Bilingual Language Acquisition Stages and Literacy Development
Simultaneous Acquisition of Several Languages
Simultaneous acquisition of several languages occurs before age 3 and involves three stages:
- Stage 1: The child uses two different vocabularies that do not overlap. Grammatical structures are often lacking, leading to mixing if structures are not yet established in either language. Phonological differentiation occurs between 24 and 30 months, and languages are used in different contexts.
- Stage 2: The child possesses two distinct lexicons but applies syntax rules inconsistently. They must separate each word from its context to identify its equivalent in the other language. Flexibility at the syntactic level is limited; common structures are learned first.
- Stage 3: The child produces correct lexical and syntactic structures for each language, though syntactic and lexical interference may still occur.
Challenges in Minority Language Contexts
Minority Language Delays: These can result from a lack of respect for the child’s distinct linguistic and cultural expectations by the teacher and the child themselves.
Language Immersion Programs
Submersion vs. Structured Submersion:
- Submersion: Language programs aimed at ethnic minority students to learn the majority culture’s language and assume the dominant culture.
- Structured Submersion: Involves placing students in standard classrooms.
Communicative Development Differences by Age
Interactions with adults help develop more complex grammatical language, precise references, expanded meanings, and comprehensive vocabulary. Oral language development shares characteristics with written language, which is often decontextualized. Children who have experienced these rich interactions are better prepared to learn written language.
Characteristics of Written Language Learning
Teaching/learning based on written language requires the child to:
- Use decontextualized language competitively.
- Employ complex grammatical forms.
- Supply information that the context alone does not provide, relying solely on linguistic cues.
- Learn specific vocabulary.
- Imagine an interlocutor for written texts.
- Write about subjects distant from everyday experience.
- Use abstract language.
Communicative Competence Aspects
This involves using different types of speech according to functional situations and interacting with competent speakers. Planning issues are generally not a concern for learning competence itself.
Comprehension of Spoken Language
The context used to predict significant events is key to developing a framework for understanding, where the text acquires meaning. The active listener uses cognitive mechanisms related to world context to understand language.
Transactional Conversations
These conversations provide necessary information, interest both partners, and are based on teaching and learning discursive skills in the classroom, achieved through dialogue in different types of speech events.
Aspects of Oral Language Assessment
Assessment should evaluate:
- Sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence (e.g., goal, turn-taking).
- Grammatical competence (semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonic).
- Strategic competence (interaction with the listener, overcoming difficulties).
- Attitude towards language.
The Reading Process
What is Reading? The process that includes understanding a written text.
Intervening Factors in Reading: Text form and content, reader expectations, and prior knowledge.
Flower and Hayes Model
Writing skills involve activating long-term memory, which relates to rhetorical questions and texts. The core processes are planning, drafting, and revising.
Acquisition of Reading: Three Phases
- Logographic: The child recognizes interesting graphic settings, forms hypotheses, and mimics the act of reading.
- Alphabetical: The child acquires phonological decoding of written symbols, paying attention to order and form, leading to a high degree of autonomy.
- Orthographic: Global recognition of written configurations.
Evolution of Writing: Five Phases
The organization of content literacy prioritizes the situation in which reading or writing is necessary, replacing concepts of ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ with ‘useful’ or ‘useless’.
- Level 1: Written playback mirroring the act of writing observed in a literate person.
- Level 2: Writing regulated as production for differentiated creation.
- Level 3: Writing controlled by syllabic segmentation of speech.
- Level 4: Writing controlled by the alphabet-syllabic segmentation of speech.
- Level 5: Writing controlled by exhaustive alphabetical segmentation of speech.