Bilingualism, Language Acquisition, and CLIL Principles
Bilingualism and Language Acquisition
Equilibrated: Individuals with equal competence in both languages. Dominant: Individuals more skilled in one of the two languages. Coordinated: Individuals who can use both languages in the same situations. Compound: Individuals who associate each language with a different context. Early and Late: Refers to when each language is learned. Simultaneous and Consecutive: Refers to whether both languages are acquired at the same time or one after the other. Subtractive: In the process of becoming bilingual, the individual may develop negative attitudes towards their mother tongue. If those attitudes are positive, then he/she is considered Additive.
The 4Cs Framework
- Content: Progression in knowledge, skills, and understanding related to specific elements of a defined curriculum.
- Communication: Using language to learn while learning to use language.
- Cognition: Developing thinking skills which link concept formation, understanding, and language.
- Culture: Exposure to alternative perspectives and shared understandings, which deepen awareness of otherness and self.
Internal and External Factors in Language Acquisition
Internal Factors
- Age: Second language acquisition is influenced by the age of the learner.
- Personality: Introverted or anxious learners usually make slower progress, particularly in the development of oral skills.
- Intrinsic Motivation: Has been found to correlate strongly with educational achievement.
- Extrinsic Motivation: External motivation.
- Experience: More experience leads to greater ability.
- Cognition: Students with greater cognitive abilities will make faster progress.
- Native Language: Students learning a second language from the same language family as their first language have an advantage.
External Factors
- Curriculum: It is important that the totality of their educational experience is appropriate for their needs.
- Instruction: Some language teachers are better than others at providing appropriate and effective learning experiences for the students.
- Culture: There is some evidence that students in situations where their own culture has a lower status than that of the culture in which they are learning the language make slower progress.
- Motivation and Access to Native Speakers
Key Concepts in Language Learning
Caretaker Talk: Involves a slower rate of speech, higher pitch, more varied intonation, shorter, simpler sentence patterns, and frequent repetition.
Competence: Refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system, event, or fact. It is the non-observable ability to do something, to perform something.
Performance: Is the overtly observable and concrete manifestation or realization of competence. It is the actual doing of something: walking, singing, dancing.
Good Method Criteria
Usefulness and applicability, explicitness, coherence and consistency, comprehensiveness, explanatory power and verifiability, simplicity and clarity.
Criticism (Roulet)
No account of present-day language usage is presented, secondary grammatical points receive a lot of attention, morphology is given a predominant place, it gives an exaggerated importance to faults to be avoided, translations are often unsatisfactory, too many notions are learned and students may feel frustrated when unable to use the foreign language.
Principles of Language Learning (Richards and Rogers)
- The Communicative Principle: Learning is promoted by activities involving real communication.
- The Task Principle: Learning is also enhanced through the use of activities in which language is employed for carrying out meaningful tasks.
- The Meaningfulness Principle: The learning process is supported by language which is meaningful to the student.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
- Number of hours
- Balance between language and content
- Level of teacher training/professional support
- Subjects
- Assessment: Usually assessed for content learning by the content teacher
- English language and subject level of students
- Programme size: Nine thousand pupils
- Main reason for CLIL programme implementation
- Material and methodologies
- Future prospects
Pupils are increasing their motivation, drop-out rates are reasonably low, schools are experiencing a considerable change, and teachers involved have opportunities available to improve their professional skills with new methodologies.