ERIC Number: EJ1090544
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1479-0718
EISSN: N/A
Second Language Education Context and Home Language Effect: Language Dissimilarities and Variation in Immigrant Students' Outcomes
Figueiredo, Sandra; Martins, Margarida Alves; da Silva, Carlos Fernandes
International Journal of Multilingualism, v13 n2 p184-212 2016
Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as age and home language can be used in the teaching environment to predict and examine the development outcomes of SL students in verbal reasoning and vocabulary tasks. One hundred and six Portuguese participants, SL learners, between 8 and 17 years old, were assessed in vocabulary frequency, verbal analogies and morphological extraction tasks. In alphabetic languages (Romance languages), immigrant students (in a SL learning situation) with a strong linguistic distance (a home language with a very different orthographic foundation) are expected to struggle in language learning in spite of being aware of strategies that can improve their skills. The storage and combination of morphemes can be a demanding task for individual speakers at different levels. Cognitive mapping is strongly based on linguistic features of L1 development. Results show that home language, not age, was a significant predictor of variation in student's outcomes. Speakers of alphasyllabary languages (Indo-Aryan languages as L1) were the poorest performers, the "linguistic distance" of their languages explaining the performance results.
Descriptors: Immigrants, Second Language Learning, Romance Languages, Morphology (Languages), Heritage Education, Second Language Instruction, English (Second Language), Age Differences, Native Language, Teaching Methods, Verbal Ability, Vocabulary Development, Portuguese, Student Evaluation, Language Tests, Task Analysis, Romanization, Alphabets, Language Classification, Learning Strategies, Morphemes, Cognitive Mapping, Predictor Variables, Language Acquisition, Language Processing, Regression (Statistics), Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Portugal
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A