and figures from the soiurces you mention, give some references perhaps?
According to Una Cunningham-Andersson and Staffan Andersson who wrote “Growing Up with Two Languages: A practical guide” which I thoroughly recommend, there is some ‘interference’ when learning a second language or growing up exposed to two or more languages, but this is normal and certainly doesn’t ‘harm’ the first language.
It depends on how it’s being done. If the child is getting a strong base in his or her first language while learning the second language, then it’s much more beneficial than the ones whose parents insist on speaking the target language at home and not their native one. It’s important that a child has a base upon which they can build the second language. If a child doesn’t know how to count in their first language then how can they learn numbers in another language? Research has shown that having boundaries on what language is used with whom in what situation can help them understand the concept of more than one language much more easily than if the parents speak the target language at random times (e.g. when out in public to show off to people). When a child can make an emotional connection to language, they pick it up much higher.
There’s some evidence that early total immersion can initially slow down a child’s progress in school when the child re-enters the mother-tongue classes, but that the child catches back up quickly.
Maybe the folks who are against all-day English-only kindy have a point.
Stephen Krashen is one of the people who seems to be very much anti-immersion. But I wonder how he can be so convinced of this if there are (apparently) so many conflicting ideas.
I’m OK with any decision the Taiwanese people make about it. I just wish they would make up their minds.
As I understand it, Krashen is not totally against all immersion programs; indeed he gives the example of the success of such programs in Canada;
sdkrashen.com/articles/fever/07.html
Yet on that page he says that those programs, for various reasons connected with the parents’ socio-economic status, functioned as a kind of de facto bilingual education, and that for him is the crucial point. Learning a second language must never be at the expense of the first one, and indeed having good skills in the first language is an important factor in learning a second language efficiently and can ‘accelerate second-language acquisition’;
sdkrashen.com/articles/fever/04.html
I think it was ImaniOU who mentioned the problems caused, for example, by trying to teach numbers in a second language that children have not yet learned in the first language. Perhaps it is this kind of issue that bothers Krashen about some immersion programs.
In addition, he is all about efficiency in language learning. He recognises that it is a long-drawn-out process and wants to find the quickest, least ‘painful’ method; to get the greatest result from a given amount of input. He argues that early immersion wastes valuable time that could be spent learning using the first language, and that such immersion is not efficient. Where the students are in a ‘Second Language’ context where the target language is the native one of the country they are living in, there is a more urgent need for higher levels of proficiency in that language and so intensive programs may be suitable. Where the target language is a ‘Foreign Language’, for example English in Taiwan, the need is not so pressing.
He also argues for modified goals; that is that rather than aiming at native-speaker levels of proficiency, FL programs should aim merely at having the students achieve an intermediate level from where they can continue to acquire language on their own.
These are interesting points, and based on many years of case-study-based research. I’m still on the fence regarding this topic, but any ‘conflicting ideas’ must deal with Krashen’s points convincingly to have credence.
So looking at these points of view it seems reasonable to conclude that young children won’t suffer from a few hours English every day as long as they are in a Chinese/Taiwanese speaking environment the rest of the day. So what exactly does the Taiwanese government have to say about this issue? Didn’t they say that English education at a very young age will harm the development of the students? What problems do they have with English teaching at kindergartens?
Is this true that Krashen has based his ideas on extensive research? When I was doing some study on bilingual learning in California, one of the biggest complaints teachers (who seemed in general to hate Krashen) had was that Krashen has not done enough research to justify his claims.
Is this true that Krashen has based his ideas on extensive research? When I was doing some study on bilingual learning in California, one of the biggest complaints teachers (who seemed in general to hate Krashen) had was that Krashen has not done enough research to justify his claims.[/quote]
Have you read his book “Second Language
Acquisition and Language Learning” (1981)? The entire book is online at:
sdkrashen.com/SL_Acquisition_and_Learning/
In that he makes a lot of references to various studies and other theorists. The bibliography is 12 pages long, and I don’t think it’s just for show. I am not entirely comfortable with the way that he deals with studies concerning “prefabricated” language routines and patterns, though (see chapter 7). He draws a certain conclusion based on certain studies but does not deal adequately with those studies which go against this conclusion. He puts the discrepancies down to different learning styles, but does not alter his initial point as a result. The theory about routines and patterns is just a small and non-vital part of the whole, however, and I think that he himself might admit that it is somewhat more speculative and based on fewer studies than the rest of the work.
The whole field seems to be pretty speculative still. I was reading “How Languages Are Learned” (Lightbown & Spada 1993) in Caves the other day.
( amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de … 194370003/ )
It’s a well-organised book which broadly categorises and examines the various theories and teaching practices around within the context of classroom studies, and makes suggestions as to best practices. It does not have a lot to say against Krashen except that some higher-level students studying under Natural Approach-type conditions seemed to have certain persistent grammatical errors. Unfortunately, the book does not directly compare these students’ performance to that of other students studying with different methods. Also, the point is made that the areas of grammatical weakness corresponded with grammatical structures that were seldom used by those students’ teachers, so in Krashen’s terms that could still come down to insufficient comprehensible input. In this book, in he and his colleagues’ work and in the work of his followers (see, for example this interesting site; maxpages.com/thena/Experimental_Design), I have seen several references to studies where students taught with Natural Approach-type methods outperformed control groups not only in fluency and vocabulary but also grammatical accuracy.
I get the impression that nobody has a really clear picture of the (second) language acquisition process yet, and studies have so far been on a small scale, and too few. In addition, there are so many uncontrolled conditions and variations in testing when it comes to studies of language teaching and learning. I believe from what I’ve read so far that Krashen is as thorough, conscientious and evidence-based as anyone else in the field.
Back to your specific point about the teachers in California: the Whole Language Approach to teaching as promoted by Krashen and others was popular and fashionable for a while but seems to have fallen into disfavour now, for not entirely justified reasons. These things come and go, and I wonder if part of the reason for his current unpopularity among the people you talked to is simply due to pedagogical fashion. As is always the case in debates everywhere it seems that a lot of his critics haven’t really read and understood his points thoroughly, but are merely repeating what others have said.
There are some initial implications with learning a second language while still developing your first language. For a truly successful immersion program for preschoolers, concepts and not just the language should be taught in the target language. I think the problem with a lot of schools here (and perhaps the government’s problem too) is that so-called language schools for young children teach those children with similar methods used for older (literate) children with unrealistic expectations such as a 3-year-old being required to be able to read 100 words after one month. Don’t laugh, I know of a school that had this expectation.
What I was trying to say earlier is that it’s one thing to teach a child to count 1-10 in English and another to teach them numeracy skills from 1-10 in English (1-1 counting, that numbers can begin from any place when counting, recognizing numbers, physical representation of objects as counting tools, number patterns, counting in groups, etc.) . Most language schools here from what I know, do the former rather than the latter. Immersion programs are successful when the children learn in a language with the proper support (such as an ESL program to complement vocabulary and grammatical issues learned in their regular class) rather than just learning the language.
I teach fourth graders in my school who have undergone our preschool immersion program. They spend the whole class time using only English to learn English language arts concepts at the same level as native English speakers their age. Some of them have parents that speak little to no English themselves, but all of the children have spent at least two years in an English-immersion environment. I have also done entrance tests with children who went through language school kindergartens. They rarely come close to our required English levels.
[quote=“Mucha (Muzha) Man”]When I was doing some study on bilingual learning in California, one of the biggest complaints teachers (who seemed in general to hate Krashen) had was that Krashen has not done enough research to justify his claims.[/quote]MM, I’m still a bit puzzled by this. Were the teachers you spoke to supporters of bilingual education? Krashen is a defender of it and often speaks out in its favour, against the attempts by officialdom to do away with it. Have a look at the article “Let’s Tell the Public the Truth about Bilingual Education”:
sdkrashen.com/articles/tell_ … index.html
No, the were not in favor of bilingual education. They felt they were producing a generation of children not fluent in either language.
And as I meant to say when I first posed the question, I was looking for feedback on whether Krashen’s research was considered up to snuff. I was not criticising him. Just looking for some balance.
[quote=“Mucha (Muzha) Man”]…as I meant to say when I first posed the question, I was looking for feedback on whether Krashen’s research was considered up to snuff. I was not criticising him. Just looking for some balance.[/quote]You are right to look for valid opposing views, and this is something I am in the process of doing myself. While Krashen’s theories are compelling and economical, it would not be wise to accept them blindly without testing them out thoroughly. Indeed the very fact that the theories are so attractive is all the more reason to do so: one of the reasons I am still rather sceptical is that they have a certain air of the 'seventies – that all we have to do is go with the natural flow and all will be fine. But it does seem so far as if there is a body of research that generally backs Krashen up.
Reading the Lightbown and Spada book I mentioned above was part of the critical testing process, but as I said, it didn’t properly put its criticisms into context.
I wish I still had access to JSTOR and to a decent university library with inter-library loans. Squatting in the corner of Caves, good though that bookshop is, is a poor substitute.
There is also a difference between fluency and accuracy. I think accuracy is more of an issue with bilingual children than fluency.
As for a lower level of vocabulary in either language, I have this thought that the brain has the capacity to learn so much language before it starts cutting back.
I don’t know if I am the first to think it or if it’s something I picked up while I was studying first- and second-language acquisition in college, but I have a hypothesis that those who can speak 3 or 4 or more languages fluently have a very limited vocabulary in each one and it explains why you lose words from one language when you start to learn or are immersed another.
It sure sounds like a nice dissertation in theoretical linguistics if I just knew how to go about doing the research.
What do you mean lose? Lose as in you can’t understand them or simply that they are not part of your active vocabulary? But many things can affect your active vocabulary. Be a mother and hang out with your child all day. Have dumb friends. Only read pulp fiction and read average newspapers and watch sit-coms.
I observed an ABC that was fully immerse in a Chinese Day care for 4 years. Spoke Chinese perfectly and thought English was the "foreigner
I am now thoroughly depressed , after seeing this. Incredible. Natural for some.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md0uXslbZoo