Learning L2 in the L1 context

Most of us had to learn a second language in school, while still in our L1 setting. I had 2 years of Latin and 2 of French in high school, then more French, a year and a half of Russian and started German in college. German became my major when I felt like I couldn't excel in math and physics, so I attended German summer school 3 times, did my graduate study in Germanic linguistics, took a Danish MA in it, and taught it in Danish high schools for about 12 years.

And this doesn't account for all the other languages I "learned" in an academic setting: Gothic and Old High German, Frisian, English, & Norse; Greek, Sanskrit, & Lithuanian; Finnish & Greenlandic Eskimo. All of these languages were taught primarily in the "learn grammar, read and translate" method.

I have met numerous foreigners who learned English that way in their home country. They have no problem reading and writing, and thought that they were fluent, but they discover that spoken English is very different from classroom English.

I had a friend in Denmark, who was studying English at the university and later became a HS English teacher like me. She was so afraid that I would discover that she made errors in English that she would never speak English with me. I sometimes thought she preferred that I made a fool of myself in Danish rather than she in English. Her husband, on the other hand, was studying economics, and had no need to have perfect English. We often talked English together. Later, he lead tours to Berlin, so I assume he also spoke a fluent, but imperfect German, which got him wherever he wanted to go.

My son's wife studied English for many years in Panama, but was completely tongue-tied when she moved here, because the teachers had punished the students with ridicule and bad grades if they made mistakes. She has had to work hard to shake off her feelings of inferior English.

My high school French teacher did try to get us conversing in French, and my German summer schools (including a college-run summer school in Vienna) were attempts at immersion, so we did do a lot of "conversing" of sorts in German there and at German House in college.

But I always say that I really learned German when I arrived in Germany after 2 years of German and had to go to a drug-store to buy a tooth-brush, as well as our first experiences ordering meals in restaurants, which produced some interesting results. (Later I had a similar experience trying to buy disposable diapers for my son. I ended up putting him on the counter and pointing - entirely "context embedded!")

But I learned particularly German (and later, Danish) another way. I read. I read many German novels above and beyond what we were assigned in our courses. In this way I absorbed an enormous amount of passive vocabulary and grammatical structures. That summer in Vienna and another 2 weeks in Eastern Germany many years later were my only extended visits in German-speaking countries. Everything else I learned from books and movies. Several of my college assignments also had to be written in German, my only writing experience except for an occasional letter. In all those first books I read, the first 20 pages are well annotated with glosses. After that I quit using the dictionary, because I had acquired enough of the context to figure out the rest of the words. I could at least figure out that a word was a poitive adjective, the name of a yellow flower, some sort of activity. If I encountered a word several times without guessing its meaning, I might look it up, because I knew that it would help my understanding to know it.

As a teacher of German in Denmark, I finally got the "discrete language skills" of German down, because I had to correct numerous translations and essays, where the students were expected to write correctly. My students had had German since 7th grade, so I got them 3-4 years later. We had to work a lot on their "discrete language skills" of grammar. since their primary school classes had emphasized conversation. Since Germany was our closest neighbor, most students had traveled in Germany, and some even watched German TV. Besides grammar and essay-writing, classes were based on large amounts of reading, and classroom discussions of what they'd read. My students had a much better chance of learning a usable German (and English, which they started in 5th grade) than we ever did with 2 years of HS French. Their exams were also very different from here: Final exams consisted of an individual oral exam, where a student discussed a half a page of one of the texts we had read, as well as a written exam, where students answered short questions, translated some text and wrote an essay based on a given 2-page text. Multiple-choice is unknown in Denmark.

My experience of learning Danish (my L3) in Denmark was mostly the natural method, with a couple of classes in Danish for foreigners and then an evening HS class in Danish intended for Danes. My experience was thus somewhat like that of our students - except that I was an adult, knew a similar language (German) fluently, understood the concept of grammar, and had a great need to learn Danish quickly, so that I could get a job. I was also married to a Dane, so I spoke Danish at home and with his family, and I had children who were becoming fluent in day care and in school.

Negotiating Identity

I was curious to see if anyone else has written about our book, Negotiating Identity, so I Googled the term. As you will see by scanning the following examples. the term is used in many different contexts, where language and culture are just a small part. Our students are working with many different identities, not just, for example, Latina/American. Our native born, WASP students are struggling with identities as well, like the kid whose parents expect him to be a doctor and he'd rather become a chef, or movie actor, or school teacher, which reminds me of Harry Wong's dedication to The First Days of School:

Dedicated to my father and mother,
who wanted me to be a brain surgeon.
I exceeded their expectations.
I became a scholar and a teacher.

• From Faceted Id/entity: Managing representation in a digital world, Danah Boyd's Master's Thesis at the MIT Media Lab:

Chapter 2: Negotiating Identity in Social Interactions
During social interaction, people regularly present themselves while simultaneously reading the presentations of others. Depending on one's personality, an individual will adjust aspects of their presentation according to the reactions and presentations of those around them. Fundamentally, social interaction is a negotiation between individuals performing within a particular social context to convey aspects of their identity. This negotiation often occurs with little conscious thought; people comfortably interact with one another, revealing what is appropriate while assessing what information is being given.

• From Negotiating Identity and Community After September 11 by Kay Deaux, Professor of Psychology, Graduate Center at the City University of New York

I became a United States citizen four years ago because of my long love affair with New York....I am a Bangladeshi woman and my last name is Rahman, a Muslim name...Before last week, I had thought of myself as a lawyer, a feminist, a wife, a sister, a friend, a woman on the street. Now I begin to see myself as a brown woman who bears a vague resemblance to the images of terrorists we see on television....As I become identified as someone outside the New York community, I feel myself losing the power to define myself...
--Anika Rahman

In this poignant statement by a U.S citizen, ethnically Bangladeshi with Muslim linkage, the complex web of issues involved in immigrant identity is dramatically clear ... Identification is typically a complex rather than simple construction, involving multiple aspects of oneself that may overlap or compete. Identification is a dynamic process, in which the meaning, the function, and even the basic labels can change from one point in time to another. Further, and most relevant now, identification is a socially constructed process in which the context and views of others have a significant role, shaping options and consequences for individual experience.

• From Coming to an Asexual Identity: Negotiating Identity, Negotiating Desire, by Kristin S. Scherrer, University of Michigan (article abstract)

Sexuality is generally considered an important aspect of selfhood. Therefore, individuals who do not experience sexual attraction, and who embrace an asexual identity, are in a unique position to inform the social construction of sexuality. ... In this article I describe several distinct aspects of asexual identities: the meanings of sexual, and therefore, asexual behaviors, essentialist characterizations of asexuality, and lastly, interest in romance as a distinct dimension of sexuality. These findings have implications not only for asexual identities, but also for the connections of asexuality with other marginalized sexualities.
Sexualities, Vol. 11, No. 5, 621-641 (2008) DOI: 10.1177/1363460708094269

• Female Repeat Offenders Negotiating Identity Abstract of article by Brenda Geiger and Michael Fischer:

This study examines the process of identity negotiation of Israeli female ex-convicts who have been separated for extensive periods of time from their children and lost custody over them. Content analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with the offenders reveal that these women were able to reconstruct their biography and retrospectively account for their crimes and drug addiction in terms of the sexual, physical, and economic abuse they had endured, and by appeal to higher loyalties, their children, whom they had to provide for. However, when having to account for their failings as mothers, all biographical reconstruction, external blame, and accusation collapsed. Looking at themselves through their children's eyes, female offenders were simply unable to renegotiate the imputed identity of incompetent mother. Neither could they confront their children's actual or expected anger and resentment nor explain why they had abandoned them. Filled with self-blame, guilt, and remorse, the offenders' only hope was to obtain their children's pardon. Permanently alienated from the center of motherhood, the female offenders interviewed in this study were doomed to existential chaos with no feeling, value, or role commitment.
Geiger, B. and Fischer, M. , 2006-11-01 "Female Repeat Offenders Negotiating Identity" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA Online . 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p118631_index.html

Chapter 3: The Three Faces of Language Proficiency

How long does it take to learn a new language? Or maybe we should ask: what does it mean to "know" a language?

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?

Cummins adds a third dimension to BICS (which he calls "conversational fluency") and CALP "academic language proficiency"):

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...
(Cummins, p. 65)

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.

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.

(Cummins, p. 67)

	Cognitively Undemanding
Context	A	C	Context
Embedded	B	D	Reduced
	Cognitively Demanding

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.
(Cummins, p. 71)

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.

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.

Message of the Statue of Liberty

I was debating whether to just put this in as a comment, or as a separate post, but the message of the Statue of Liberty is something we seem to have forgotten. I read a number of web articles about it, and chose this one: MESSAGE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, The Promise of the Golden Door, by Julie Redstone.
In case you've forgotten, there is a plaque with this poem the "The New Colossus," written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus, appear on the Statue's pedestal:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Julie Redstone continues to explain what this Liberty is:

What is the Golden Door?
It is the entrance into liberty and freedom from oppression that is the promise of America - a land, a people, a way of life.

It is also the freedom of spirit and of choice that was declared an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence - a document whose date of execution, July 4th, 1776, is inscribed on the tablet she carries. The Statue welcomes all to this door - the lost, the needy, the rejected, the exiled. She invites them to step through it into freedom.

Liberty's comforting presence is increasingly needed when the sea of world events becomes more stormy, the waves higher. In times of turbulence, her light is reassuring, her presence, a guarantor of safety.
(Redstone)

I must admit that I had always thought that the part of the poem with "Give me your tired and poor" was engraved around the statue, not just on a plaque, so I learned something here.

The women of the earlier post from Iraq finally were welcomed at the Golden Door, but it evidently "freedom from opression" might welcome a select few, but we have not been very good hosts since they got here, to help them achieve the freedom they sought. They are again "huddled masses." And the immigrants, who have given up trying to come here legally because the system is broken, may be "huddled masses" but they're not welcomed at the Golden Door.

Of course these days there are a lot of people born in this country who feel that they are part of the "huddled masses," or maybe, "yearning to be free." It is our responsibility as teachers to help our students attain what they have come to school for: their highest potential, which will give them Liberty. This means ensuring that we give them ample opportunities to learn the cognitive skills, including academic English (the topic of the next chapter) to achieve this potential.

A culture shift isn't always what you expected either

The book, Negotiating Identities, is about how to teach English learners in school, so its understanding of identity is as a foreign person arriving in a new country. However, there are similar identity conflicts when your native language is a dialect of the standard language, and when your culture and identity is very different from the dominate, educated, culture. This of course is true of many African-Americans, who speak some sort of Ebonics among themselves, or even Latinos/Latinas who have grown up in predominantly Latino culture, such as in East LA, where everyone speaks fluent, natural American, but with their own particular accent.

My first husband, A., a Dane, came from a proud and competent farm family. His mother was born is a small town, not on a farm, and conveyed her delight in reading to her children. When his eldest brother, N., finished the primary school in their farm community, he was encouraged to go to middle school in the neighboring town. There he was constantly taunted for his country-yokel dialect and his farmer ways. Nevertheless, he persisted, and got a job in a bank, which supported him to get his high school diploma and then a law degree in evening school.

My husband, A, would have none of this taunting, so he first went to a follow-up school for farm children, where he evidently developed an interest in more socialist politics, in contrast to the libertarian politics of most Danish farmers at that time. He was strong in his personal identity as he went on to a variety of jobs in industry, which he often lost because of conflicts with bosses. At some point, he decided to follow in his brother's footsteps, took evening classes to pass both middle school and high school, and was completing his second year of university studies in political science when I met him.

But A. had an identity problem. Somewhere in his schooling a teacher had convinced him that he would have to speak standard Danish (with the accepted local city accent) to succeed. He completely dropped his dialect, which I never heard him speak, even with his parents, whose dialect was so old-fashioned, that it took me several years to understand most of it. Even though he "lost" his native language, we went to the farm every weekend, where he loved working with the harvest or feeding the pigs. He appreciated his mother's influence on his book-learning as well, but in conversation always answered their dialect with standard Danish.

A. aimed at a career as a university professor, but felt that everyone who was competing with him for tenure track positions had connections through their academic family background. I don't really believe this was entirely true, although he was part of the first generation of non-middle class students who got an education beyond 7th grade. Before his generation, only about 12% became university students.

He is often quite bitter about his life - a stroke in his 40's didn't make life easier. While his parents were adamant that their children should decide their own careers (the youngest 2 remained farmers,) A. was insistent that his children should get a university education, which our son initially didn't do. This caused constant intergenerational conflict as well.

Some others I knew could easily switch between dialect with family and standard local Danish with their colleagues. (I remember feeling very honored when one of these invited me to a birthday party, where most of the others were local and family, with whom she spoke in dialect. She spoke in dialect at the party, also to me, so I felt like she had accepted me into her inner circle, almost as a native.)

Would the once very self-confident and strong A. have kept his confidence if he had accepted the language of his background? Was his denied language the most important part of his identity? He apparently dropped it voluntarily, but their were certainly outside influences that forced him to change that part of his identity instead of negotiating a space for it.

Life not what they expected

As I was beginning to think about this blog, I read an article in the LA Times about Iraqi refugees to this country, Iraqi refugees find U.S. life not what they expected. For Iraqi refuges, coming to the U.S. presents multiple conflicts. They are often part of the previously dominant Sunni culture of Iraq, often highly educated, accustomed to a high position in society, which included staff to cook and clean. But furthermore, they are coming to the country that conquered them and removed the possibility to continue the privileged life they had known. Often they will need retraining to be able to hold a position even vaguely resembling what they had known.

The article describes the travails of a woman lawyer, whose husband disappeared, and her adult daughter, who has a master's in computer science. I assume particularly the daughter speaks English somewhat fluently, and will soon be able to find work somewhat related to her education; her lawyer mother had hoped that she would at least be able to do clerical work in a law office. But this has not yet happened because of the current economic situation.

The Iraqis are some of the most educated and skilled refugees to come here, aid workers say. Used to a middle-class life, many hope to work as doctors, lawyers or accountants. But recertification is costly and time-consuming. So they are advised to at first pursue more typical refugee work as shop attendants and cleaners.
(Zavis, p 2)

They all discuss whether it would be better to return to Iraq, but then they remember why they had to flee. The new identity forced upon them here is distressing, but the life available to them - their former identity no longer exists.

"Everything in my life was destroyed, even my dreams," Ann said after mother and daughter labored over a meal that back home would have been cooked for them. [the daughter continued:] "I blame her. I'm sorry for that. . . . She always protect me. Why she can't protect me this time?"
(Zavis, p 3)

They will have to renegotiate their identity time and again in this country until they can feel comfortable with what it has become.

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door

The text below is about half way through the graphic story "I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door," by Maira Kalman in the August 27, 2009, NYT. (You can see the story if you click the link or the text - have patience, it takes a long time to open!) As she writes, when she was sworn in as a citizen (from Israel) she was told that they would "shed our old identity and put on a NEW IDENTITY..." but the woman she met at the district office of Homeland Security for immigration told her "This nation's IDENTITY is BASED on its rich diversity... Americans can be many different things."

Of course Maira Kalman is a voluntary immigrant...