Choosing Maintenance: Children in Dual-Language Programs Integrate Across Languages

• In Event: 3-192 - Classroom Language Use and Learning Outcomes in Dual Language Learners in the U.S.

Integrative Statement

Parents of children growing up speaking a minority language support maintenance of the minority language through enrollment in dual-language education. Dual-language education provides content through two languages and is considered an additive program, with children adding a second-language while maintaining and continuing to grow in their home language. Yet the conditions of dual-language education are precisely those that should theoretically present challenges to a major means by which children accumulate knowledge, namely, by integrating information across learning episodes and extending beyond what is directly taught. In expressing support for maintaining the home language, are parents also inadvertently adding obstacles to educational success?

By design, dual-language programs present academic content through two languages, often by different teachers, in different classrooms, with different materials. This requires children to integrate and build a knowledge base across two languages and educational environments that lack the surface similarity that young children often depend on to recognize material is related and can be integrated. In the present line of research, participants are children in an English/Spanish dual-language program in an impoverished rural agricultural community in the United States. The school offers both dual-language and traditional education models side-by-side within the schools. Dual-language children are matched for comparison with traditionally educated children based on language, cognitive, and socio-economic factors. Children’s performance is assessed in a task requiring them to self-derive new factual knowledge from the integration of novel facts presented through separate lessons in the classroom. All children also participate in control conditions in which both novel pieces of information are presented in English. In the manipulated condition, children in the dual-language program hear one novel fact in a pair presented through English and another fact presented through Spanish.

In Study 1, a matched sample of 104 children across grades 1 and 2 listened to story passages containing novel facts that could be integrated and utilized to self-derive new knowledge. There was no effect of educational program (dual-language compared to traditional), condition (control compared to manipulated), or interaction between the two, Fs < 1.24, ps > .27. The results indicate that there was not a cost to self-derivation performance in this cross-language context. In Study 2, 100 matched third and fourth graders heard novel facts in a format that lacked the rich context of the story passages. In this format, there was an education program by condition interaction such that children across both education programs performed equivalently in the control condition, but children in the dual-language program had lower performance in the cross-language condition compared to traditionally educated peers who received the same information through one language, F(1, 89)= 5.04, p = .03, ŋ2=.05.

In addition to informing our understanding of the process of building a knowledge base, conceptual representation, and cognition, the results have applied relevance for instruction in traditional and dual-language classrooms. Parents for whom it is important to maintain the home language can benefit from understanding that maintenance through a dual-language program need not interfere with educational outcomes when appropriate contextual support is provided.

Authors

• Alena G Esposito, Clark University
  Presenting Author

• Patricia Bauer, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author