Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Developing Bilingualism

Fall 2007

Week 12 - Answers

Hamers and Blanc (2000), Chapter 11

Herdina and Jessner (2002), Chapter 5

1. What, according to Hamers and Blanc, is essential for success in education? Why?

       (pp. 318-321)

According to Hamers and Blanc (2000), and this should not be too surprising, it is literacy which is essential for success in education. It should be clear to all of us, even those who are not in the Teaching Reading class semester that education systems were developed for and basically revolve around literacy, the ability to read and write. In order to get a better feeling for this, we need to think about the underlying features of literacy, or what is required for literacy to develop. Literacy as we've seen in this course is closely related to abstract thought. This abstract thought requires a certain type of form-to-function mapping. A long time ago in this class we already mentioned that there are basically two different kinds of form-to-function mappings, they are communicative and cognitive. Cognitive form-to-function mappings allow us to be able to think abstractly. They allow us to think in a different way, outside of a particular situation or context. Since all writing is, by its very definition, decontextualized, these types of cognitive form-to function mappings are essential for literacy skills. Mastering, or better yet, coming to terms with these types of functions - mappings, is an extremely important skill in traditional education. This is even truer than we realize when we consider the fact that education like writing itself is founded on an abstraction itself from the world at large. Schools and classrooms are physically separate from the rest of the world for a good reason, they expect people to behave in think in different ways and highly decontextualized ways. We create different spaces for different kinds of thought. Without literacy, and the form to function mappings which come as a result of literacy, students simply won't get what they're doing in school and we know that many of them don`t not in Korean and even more in English.

       It is interesting to note how educational systems in developed countries are realizing that they have done too good a job of separating themselves from the world at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels as almost all systems are in a state of flux. They are trying to find better links between the world and the classroom, so now we have come full circle as education is no longer essentially a means of separating rich from poor, but a necessary tool for dealing with an increasingly complex world.

       In talking about how literacy is related to L-1 and L2 development we are going back to the old question of additive -versus- subtractive bilinguality, but a poderance of these questions and the resulting answers are essential for the development and sunning of bilingual programs. It is important to remember that literacy, again, requires different types of form to function mapping. Essentially pre-existing communicative functions needs to be extended out of the here and now into the abstract. We can think of literacy, as described by Ong (1982), as a kind of technological explosion which allows a whole new type of thought to develop. In order to use this new skill many new functions suddenly become not only available but also highly necessary. These new functions require new forms for old uses. Again, thinking about the process of how this develops, it is generally claimed that cognitive functions (based on literacy) are further developed from communicative functions in the initial stages of development. Therefore, we need communicative functions to develop cognitive functions. A student coming to school who has communicative functions in one language (X) and will be schooled in language X should have no problems (haaa!) developing cognitive functions extended out of their already well-developed repertoire of communicative functions (In theory). Think, however, for a second about a child who has communicative functions in a language (Y) and will be schooled in a different language, language X. This child may be able to develop cognitive functions for X out of their communicative functions set for Y, but only if they are allowed to continue to access and development of the functions related to Y. If Y is no longer used and the use of Y is greatly suppressed or eliminated then this child is not going to have anywhere or anything to develop their cognitive functions from. There will be no abstractions of anything and the poor child will have to go back and try to develop communicative and cognitive functions in X all at the same time, which presents a daunting task indeed.

This is the basic underlying assumption which argues for the need of bilingual education. The idea is that students will be able to use both their languages to develop the new types of functions they need to excel in school and in society. Both languages need to remain available for student to use and extend them.

2. How does bilingual education differ from other types of language education? (pp. 321-322)

Bilingual education differs from other types of language education in a few simple ways. The first of these is that bilingual education requires the use of at least two languages (presumably used to complement each other) in the education program. This doesn't mean that the two languages are used at the same time necessarily or in the same amount or degree, but within the total scope of the program there should be least two languages which are used as a medium of teaching content and not just as subjects. This allows us to distinguish bilingual programs from submersion programs, such as we find in so-called foreign schools or international schools here in South Korea. The second major difference in a bilingual program is that content provides the main means by which languages are taught (by which students are exposed to languages). Language is taught through the instruction of content or subjects and the language itself is not exclusively a subject of study, it is the means by which other subjects are studied. The basic idea here being that languages and language use should reflect a meaningful purpose and not simply be objects of study without any seeming purpose. These differences distinguish bilingual programs from regular school language programs as well as from submersion programs.

       We need to openly acknowledge that the Korean school system involves a tremendous mismatch between the categories identified by Fishman and Lovas. In Korean schools right now the intensity of English is very low, yet the goals are unrealistically high, and the status of the target language is also too high. By looking at their ideas we can try to develop a type of bilingual education which will hopefully equalize these different points. Following this, we can develop bilingual program here which for its intensity would follow the idea of partial biliterate bilingualism, for the idea underlying this goal we would probably want to develop something like an enrichment program and finally for status we would want have something more akin to language of primary importance and language of secondary importance. It should be obvious here that Korea is and needs to remain the language of primary importance and English is and must remain a language of secondary importance. As we already mentioned in this class, it is very important that we send a strong message to our students and children that Korean is more important than English in South Korea and certainly more useful for us than English, and society needs to help tow the line. The development of a carefully constructed bilingual program will allow us to show that clearly while at the same time embracing and enhancing a realistic view of proficiency in English.

3. What are some of the major factors that influence bilingual education? (pp. 323-330)

The major factor that influences bilingual education is the society itself. We mentioned before in this class that the condition of bilinguality can only really happen if the society allows it. The same can be said for bilingual education to an even greater degree and this is often based on valorization. Bilingual education will either flourish or perish depending on the views of the society. Canada has developed sustainable bilingual programs basically because enough people see the value in being bilingual and also because it is politically expedient to do so (In Canada here are roughly 17 Million English speaker confronted by almost 7 million French speakers. That is a rather large and politically powerful minority). Certainly there are enough French speakers in Canada, who also are the majority in large parts of the country, to make bilinguality necessary and to promote a sense of fairness and bilinguality, bilingual programs have been started and continue to be operated. French is also quite highly valorized by Canadians, particuklarly as Quebec is one of the richer provinces. In other countries, the United States, for example, this is not been the case. In the US a strong English-only movement (in effect since the late 1980s) has wiped out the bilingual programs that had been established in the 1970s. In a very simple way, the society of the US does not value other languages - any other language - as much as English. The speakers of other languages are poorer on average and their languages have limited function in US society. Bilingual programs are very a much political issue and will only exist when they are politically viable or necessary. Interestingly the US response to the stellar rise of global English to try to reinforce and introduce forced monolingualism where a higher degree of bilingualism was formerly tolerated if not actually much supported.

4. What are the three types of immersion programs? Briefly describe each one. (pp. 332-333)

There are basically three different types of immersion programs.

Early Total

Early total immersion is a type of bilingual program which obviously begins early, that is with kindergarten or in the first grade (sometimes in preschool or the early years of elementary school). It is also marked by a complete immersion in the L2. Thus, English-speaking first graders going to a school with Spanish instruction only would be an example of early total immersion. These programs are marked by the lack of use of the native language of the students for at least a certain period of time. Thus, in early total immersion programs, the students do everything in their non-native language. It should, however, be noted that researchers have experimented by bringing in small numbers of the native speakers into the immersion program and this seems to be of great benefit, depending on the valorization level of the target language, which is also the language of instruction. It is important to remember that in immersion programs not only does language need to be used in the classroom, but it should also be used outside the classroom for general communicative purposes. What is then observed is that in total immersion programs where there are no native speakers, the learners often shift back to their L1 when not in class, thus diminishing the overall effect of the program. Again, how this works depends on the valorization levels of the languages involved in the program.

Early Partial

An early partial bilingual program is similar to early total immersion except that children are exposed to the target language (L2) only part of the time. In this way they are given instruction in both their native language and the target language. They, therefore, receive less overall input and exposure to the target language and at the same time are able to continuing developing their own native language for cognitive functions, which may be quite important depending on their level coming in to the program and really what the purposes and goals behind the program are, not to mention the societal variables underlying the program itself. Research comparing early total and early partial immersion programs have shown what we would probably expect in that students in early partial immersion programs are not quite as advanced as students in early total immersion programs in their acquisition of the target language (in evaluations based on native speaker norms).

Late Total

It is interesting to note that there are no late partial immersion programs for the simple reason that partial immersion is seen as being unable to provide enough input to make a big difference when it is introduced too late. Late immersion programs generally occur in high school or maybe the last year of middle school or junior high school (that would be from seventh to the ninth grade). Again, the immersion is total in that students are instructed using only the target language and are encouraged strongly to use only the target language even outside the classroom while on school grounds. In addition, where possible, native speakers of the language are also brought in to ensure more natural use of communicative functions and generally more diverse output. Research findings on students who have completed late total immersion and early partial immersion show few differences between them, while early total immersion students seemed to fair the best among all three groups in relation to both their L1 use and their L2 use.

       This is an important finding and really reminds us of the power of cognition and transfer in relation to language acquisition. This clearly demonstrates that earlier is not necessarily better. It should also be remembered that for students to do well in early total immersion, the parents and society is going to have to highly valorize the L1. If this does not happen then even though the L2 might be well developed the L1 may not be in some sort of subtractive bilinguality could set in.

5. In his assessment of bilingual programs, Dodson claims that using both languages interchangeably in the classroom is the best method to follow. Argue to either support or refute this claim. (pp. 338-340)

Dodson's claim is a simple practical one which relates to the everyday reality of the classroom in bilingual education situations. What he is really saying is that it is probably simpler for us to have fully functional bilingual teachers who will meaningfully shift back and forth from one language to the other on a regular and planned basis rather than have some committee from above trying to figure out how much and when each language is going to be used. The teachers in the front lines are best equipped to make such front line decisions. While it might be good for overall systematicity and fairness, planning from above may not be nearly as simple as it may sound, remember Pitre`s Law. Think about the situation in Korea.

        Korea has been leaning strongly toward and implementing halfheartedly programs of team teaching. There are also a very few sheltered content programs where one teacher teaches the content straight out and another teacher then comes in later and does language awareness and practice exercises with the same content. Both types of programs are similar in that they require a large amount of interaction and cooperation between teachers which may be both bilingual in the same or different languages, one may be bilingual and the other monolingual or both teachers might even be effectively monolingual in different languages. Yikes!!! The question remains, how are these two teachers going to communicate with each other, especially in a social situation like Korea where Korean is so widely used and English is so highly respected. Conflicts will be and certainly do prove to be the norm. Teachers often DO NOT cooperate at all and often resort to using different kinds of languages as well as input in their own separate teaching sessions.

       Using certain languages for certain subjects, such as in a partial bilaterate program could alleviate the possible problem of teacher miscommunication and ego conflicts because we just keep them separate, but it also puts the different languages into very specific, and somewhat unnatural roles (depending of course on the society we are dealing with). If we decide to switch languages from one year to the next year within the school system this may work as well, but it is also highly unnatural.

       What Dodson is claiming is something very commonsensical and namely that we should use the languages naturally. WOW!! Languages that are similarly valorized overlap a lot in their use and this can be shown in a natural way in the classroom. Since we now believe that languages, no matter how many we know, are fused together into one big linguistic system (a Common Underlying Conceptual Base (Kesckes and Papp 2000; Herdina and Jessner, 2002)), then it might just be better to actually use the languages together. In the classroom, Dodson envisions a highly competent bilingual teacher code switching and code mixing as she attempts to teach content in the most efficient and comprehensible way possible. Let the truly bilingual teacher determine themselves which language to you to use for which point and when and why, but with guidelines of course and careful, careful training. That is Dodson's claim: simple and possibly very effective, but hard to implement on the national level.

6. What are some of the main myths about bilingual education? (pp. 340-342)

The main myth of bilingual education is that it encourages students to not learn (as is the main belief in the US and UK) English, or whatever the main language of the society is. People feel that bilingual education costs a lot of money, which it does not need to, and that it is money poorly spent because it keeps people out of the mainstream of society by teaching them to use their own home language or regional minority language. Of course this is the myth, and is very annoying one because bilingual education is all about the opposite: promoting balanced language use among the languages the child has, including and most importantly the main language of the society. So, in getting students to learn English in South Korea by offering total or partial bilingual programs the Korean language itself may not only be strengthened in some students so long and is the use of Korean is highly valorized (additive bilingualism will be developed), but other useful languages will be learned more completely and for better effect.

       Another myth is that bilingual education is too hard for some students. According to this myth only smart students with a well-developed linguistic intelligence benefit from bilingual education. This is simply not true. Depending on the program setup, it is often the lower-level students who benefit more than higher level students, who would do well in any case and any situation. So, we can see that bilingual education, if done well, really has tremendous benefits for both children and possibly society, but the society must be ready for it.

7. How do the authors suggest bilingual programs are set up for minority language speakers?

       (pp. 343-347)

Bilingual programs for minority language speakers should be set up in a way which promote both their own first minority language or language form and also their use of the mainstream language or language form. That is basically it. The bottom line which is mentioned is that programs for minority students in which they are submerged in the mainstream language often do not work because of societal differences. The language or language form, as the case may be, of the minority group generally has an extremely low valorization level among the society at large, which puts this group on the defensive. Pressure to integrate often results in exactly the opposite, and this is often what happens in submersion programs. Minority group students do not feel that they are respected by the majority group and therefore feel no impetus to learn their language or their culture and may even not want to depart from their society. This is reflected in low performance in regular school programs which, taken for the viewpoint of a minority group, are nothing more than submersion programs. But a bilingual program can be used as an intermediate step wherein minority group members can develop equal levels of proficiency both in their languages or language forms. By enhancing the valorization level of the minority language for the minority language speakers we are giving them power and allowing them to feel respect for themselves. Once they feel that they are on a more equal footing with the majority group then they will not feel as threatened to learn that majority language. But we also need to consider the reality that that most minority languages do not have written forms. Then it becomes important for them to acquire a degree of literacy in their own language, which will enable them to do the same in the target (majority) language. Therefore, in countries where there are many minority groups, bilingual education could be seen as a very important step to enhancing the situation of many of these minority group members.

       The authors (Hamers and Blanc) are somewhat leery of community bilingual education simply because of language attitudes. While the idea might seem wonderful, it is probably not very practical because what occurs in community bilingual education is that majority group speakers learn or are schooled through a minority language. We have already seen that people have very strong feelings about different languages, and particularly about less spoken languages or languages spoken by minority groups. This would mean that, for example speakers of standard Seoul dialect would have to go to school where they would be taught to read and write in a South Kyoungsan dialect (assuming this dialect were written). Could you imagine the uproar of the parents in Kangnam? Languages mean power and speakers of powerful languages generally do not show very much interest in non-powerful languages. Thus, even in Ireland, where Irish is seen as the cultural endowment of the country and shares official status with English, students complain about having to learn Irish. Most students do not excel at it, and very few actually become fluent in Irish but they still believe it to be an important but obviously not powerful language. Thus, community bilingual education probably won't really work in the long run because it ignores the very essence of human nature.

DMM, Chapter 5 - Answers

1. What is the difference between monolingual competence and multilingual proficiency? (55-58)

Multilingualism is defined as the command or use of two or more languages by the respective speaker. The difference between competence and proficiency: Competence refers to the knowledge of L2 a learner has internalized. Proficiency refers to the learner`s ability to use this knowledge for different tasks.

     Compare monolingual competence & multilingual proficiency, based on the definition of competence and proficiency above, the monolingual competence is just the knowledge of one language of a learner, but the multilingual proficiency refers to the learner`s ability to use more than two languages for different tasks and different situations. Therefore, we can have a sense that multilingual proficiency is superior to monolingual competence, and also, we respect to have a multilingual proficiency than competence.

2. What are three consequences of multilingualism? Briefly describe them.(60-65)

Under specific conditions multilinguals can have tremendous advantages over monolinguals, in terms of language competences, cognitive development, and social development. The acquisition of more than two language systems leads to the development of new skill such as metacognitive strategies due to the learner`s experience of learning how to learn a language and an enhanced level of metalinguistic awareness. Also, the development of proficiency in two languages can result in greater levels of metalinguistic awareness.

1) Language competences:
According to Bialystok, there are no universal advantages, but that the processing systems developed to serve two linguistic systems are necessarily different from the processing systems that operate in the service of only one. Thus, bilinguals who have attained high levels of proficiency in both languages are viewed as being advantaged on tasks which require more analyzed linguistic knowledge.

Metalinguistic awareness in multilinguals should be regarded as closely linked to the idea of monitoring. Multilingual speaker use the monitor to watch and correct his language in a multilingual context which increases the use of such a monitor.

2) Cognitive development:
Bilingual people show definite advantages in cognitive flexibility, creativity, divergent thought or problem solving. Multilinguals and monolinguals have different thinking styles. Bilingual children proved to be divergent thinkers, that is, they are more creative, imaginative, flexible and unrestrained in their thinking. According to Ricciardelli, in a study on the cognitive development, bilinguals who had attained a high level of proficiency in both languages performed significantly better on creativity, metalinguistic awareness and reading.

3) Sociocultural development:
The use of two or more languages not only influences the linguistic and cognitive skills of multilinguals, but also their social skills. Actually, bilinguals are more sensitive than monolinguals in interpersonal communication. Some researchers mentioned the superiority of bilinguals with regard to communicative sensitivity. For example, according to Genesee, Tucker and Lanbert, the bilingual children`s explanations of the game turned out to be more appropriate to the listener’s needs than the explanations given by the monolinguals. Communicative sensitivity towards the needs of the communication partners appears to be related to the concept of interactional competence, which refers to the ability of a person to perform and interpret communicative actions, for example, thanking and greeting, in interactional situations

3. What are the main ideas about multilingual variation, sociolinguistic variation and psycholinguistic variation? (69-74)

The scope of language variation is an aspect in which multilinguals differ greatly from monolingual speakers. Bilinguals or multilinguals have the obvious consequence of language choice. In other words, they can choose the language of communication according to the requirements of the respective situation. Thus, multilinguals exhibit a greater linguistic variety measured in terms of monolingual performance. We can distinguish multilingual variation to interpersonal variability (sociolinguistic variation) and intrapersonal variation (psycholinguistic variation). The interpersonal variation is the fact that different speakers of the same language show considerable variations in terms of the phonetic, syntactic and lexical systems of a language. For the intrapersonal variation, variation is considered as a psycholinguistic phenomenon.

1) Sociolinguistic variation:
Language change or variation has been seen primarily as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Consequently language variation has automatically been interpreted as inter-speaker variation, that is in terms of regional variation or sociolect. And even then, it is assumed that sociolinguistic variation follows very specific rules. Variation is not random but strictly controlled, often by extra-linguistic factors, and the specification of these factors may help us account for the change.

2) Psycholinguistic variation:
One significant psycholinguistic variable in the development of multilingual systems is language aptitude. Variation in the language learning progress has frequently been attributed to differing language aptitude which has been discussed extensively and controversially in a language learning context. Also, aptitude cannot be trained. From Carroll and Sapon’s description of aptitude, it is defined as follows:
(1) Sound coding ability: the ability to identify and remember new sounds in a foreign language
(2) Grammatical coding ability: the ability to identify the grammatical functions of different parts of sentences
(3) Inductive learning ability: the ability to work out meanings without explanation in a new language
(4) Memorization: the ability to remember words, rules, etc. in a new language

Aptitude is considered a separate component and is not identical with intelligence. It is generally considered a valid predictor of the rate of learning of a language.