Second Language Learning in the Early School Years: Trends and Contexts. Victoria A. Murphy
of the tasks in my professional life is to act as Course Director of the MSc in Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition at the University of Oxford. I teach a module on that course entitled ‘L1 and Bilingualism’, which covers what we know about how children learn language, both when it is their native (only) language and when they are developing bilingually. I have been teaching this module for nine years; through this graduate seminar, in conjunction with the inspiring PhD students I have been fortunate enough to work with over the years, I have been able to enjoy many lively, informative discussions and debates with some very talented students. These interactions, together with the research I have been engaged in for the past 20 years, have had a profound impact on the way I conceive of the research outcomes on L2 learning in children and I am very grateful to all of the students who have inspired my thinking. However, in the course of teaching and researching these topics, over and over again I have had students ask me to recommend a volume that reviews research evidence on L2 learning in childhood – a volume that would provide them with a ‘bird’s eye view’ of what has been going on in the research investigating different aspects of how children learn more than one language in childhood. While I was certainly able to draw up impressive reading lists, given the fantastic research available on numerous different aspects of research on these subjects, I was not able to identify a single volume which I thought provided such a general review. A number of years ago, one student suggested that I might write such a book myself. This planted the initial seed in my mind – that I might perhaps one day prepare such a review. That day has now arrived and this volume is the product.
Research on child bilingualism and L2 learning, like a well-cut diamond, is multi-faceted. As a result, in writing this book I have had to necessarily make decisions about what facets would be included and, perhaps more notably, which would not. Undoubtedly some will argue that I have erred in my judgment on areas of research I have included. Given that I have had a prolonged interest in language development in education, I decided to focus on contexts of learning in children that intersect and interact with educational provision. This is also particularly important internationally, as increasingly children are becoming bi- or multilingual through their experiences with languages in the context of primary education. The only exception to this general approach is Chapter 2 on simultaneous bilingualism, which sets the scene for the remaining chapters and illustrates that very young children are more than capable of learning multiple languages without any adverse consequences to their linguistic development in either language. However, I am fully aware that there are gaps in this book, as I found it challenging to address everything I felt was important, both in terms of which contexts to include, and which research to include within each. I hope that minimally this volume provides a good starting point for the interested reader to delve more deeply into the multi-faceted subject of child L2 learning through education.
While the ‘seed’ of the idea to write this book was germinating, I began to notice various emerging trends in relation to teaching foreign languages to young learners that also guided the thinking and writing of this book. Having been educated in Canada, where it is standard practice to learn French at young ages in primary school, I was shocked when I came to England in the mid 1990s and discovered that foreign language instruction was not part of the primary curriculum. I learned that it once had been, but had been withdrawn for a variety reasons, notably that the government of the day had decided it was not effective. A number of issues are related here, not the least of which includes the fact that a decision to withdraw FL learning would have been less likely in a non-Anglophone country and reflects a view that English is the most important language for our young global citizens. I was concerned that there might be an underlying belief along the lines of: If our children are already native speakers of English then, while FL learning might be nice, it does not deserve any prominence within a primary curriculum in an English-speaking country. Additionally, I was concerned by some of the approaches to FL learning that I came to read and learn about, those which demotivate an inherently motivated and interested population of learners. As someone who learned quite a lot of a second language through primary education, I felt a significant sense of loss for the generation of children in the UK who did not have the benefit of learning a FL properly through school.
I was most heartened, however, to learn that around the world, including in the UK, governments began to consider FL learning in childhood more seriously by making policy decisions about either introducing FL into the curriculum or even lowering the starting age at which FL instruction begins (see Chapter 6). However, like many other researchers with an interest in child L2 learning, I began to wonder what was motivating the decision to lower these starting ages, when I realized that it did not always appear that these initiatives were made on the basis of evidence. As I discuss in Chapter 6, policy documents in the UK, for example, speak to the ‘ease’ with which children learn languages. However, those of us who research children learning an L2 have been aware for some time that age is not likely to be the critical variable here – that the nature of the child’s exposure to the L2/FL is equally or indeed perhaps even more important than the age of the learner.
I decided, therefore, that in taking up my student’s suggestion to write the review of research on child L2 learning, I would focus the discussion on a comparison of L2 outcomes across contexts within the overarching population of young learners. I felt this would be useful for a wide variety of individuals (such as graduate students from a range of disciplines, practitioners, policy makers, etc.), and that it would be constructive to identify the diversity of contexts, and outcomes within contexts. Given that all the learners across each of the contexts in this volume are young learners, the discussion highlights that age is arguably not the most significant variable in predicting successful L2/bilingual outcomes. In so doing, I hope too that I have been able to highlight the multiplicity of different factors which contribute to the variability both within and across contexts, so that in examining L2 outcomes these can be taken into account. To illustrate, the fact that simultaneous bilinguals rarely develop with fully balanced proficiency in both of their languages (Chapter 2); that heritage language learners often lose or fail to completely develop their knowledge of their home language (Chapter 3); the difficulties that many minority language learners experience with literacy development (Chapter 4); and the slow progress made by young FL learners (Chapter 6); can all be understood when factoring in a range of different contextual variables. As but one example, it would be gratifying if future evaluations of FL learning outcomes in input-limited environments (as in the UK, for example) would take note of some of these contextual variables, such as the nature of the provision and the kinds of support for FL learning outside of the classroom. Perhaps with these sorts of contextual issues in mind, future policy makers might make more evidence-based decisions about educational provision that best supports multilingual development. I live in hope!
1
A typology of contexts
Introduction
Children seem to learn languages easily, without apparent effort, regardless of their parents’ level of education, literacy skills, or socioeconomic status1. A child living in a yurt in central Asia will learn his/her language as readily as a prince in castle. Anyone who has been around young children as they develop their linguistic proficiency can observe the remarkable facility with which children develop knowledge of something as complex as language, without even seeming to try. Indeed, there is a prevailing assumption that young, developing children are little sponges who soak up everything around them, including languages. This view is exemplified by an online article about children learning languages on a popular online site for parents where it was stated that ‘… as children are sponges who pick up new things much more quickly than adults, learning a language comes easily to young minds’2. This view that children have a predisposition for learning language was originally brought to the fore with Lenneberg’s (1967) influential Critical Period
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