Negotiating comprehension

I just had to include this entire blogpost from Academomia (written by my cousin,) because it's a fantastic example of negotiating for meaning--for sense-making. I'm afraid that a language learner might not be as persistent as 3-year-old Charlie:

On our way to church this morning Ryan and I were talking about our university's quarterback situation in which we lost a bunch of games, our starting QB was injured and taken out of a game that was not supposed to be that big of a deal but that we were barely hanging onto, our second string QB was put in, and we scored like a thousand points inside one quarter.
Ryan made the giant mistake of saying "Poor starting quarterback, that's a tough deal."
Charlie piped up from the back seat. "Wha happened to him?"
"Uh, our quarterback got hurt playing football."
"Wha happened to him?"
"He fell down during a football game and got a booboo. Now he is all better but the coach has to decide which quarterback is going to play the rest of the season."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Our quarterback fell down and hurt his leg, Buddy. He's fine, but now there are two good quarterbacks and the coach has to decide who gets to play."
"Wha happened to him?"
"Charlie, why don't you tell me what I've told you so far?"
"I don't know."
...
...
Ahhh.
"Wha happened to him?"
Sigh. "Our quarterback fell during the football game and hurt his leg. His mommy wrapped him up in a quilt, gave him some milk, and let him watch TV. Now he feels better."
"Oh."
Later after we picked him up from Sunday School Charlie skipped down the hall saying "The football player fell down and got a booboo and now there are two quarterbacks and his mommy wrapped him up in a quilt and let him watch George and that was SO NICE of her and now he feels ALL BETTER!"

Now that is real sense-making related to the experience of a three-year-old--comprehensible input, as it were! How do we recognize when our students haven't been able to make sense of what we're saying? A high school student is much less likely to persist, so we may not discover the problem before a test, unless we do careful and constant formative assessments.

Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants

The LATimes also had an article related to the topic of this blog today, Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants. The international high school provides an alternative to newcomers, some of whom have never been in a classroom. Many of the students at the Oakland International High School have had little or no education in their homelands, and most have endured the tragedy of refugee camps, absent parents and even being orphans before coming to this country. The school has an ambitious mission

... to provide quality alternative education for recently arrived immigrant students in English language acquisition and in preparation for college. Our diverse students become active participants in our community while learning in small groups through hands-on, interdisciplinary projects and collaboration.
(School website)

and a willingness to make it work, which isn't an easy job for either the students or their teachers. The article tells the story of some of its students:

Samuel Kanwea showed up for what should have been his freshman year in high school illiterate, malnourished and exhausted from years of living in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. His family had never been able to afford the luxury of education, so he spent his early teenage years collecting firewood and selling fish. When the Liberian refugee started school in Oakland at the age of 17, it was the first time he had set foot in a classroom.
(Gorman, p 1)

Another student from Guatemala has a slightly easier time because she speaks Spanish, which is not her native language, and she had attended some school.

In one sense, Florinda -- who attended only two years of school in Guatemala before arriving in the United States in spring -- has an impressive gift. She speaks both Spanish and Mam, a Mayan dialect. But, like many new immigrants, she doesn't speak any English. Everything else in school -- geography, algebra, U.S. history -- will be out of reach until she learns the language. Classmates become both friends and translators.
(Gorman, p 1)

The principal Carmelita Reyes is very much aware of the difficulties students have when they are not literate in evey their native language. But Florinda at least has the advantage of already being bilingual, which we have read is always an advantage to learning a new language. She also can seek help in Spanish, while some students do not have fellow speakers of their language that they can turn to for a translation.

Hser Kaw, 15, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his family fled Myanmar. He spent just a few years attending school in a bamboo building before coming to the United States as a refugee in 2007. Hser said he often skipped class at the camp.

When he first started at the Oakland school, Hser said, he felt intimidated because he couldn't read, write or speak English. He spoke some Thai and a little-known language called Karen. ...

In his first year, he received mostly Ds and Fs. He said he considered quitting, but knew that he would be able to find a better job if he graduated. So he sought out extra help and completed his missing work, and he's now in 11th grade. Reyes said Hser is often the first student to arrive on campus in the morning.
(Gorman, p 2)

I was shocked to read that these students even received grades at this level. Getting D's and F's in subjects you have no background to be able to understand can only knock away a student's motivation. Luckily many refugees are made of very strong stuff to get them this far.

Even though learning to read has been a tremendous struggle, Kanwea said getting discouraged hasn't been an option. His mother, Jessie Kanwea, said she is relying on him and his sisters.
(Gorman, p 2)

The article ends with a quote from President Obama's speech to schools, which the class was reading.

Even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you, don't ever give up on yourself. . . . The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

Inner City Boarding School

In my reflections on Chapter 1, where the concept of negotiating identity was introduced, I wrote about the boarding schools that have often been used to erase the identity of (usually) indigenous children so they could become "productive members of society." Thus I was struck by an article today in the New York Times Magazine "School Issue," The Inner-City Prep School Experience, about the SEED School in the Southeast section of Washington, DC. It sounds almost like the same sort of experience that these other children experienced. And yet it isn't entirely. The children go to their homes and neighborhoods every Friday afternoon and return Sunday evening to what become the sanctuary of the school, where they are dressed like the child in the picture, which would certainly not be accepted in the 'hood, and have to negotiate their identity all over again. According to their website:

SEED’s model is unique not only in that it is a boarding school for public school students, but also in that it is located within the students’ local community. Proximity to the local community nurtures positive contact with family and community leaders. It also provides students the opportunity to serve as role models and improve their own communities through service. SEED offers resources for local families, thereby strengthening both students’ support structure and the surrounding community.
(SEED School website/Experience)

But how do the kids manage their two identities, the school identity and the home one? For one thing, the Student-Parent Handbook says it "is is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” (Jones, p. 1) so the students are permitted a certain amount of the hair styles, jewelry, etc. that is important to their home identity. One girl told the writer that

SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”
(Jones, p 2)

The students' need to negotiate their identities is very clear from this quote:

To survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams [the head of the school.] But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”
(Jones, p. 3)

Certainly Adams' attitude is the exact opposite of the leaders of the old boarding schools! These students are protected from needing to negotiate their identity constantly by being at the school 5 days every week, but their position at home is the same situation we described in blog reflections on another book for a CGU class this summer, The Adolescent Dilemma (which we tried to direct at high school students, but instead got reactions from other teachers.)

Language as a bridge and an identity

Hector Tobar's column in the LA Times today, Language as a bridge and an identity, provides a lot of wisdom on this topic. Tobar is of Latino origin, and spoke Spanish until he started school.

I know, from experience, that a second language is like a mental muscle that will turn flabby if you don't use it on a regular basis.

The first words I spoke were in Spanish. At 5, I was still fluent. But at 17, after a dozen years of only English in local public schools, I spoke Spanish like a 4-year-old.

When I went to college and mastered Spanish at age 20, worlds opened up to me. I had my first real conversations with my Guatemalan grandparents. Today, Spanish is essential to my profession -- I've interviewed peasants and presidents in the language.
(All quotes from Tobar)

In the article he interviews parents and students at a weekend Spanish class which helps the children hold on to their Spanish.

I was invited to speak on Sunday to a group of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds, and to their odd, tiny "classmate" -- a stuffed bear. Like me, the children were all English speakers, born in the U.S. But the stuffed bear spoke only Spanish ... So the kids and I chatted in español -- just so el oso wouldn't feel left out.

One of the parents told him the reason he found it necessary to enroll his child in the school:

"As soon as my son went to preschool, all of his buddies were speaking to him in English ... English was powerful. And Spanish was for the people cleaning up the school."

It seems odd that the language of Cervantes and Neruda would be considered a second-rate tongue. But that's the reality of L.A.

Here, English is the language of success, while Spanish is the language of hard labor. Some people run away from it as fast as they can.

A small minority would like to erase Spanish from the city's life. That would be a grave mistake.

Spanish adds to our collective cultural sophistication, along with Korean, Mandarin and many more languages. Those tongues and the people who speak them make us a more cosmopolitan and economically competitive city.

It was certainly a lot easier for my children to stay bilingual in Denmark. English was a high status language that everyone needs to be able to speak, so they start it in school in 5th grade. But even though speaking English has high status, being American sometimes gave problems, particularly from the time of the Vietnam war, all the way to Clinton's presidency.

But cultural sophistication is not the only reason to keep your first language, which is Spanish for many of the residents of our area. All of your languages are part of your identity.

And being connected to the language of your ancestors is good for the soul. [One of the parents] says she sees the impact of not knowing Spanish on some of her relatives. "They don't know where they come from, or where they're going," she said. ... "I have all these cousins who are basically monolingual in Spanish," she told me. "But all their kids are monolingual in English. They can barely communicate with each other."

Being a hybrid

I asked a Taiwanese/American friend to look at this blog, and to comment on it. I asked her to tell me about her Chinese/American identity, remarking that in Denmark I used to feel like I was 75% Danish and 75% American (since there was certainly some overlap in the two cultures.) Linda said she understood the concept but considers herself 65% American and 35% Chinese hybrid (as a mathematician, she wants it to add up!)

Linda has very kindly shared a couple of sections from her Ethnographic analysis of her own background, which was a major assignment for our summer classes.

Family Background

I was born and raised in a middle class family with traditional Chinese values. My father was an entrepreneur who was the primary financial provider for our family. My mother was the traditional loving wife and mom. She focused most of her attention on instilling good values in her children, doing everything she can in her power to ensure that everything was done to the utmost of her ability. The house was spotless in her presence, the children were never left unattended and the household ran smoothly.

Growing up as a young child, I was exposed to several languages. My first language was Taiwanese. It was the primary language that was spoken within our household, and among friends and relatives. As I entered into my school years, I learned Mandarin, which was the formally accepted written language in Taiwan at the time. My father spoke Japanese as part of his professional dealings, and as a result, I was exposed to the Japanese language as well. It was not until my college years [in the U.S] that I actually spent some time formally studying the Japanese language. Throughout my secondary school years, I spent five years studying the Spanish language as part of my foreign language requirements.

My first introduction to the English language and the western culture was at the age of eight when my family immigrated to the United States. For the most part, my western influences came from the world outside of home. As a child, my teachers and friends at school played essential roles for shaping my acceptance of the Western culture into my life. It did not take long for me to embrace the openness of the Western culture, as it closely connected to my personality. Confused about my true identity, I was living a Western life by day and an Eastern life by night throughout most of my school years. The two sides of me did not mesh until I began to look within myself as a young adult. It was not until my late twenties that I actually accept myself as sort of a hybrid, someone who embraces the freedom of the western culture while still upholding some traditional Chinese values from within.

Today, I feel extremely lucky to have been exposed to both the Eastern and Western style of education. As a teacher, I will pick and chose from both styles of education. Depending on the needs of each student in my class, I can shift between the Eastern and Western style of teaching.

Language Acquisition

My first encounter with the English language occurred on my first day of class in America as a third-grade student, at Yorbita Elementary School in La Puente, California. No one in my immediate family spoke English, and thus, my first day of school in the United States was complete immersion in the most unexpected way.

As I recall, the teacher pointed to me during my first day of class and said, “Linda”. She pointed to herself and said, “Ms. Dubra”. Not being aware of the English name that I was just given at that time, I remember thinking the English language was so complicated. In Chinese, the simple words of “you” and “me” were just “ni” and “wo”. I thought to myself, “Why are there so many syllables for such simple words of communication?” After a few days of having this misconception, I finally made the connection that “Linda” was actually my name, and therefore, “Ms. Dubra” was the name of my teacher.

My experience as an ELL student in 1978 was one that was nurturing and encouraging. My teacher and the class aide were both more than supportive of my inability to understand the English language. They were also pleasantly surprised at my mathematical capabilities, as I had no problems comprehending formulas and equations that were based on the Greek system of numeration.

Differentiated instruction was used to teach me the English language. Initially, a student aide who I met with for approximately one hour per day taught me some basic English vocabulary using body language and picture cards. As I began to understand some verbal English instructions, I joined first grade students during the English portion of their class. My day consisted of two separate instructional parts. It was through this method of differentiated instruction that I learned to read in English.

It took only a few months before I was able to communicate verbally using some basic day-to-day English vocabulary. However, it took many years of practice before I felt confident writing in the English language. It was not until I fully immersed myself into the American culture as an adult that I was able to comfortably write in English. That meant I had to stop translating from Chinese to English and actually, think and write directly in English. It took almost twenty years of work in progress for me to achieve a fluid level of written communication in the English language.

On schools in Taiwan and the U.S.

(from the email, not the ethnography) Generally, school in the US was a lot easier in terms of academic expectations, and much more at ease (more freedom) with respect to the daily school life. The teachers were all super nice and caring, and they never really punished anyone. In Taiwan in the late 70's, the teachers [could] physically hit students for talking, doing something incorrectly,... as a form of punishment. Middle school students actually [had] to have their hair cut a certain way, a very specific length - I remember always laughing at my sister's silly cut when we were young. Can you believe that?

[Linda added in a later email that] the education system today in Taiwan has changed quite a bit as well. Students are allowed to have their own preferred hairstyles now, unlike before where they even had someone at school reshaping your haircut if it did not meet the stated requirements. Coloring hair is still not accepted in most schools. Teachers are also not allowed to hit students anymore today. I would estimate the change to be in the 90s, maybe a gradual change began in the late 80s as Taiwan opened its market to the outside world, receiving more western influences as a result.
(Emails from Linda - My emphasis)

I think Linda describes very clearly the conflicts of two cultures, how she negotiated her identity between home and school, as well as her own awareness of her lack of Academic English, as discussed in the book and earlier in this blog.

Since there were most likely very few Chinese students in her school, she learned entirely through immersion in English, with caring teachers. Since she had learned not only her family language Taiwanese, but the Academic Chinese of Mandarin in school and was adept at mathematics, she was able to pick up the language quite quickly and was encouraged in her studies. She was given maximum exposure to English by being placed in a regular classroom (albeit a couple of grades back) so that she could learn to read along with the first graders. Since her language was not European, she had to learn an entirely different code and had very little other than underlying language universals to help her learn English.

Chapter 8: Collaborative Empowerment

At the Preschool, Elementary and Secondary Levels

Our assignment permits skipping "Chapter 7: The Deep Structure of Educational Reform," which probably goes beyond "that which we can change;" "Chapter 9: From Doublethink to Disinformation: The Academic Critics of Bilingual Education," an attempt to give the other side the word and "Chapter 10: Babel Babble: Reframing the Discourse of Diversity," also a chapter on policy, which would be very useful to some, but not first-year math teachers. So I have not read these chapters now, but may come back to them some time.

---

In Chapter 7, Cummins gives practical examples of several schools at various levels where the concepts he has developed here are carried out in practice as inspiration to the rest of us. I quote first from his conclusion, and then return to the various schools to pick out certain practical elements I find particularly interesting.

They show also that empowerment is generated only through interactions that affirm students' identities and extend their conceptual horizons. The creation of power in these interactions is at the core of genuine educational reform.
One reason why much educational reform has remained at a safe surface level ... is that genuine reform ...is not safe.; it threatens structures of privilege and status within the society. Faced with the escalating rhetoric of diversity as the enemy within, it takes courage for educatios to assert the rights of children to develop their home languages and the importance for the nation of fostering these multilingual resources....
(Cummins, p. 253)

Cummins tells about a preschool run on Montessori principles developed by the Foundation Center for Phenomenological Research, which is apparently now the National Council of La Raza which now has a number of different programs, including the one linked here on Early Care & Education Programs. The major difference in the preschool in Winters, CA, described by Cummins is that the school recruited members of the community with no educational training, and taught them Montessori methods, creating a school that is part of the community, provides jobs for community members, trains whole families in health and literacy, and in general perpares the small students well for the school career. The students and their parents become empowered by the program and strenghten their identities as Latino/as and Americans. From the website I cannot determine if this school still exists nor any studies on its results.

For the Elemenary level, Cummins highlights the work of several different schools:

• The Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Washington. D.C.is primarily Spanish/English, but also enrolls both Asian and African American students, as well as Spanish speaking students from many countries, making it very mulit-cultural, while retaining the students' identities.
  

  [The] School offers a ... bilingual program for grades pre-k to eighth. All instruction and school activities are conducted in a dual-language immersion environment, with equal weight given to learning in English and in Spanish. Both ... faculty and ... student body are balanced 50%-50% between native English and native Spanish speakers. In addition, by enrolling children from many neighborhoods, nationalities, cultures, and economic circumstances, Oyster provides a heterogeneous social environment that is essential to its multicultural mission. Oyster enjoys an unusual dual status as a DCPS neighborhood public school and as a school entirely devoted to a specialized program. Accordingly, all "in-boundary" children have a right to attend grades K-8, while "out-of-boundary" and pre-k applicants are admitted according to the school's selection criteria.
  (From school website)
  

• The Dual Language Program of Manhattan's District 3 has at least three types of bilingual education. Cummins was particularly interested in their pioneering Dual Language program.

  Bilingual
  Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs provide language arts and subject matter instruction in the student’s native language and English as well as intensive instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL). As the student develops English proficiency, instruction in English increases and native language instruction decreases.
  Dual Language
  Dual Language programs educate ELL students in need of English language instruction alongside English-speaking students who are interested in learning a second language. Programs continue to develop ELLs’ native language and English language skills throughout their schooling while enabling English-speaking students to become bilingual as well. Both groups provide good linguistic role models for each other, and through their interactions, support language development in both languages. Students receive half of their instruction in English and half in the target language.
  ESL
  Freestanding English as a Second Language (ESL) programs provide all classroom instruction in language arts and subject matters in English through the use of specific instructional strategies. Native language support is available to help students accelerate their understanding in subject areas. Native language assistance is supported by such activities as encouraging students to discuss subject matter with peers in the native language, allowing students to use the native language to write explanations of what they understand, and making native language textbooks, libraries, dictionaries, reference materials and technology resources available for students to use in the classroom.
  (PDF from District Website)
  

• The Bilingual Bicultural School, which occupies part of a larger school in East Harlem, uses multi-subject projects to teach both English and Spanish dominant students in both languages. They have been particularly known for the use of technology for these projects.

  The Bilingual Bicultural Mini School's Mission is to provide a performance standards-based curriculum that is of exceptionally high quality, challenging and intellectually enriching for all our students. OUR MISSION WILL BE ACHIEVED THROUGH THESE GOALS: 1) Students, parents, teacher, and administrators are treated with respect; 2) Trust, faith and belief in our children are ever present; 3) We recognize that all our students have gifts and talents; 4) Provide higher level of knowledge in all subject areas; 5) The integration of technology across the curriculum; 6) An arts program that gives all students access to art, music and dance instruction; and 7) Parents participate in schoolwide activities that emphasize scholastic growth for their children.
  (From school website)
  

At the Secondary School level, Cummins finds that the situation for bilingual students is acute for several reasons:

1. Students risk running out of time before they have caught up sufficiently in academic English...
2. traditional departmentalized high schools are organized in rigid way that often track ELL students into lower-level programs, and construct their bilingualism as an academic deficiency.
3. a large majority of secondary school teachers have had minimal training to eneable themto teach ELL students effectively.

The three programs profiled [in this chapter] have one major element in common: they all acknowledge that bilingual adolescents have "so much to say" ... and they provide organization of structures and interpersonal spaces within which students' voices can find expression.
(Cummins, p. 245)

• A Navajo-English Applied Literacy Program encourages students to create "specific products for specific audiences," such as their community. They produced articles about the community in both Navajo and English for the community weekly paper, and videos in both languages for the local TV station among other activities. By reporting on their community they learned more of their own culture, strengthened their Navajo language, and most importantly developed empowerment based on their Navajo/American identity.
• At a high school in Oxnard, CA, a single teacher, Bill Terrazas, encouraged students to have long dialogues around round tables to help them find their identities and position in the community. His students formed an organization called Students for Cultural and Linguistic Democracy, which I, unfortunately can find no current references for.
  
• The International High School at Laguardia Community College in NYC is truly international, with an ethnic break-down of 35% Asian, 48% Hispanic, 3% Black and 14% White of different nationalities. 63% have ELL status. As part of their Mission Statement, they list
  

We are committed to the following educational principles:

• Limited English proficient students require the ability to understand, speak, read and write English with near-native fluency to realize their full potential within an English-speaking society.
• In an increasingly interdependent world, fluency in a language other than English must be viewed as a resource for the student, the school and the society.
• Language skills are most effectively learned in context and emerge most naturally in purposeful, language-rich interdisciplinary study.
• The most successful educational programs are those that emphasize high expectations coupled with effective support systems.
• Individuals learn best from each other in heterogeneous, collaborative groupings.

(From school website)


• To this I would like to add the Internationals Network for Public Schools that I discussed in a post about Chapter 5, September 11, and Oakland International High School, which I discuss on Sept 27: Oakland campus caters to refugees.
  

---

This is the completion of my interactive journal about the required chapters from the book Negotiating Identities. However, if I should find something else related to this topic in the future, I will return with a new post. I consider this, like all journals, as a work in progress.
I would very much appreciate your comments, suggestions or additions to my posts. Perhaps, for example, you are working with a program that should be included here.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

The Role of First and Second Language Interdependence in Explaining the Outcomes of Bilingual Programs

When you learn to speak as a child, you are using some sort of innate cognitive abilities to understand language, which Noam Chomsky called the General Theory of Language in his revolutionary book from 1957, Syntactic Structures. He proposed that individual grammars of individual languages were based on a cognitive structure used by all languages. For example, all languages (except sign language, of course) use a variety of phonemes, which can be described by universal features, all express various concepts in some sort of semantic structure, words, prefixes, etc., and all have a certain syntactic structure (subjects, objects, verbs, etc.) This is why it is possible for us to learn a strange language by picking up objects to ask for their names and put the names into some sort of comprehensible structure. We still have to learn the specific rules for each language, but the main framework is already in place.

[Linguists] must be concerned with the problem of determining the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars [of specific languages.] The ultimate outcome of these investigations should be a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages.
(Chomsky, p. 11)

Chomsky's book arrived the same year that a symposium on Universals in Linguistic Theory was held at the University of Texas. These books were the "bibles" when I studied linguistics back in the 1960's. I was pleased to see that Chomsky's book has been republished, and that the topic is still of interest. Nowadays, of course, there are bio-neurological theories of language that weren't possible when I studied linguistics, such as the works of Steven Pinker, which I will have to study some day.

So learning a language is learning those specifics about the particular language; learning math is learning math concepts, which are language independent.) We can appreciate a picture drawn by someone no matter what language she was thinking in when she painted the picture; people who speak different languages can plan sports, even on the same team.

Just as a football player has no difficulty learning the rules of basketball or soccer, because they have some general "sports rules" and a pianist can learn to play a violin or flute because he already understands the musical concepts behind playing instruments, then every language that a student learns builds on her cognitive understanding about what the general language rules are that govern all languages. In each case, the person compares and contrasts the sport, or instrument or language with what s/he already knows, to figure out which new parts still have to be learned.

For example, a Spanish speaker discovers very quickly that English has a lot of recognizable vocabulary, and figures out rules so that he can automatically "invent" correct words in English using those rules. He learns by trial and error when these invented words work and when they are incomprehensible, buiilding his cognitive understanding of both languages.

According to Cummins, there are still people who believe in a "Separate underlying proficiency (SUP) model of bilingual proficiency", which apparently believe that you start from scratch when you learn a new language. Cummins is supported by the early theorists in the theory of Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) model, which assumes that a good part of learning is common, no matter what language you speak, as he shows in this figure:

Figure 6.4 The "Dual Iceberg" Representation of Bilingual Proficiency
(Cummins, p 174)

Cummins reports on numerous studies representing many language combinations that prove this point, that by learning one new language, a student builds a cognitive representation of language learning that aids him in learning new languages. This is why some people can speak enormous numbers of languages - since a large part of each language is common cognitive representation.

The Ramirez Report (1991), the Thomas/Collier Study (1997) and various International Evaluations

Cummins goes into more detail on a four convincing studies, where large numbers of students taught in different types of bilingual programs were studied, both in the U.S. and internationally. All of the studies he describes provide good support to the thesis that the longer students have good training in their L1 as well as the L2, they will become proficient in both, and in some cases more proficient than their monolingual peers, supporting the additive enrichment principle.