When I've looked back at my experience learning Danish as a 25-year old, I was thinking 3-4 months. But then I remember the embarrassment of misunderstandings, my husband's writing job applications, my relief that I could submit my American dissertation draft (in English) as my Danish MA thesis, and that most exams were orals. Even many years later when I was trying to earn a living between real jobs, when I was told by a temp agency that I couldn't do a receptionist's job because of my (minimal) accent.
Most texts about learning a second language divide language competency into two categories: BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.) Most kids pick up BICS pretty quickly. I remember meeting a little 4-year-old American boy in our apartment complex in Denmark, very miserable because he couldn't communicate with the other kids. It seems like it didn't take him more than a month before he was playing happily with them. My daughter at age 2 1/2 was having trouble separating the English of her mother and children's books, and the Danish of her father and day care until we spent a couple of weeks in England with no Danish around. After that there was not problem keeping them separated.
So our bilingual children started school with the monolingual Danes and appeared to do as well as them, since they were learning CALP along with their Danish classmates in school...as well as, it appears, at home. Because we read to them in both languages, and discussed things with them, they were getting kid-sized CALP from us. It apparently doesn't matter which language you start doing cognitively stimulating things, as long as you do it. But even so, studies have shown that kids often need 4-7 years to catch up with their classmates when it come to CALP, the stuff that's measured for grades and standardized tests. Small children probably a little less, if they get good support at home, kids 8-14 best, it seems, and over 14 never has a chance to catch up. (Cummins, p. 73) .
Somehow it seems to me that there are parameters not being considered here:
- How much cognitive stimulation is the child getting from home (no matter in what language?)
- How old is the child - or person?
- What is his L1 (a language that is similar in vocabulary to English (i.e. with all the Greek and Latin academic words) or one that is very different?
- How challenging was the child's schooling in L1 before coming here?
Discrete language skills reflect specific phonological, literacy and grammatical knowledge that students acquire as a result of direct instruction and both formal and informal practive (e.g. reading). Some of these ... skills are acquired early ... [including] knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sounds represented by the ... letters,,,, and the ability to decode written words into appropriate sounds. [Later] they will also acquire conventions about spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as well as ...grammatical rules...Evidently some students are able to acquire convincing conversational and discrete language skills without being able to use them in academic situations. Thus both the teachers and counselors don't consider the possibility that the student is still a language learner when it comes to cognitive learning skills. Cummins argues for longer protected bilingual training, so that students can develop more of the CALP skills before being transferred to regular classes.
(Cummins, p. 65)
Language presents demands across both contextual and cognitive continua to receive and produce language. If there is sufficient external context, just as gestures and appropriate objects, language learners can understand quite well with minimal language skills. As the student learns vocabulary and cultural background, she internalizes more and more context, so that more can be understood without the external context. Similarly, the language may be cognitively undemanding, as in a conversation or an easy book, while it can become progressively more demanding, as in high school and college classes. Cummins presents a framework to show these two continua.
Cognitively Undemanding Context A C Context Embedded B D Reduced Cognitively Demanding (Cummins, p. 67)
The area A defines normal conversation (BICS), while D is the most academically challenging (CALP). According to Cummins,
the progression of academic tasks should ideally go from quadrant A ... to quadrant B ... and then to quadrant D... Cognitive challenge is essential for academic growth but the internal and external contextual support necessary for bilingual students to meet that challenge must also be built into the activities. ...Quadrant C activities ... can be useful for reinforcement or practice of particular points and for teaching discrete language skills. However, if instruction stays at the level of quadrant C ..., it risks focusing only on out-of-context drills and worksheets, ...[failing] to supply ...elements to facilitate learning: for example, cognitive challenge, affirmation of identity,and extensive comprehensible input in the target language.Of course all students, not just English Learners, can benefit from this progression. It is very interesting to see where Cummins places worksheets as context-reduced, cognitively undemanding.
(Cummins, p. 71)
Getting back to the question of how long it takes to acquire proficiency, Cummins reports on research on students in several different countries. He concludes that students can gain "peer-appropriate" (BICS) language skills quite quickly, since the cognitive level is relatively undemanding. However, it takes students a longer time to catch up with their classmates on the more demanding classroom skills, because their classmates are "a moving target;" they are also moving on. So a language learner has to learn at a faster pace in order to catch up with her classmates, which puts enormous pressure on the students. Even though they are apparently fluent, they still need a lot of support in the classroom. It is no wonder that many of these students give up when they have to work harder than their classmates. We teachers must be aware that even seemingly well-adjusted language learners may be struggling, and provide them with the support that they need.
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I think language have a big impact on what we do in our everyday lives because it is one way to connect to other people. By just presenting your thesis ideas, people would required to connect to other people, and language can be the communication that people need.
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