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The effect of full-immersion schooling on nativelikeness and dominance in Palestinian Arabic-American English bilinguals
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Abstract:
In second language acquisition, it is well known that an early age of onset and an extensive amount of naturalistic input are key elements promoting successful learning outcomes. What is less well known is what outcomes we can expect when the main source of these elements is full-immersion schooling, defined for the purposes of this study as a type of schooling wherein the medium of instruction is the students’ L2 and the school provides additional elements favoring successful L2 acquisition, while the L1 is the predominant home and societal language. The main question driving this study was whether individuals I call school bilinguals, who have been schooled entirely or almost entirely in a full-immersion setting, achieve nativelike competence in the L2, defined as a level of competence equal to that of a prototypical native speaker of the L2, for whom that language was the predominant home, school, and societal language during childhood and adolescence. Other questions of interest related to L1 competence, dominance, the societal language, and individual variation. The study sought to find out whether school bilinguals achieve nativelikeness in their L1 and whether they become dominant, in terms of proficiency, in one language or the other. The study also sought to tap into the role of the societal language by comparing school bilinguals with heritage speakers of the L1 who share the school bilinguals’ L2, in other words, individuals whose linguistic background overlaps to a great extent with that of school bilinguals with the exception of the predominant societal language during childhood and adolescence. Finally, the study sought to find out whether school bilinguals exhibit individual variation in their nativelikeness outcomes, and, if so, whether language aptitude, language use and exposure, and/or socioaffective factors correlate with individual variation. School bilinguals and heritage speakers with Palestinian Arabic as an L1 and American English as an L2 completed a language aptitude test and a linguistic questionnaire targeting language use and exposure and socioaffective factors. They also completed a battery of parallel tasks, in English and Arabic, designed to measure nativelikeness and dominance in terms of proficiency. An Elicited Imitation Task (EIT) in each language was administered to measure dominance in terms of proficiency, and a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) and a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) in each language were administered to measure nativelikeness. The TVJTs and GJTs targeted five linguistic areas in each language: article semantics, verbal aspect, resumptive pronouns, double objects, and adverb word order. These linguistic areas were selected because they exhibit important differences between the two languages and are thus particularly vulnerable to intrusive transfer. It was expected that nativelike performance in all five areas would be a strong indicator of nativelikeness. Native speakers of each language served as controls and completed the language aptitude test and the EIT, TVJT, and GJT in their respective native language. Overall, the results suggested that the school bilinguals were nativelike in both languages, with balanced proficiency across the two languages, and that the heritage speakers were nativelike in English and not nativelike in Arabic, and dominant in English in terms of proficiency. Little individual variation was found within either of the two groups, and there were very few significant correlations between individual variation and language aptitude, language use and exposure, or socioaffective factors. While this suggests that when the home language is the L1 and the school language is the L2, it is more advantageous, in terms of ultimate attainment in the two languages, to have the L1, and not the L2, as the societal language, more research is needed in order to determine how generalizable these findings and conclusions are.
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Keyword:
bilingualism; full-immersion schooling; heritage speakers; language dominance; nativelikeness; school bilinguals; second language acquisition
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113038
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Effects of instruction on writing improvement of university heritage learners of Spanish: A longitudinal study
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The effects of language instruction on L2 learners’ input processing and learning outcomes
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