SSHRC
2006-2009

Bridging the Space Between First and Second Languages at School

White, J., & Horst, M. (Concordia University)

Does knowing more than one language make you better at language generally? The answer to this intriguing question appears to be “yes”. Research indicates that in comparison to monolinguals, people who learn another language have more highly developed metalinguistic awareness. That is, they are more able to see language as an object and speculate on its characteristics. Thus a young native speaker of French will understand early on the meaning of ses (= English his and her), but with the development of metalinguistic awareness he or she will realize that ses is actually a word with distinct spelling and grammatical properties that distinguish it from its sound-alike ces (= English these). This kind of awareness has been shown to play an important role in successful reading and writing at school. The finding that it develops more readily in children who know a second language raises two key questions: Can first and second language instruction be reshaped in ways that encourage learners to make the cross-linguistic comparisons that underlie this cognitive advantage? If so, can such instruction lead to measurable improvements in both first and second language knowledge?

This research addresses these questions by developing and testing instruction that raises learners’ contrastive language awareness (CLA). The context is elementary schools in Quebec, where French is the first language of most learners and English is taught as a second language. The experimental CLA activities are taught in both language programs and require collaboration between programs that have long gone separate ways. But new impetus for building bridges comes from a recent province-wide reform that emphasizes the transfer of learning across the elementary school curriculum and from researchers who are increasingly aware of the potential value of raising learners’ language awareness of patterns across languages.

The specific objectives of the research program are twofold: 1) to enhance young second language learners’ ability to recognize patterns in their first and second languages in ways that can be expected to result in measurable development in the areas of grammar, vocabulary, and discourse in both French and English; 2) to produce and pilot classroom teaching materials that will facilitate language coordination between first and second language teachers. The extension of CLA to languages other than French and English will be investigated in future research.

Contributions of the research:
From a theoretical perspective, the findings will contribute to our understanding of the nature of CLA and the extent to which it can be developed through tasks that require learners to direct attention to aspects of language and formulate hypotheses. Measures of CLA developed for the project will be of interest to psycholinguists and applied linguistics researchers. The study responds to calls in the language awareness and teacher training literature for empirical verification of claims. The research also serves the education community by producing a set of materials and prototype activities that can be used by teacher trainers in universities and importantly, by classroom teachers working collaboratively to enhance the first and second language development of their students.