Latin!? No really, what foreign language?

The reader blog "What do world language teachers need to know and be able to do?" lists the following seven requirements below as the current World Language Endorsement--or common core knowledge--requirements for K-12 teachers in Washington public schools:

1. Child and adolescent development, individuality and diversity
2. Language and culture
   
3. Language acquisition
4. Learning environment
5. Assessment
6. Professional development
7. Classical language

The author then later brought up an anecdote about a high-school senior staying seated at a reception when the speaker asked all those who speak another language to stand up, saying that she had only studied Latin during high school. While the last category of the above requirements suggests how much weight school officials still put on knowledge of classical languages and cultures, the anecdote seems to suggest public ambivalence regarding Greek and Latin. Indeed, it looks like "students themselves perceive that learning Latin is not the same thing as learning to speak another language," that it's no longer any useful to study classical languages like Greek and Latin now that they are no longer spoken. I personally would love to study Latin, and believe in the immense advantage of a basic understanding of Latin roots, so I had to disagree with this. The anecdote did make me wonder, just how important (or unimportant) classical languages are to people's studies of modern languages as well as to modern world cultures, so I researched the specific case of Latin, and found some very interesting language-related specifics.

Latin, for example, is more or less the direct ancestor of the Romance languages of the Indo-European language family. In the modern world, the Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, most of whom are in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The most dominant Romance languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Calatan. Among these, Spanish ranks second or third in the world for language with most native speakers, and Portuguese ranks seventh. (English--arguably the most "important" language in the world right now--borrowed many of its words from French, and is therefore under Latin influence as well.) Except for some pre-Roman influences, "the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly evolutions" of Vulgar Latin--the "language of soldiers, settlers and merchants" of the former Roman Empire. Latin, at least the Latin of the people, then carries paramount importance in the modern world.

This brings back the question of dying languages. Though an extreme case, Latin is a dead language that was "saved." Dead, in the sense that people no longer speaks it in daily lives, and saved, as in records of it are still preserved in the modern world. Saved, but not revived. If the anecdote does indeed reflect public opinion--if people are not and do not want to revive even such a significant language as Latin, I wonder what chance other dying languages have of being revived (or even saved) by society--the only force with the power to save its own dying languages.

This week's interesting fact: the term "romance" (as in romance novels and love) comes from the same root as the Romance in Romance languages, which comes from "romanice" in "romanice loqui," or "to speak Roman." Roman here refers to Vulgar Latin, or the spoken language as opposed to Classical Latin used in proses, poems, and other written works. According to wikipedia, "in the medieval literature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, while popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular" and therefore came to be called "romances."


The very interesting sources I used to write this post (that you should definitely check out):

• Wikipedia - Romance languages
• Wikipedia - Latin

Saving the Welsh language

We have been discussing a lot in class and through our blogs about the reality of saving languages: whether it is possible, viable, or even necessary to save a dying language, what we can gain or preserve by saving one, and what we might or might not lose by letting one die away. Debating the need and benefits of saving dying languages, it would be very helpful to observe and analyze the benefits and problems of a success story, also. The effort to save and revive the Welsh language is such a story.

As writer Eluned Morgan states in the article "Language should help unite the nation," Wales "should be proud of the fact that it is one of the very few countries in the world that has managed to turn around the fortunes of a minority language and increase the number of its speakers" through "direct and targeted government intervention." Before this, however, Wales must face and address two main concerns from its people and other countries. First, it must answer criticisms of the resulting reverse discrimination against non-Welsh speakers, especially in the labor market. This is not exactly a concern specific to the language revival in Wales, though. A bilingual laborer almost anywhere in the world will have a better chance of getting a job than a monolingual applicant, assuming they are similar in other aspects of their application. (Once this condition fails, of course, discrimination truly sets in, and is in no way tolerable.) Language-wise, "it goes without saying that to ensure the continued revival of the language we must ensure that, where relevant, there are opportunities to use that language," which means "some employees must speak Welsh." Just like it is necessary in California to hire bilingual medical employees to communicate with non-English speakers, it is necessary and socially beneficial to hire Welsh speakers to communicate with non-English speakers (especially as most of them are senior citizens whose social needs are greatest).

The second concern the article addresses is one much more relevant: how best for a government to allocate scarce resources in attempting to revive a language. The writer phrases it best: "Would the money currently spent on reams of complex and costly Welsh documents read by very few not be better spent on expanding the opportunities to speak Welsh at the grassroots level, with for example help to open a Welsh-language nursery school in every small town in Wales?" What is the perfect balance between policies and outreach? Between official literature and everyday, informal conversations? In the case of Wales, what about the 80 percent of the population that are non-Welsh speakers? How can the government reward and encourage Welsh speakers without leaving out and angering the rest of the population?

Here in lies the problem of saving minority languages: the government must actively take part in the process in order for it to succeed and last, but the fact that it is a minority language prevents the government (especially democratic governments) to properly dedicate to it, what with the many other social issues it must deal with that much more directly affect its citizens' daily lives. Saving languages, at least in the most literal sense of preserving the vocabulary and grammatical structures themselves, are not impossible. Today's recording technologies can ensure so. Whether communities can rally the financial and social support to do so, however, remains a tricky question to be answered only by each community itself.

Good luck on your midterms, everybody! =]

When "I heard you" becomes "I saw you"

Our language is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other mammals in particular and other animals in general. A lot of you guys agreed with me on this in your comments on the Neanderthal articles. Not only does it allow us to express and communicate complex thoughts, language socially unites communities and countries together, connecting individuals who speak the same language much in the way a same hometown or birth country does. In other words, language allows us many of our identities, and plays a large part in shaping us into the unique social humans that we are. The same is true even for languages that are not spoken, as Sara Petersen, a Sign-language teacher at a Minnesota elementary school, realized. In the article "Teacher 'jazzed' by work with hearing-impaired students" by Joanna Miller, Petersen comments that the more deaf children "know about themselves and what’s different about them, the more they can do to help themselves.” This, according to Petersen, is achieved by teaching them Sign language and surrounding them with deaf peers, so they “would not have to go through an adult for everything they need to talk about," and have the communications tool to build for themselves "a better self image.” Even for deaf people, then, language helps create a deaf culture to unite individuals.


If language's paramount importance in communicating and uniting "normal" folks holds true as well for deaf folks, I can't help but wonder if the same is also true with language's role in shaping thought. As we discussed in class, humans think not only in spoken language, but also in images and with other senses. What if these visual images ARE the language, as is the case for the "profoundly and prelingually deaf"? People who have acquired language before they became deaf, as Cecil Adams says in his 2003 Straight-Dope article "In what language do deaf people think?", have a problem "not minor, but manageable." They think with the language they once spoke, much like normal humans do, and may learn Sign only in order to communicate. People who were deaf at birth or became deaf before they acquired language, however, need Sign not only to communicate, associate and form identities, but in order to do the very act of thinking itself. How different is the role of images for them, then, if most sign languages use the hands to create images in order to communicate? Are the images of Sign distinguished from other images in their thoughts, or are they treated the same way?


A native deaf signer reported to have been asked the question "How do you think?" many times. Here is her answer, which I find fascinating: she sees her mouth forming words or herself signing words in her head, and she sometimes also hears the "little voice in the back of the head" that all of us do when we think, even though she has no idea what it's like to hear a voice. She herself has no idea how this is possible, though she guesses she may have an idea of how words should sound through experiences with speech therapy. This brings up yet another interesting question: how does the way a deaf person thinks changes when he begins learning another spoken language in addition to Sign (in this case, English)? How about the difference between learning English in comparison to Sign, as opposed to learning Sign after speaking English, if the natively deaf are biologically different from those who became deaf after spoken-language acquisition?


Extremely random side note(s):

In trying to decide whether language shape thought, I attempted to define thought, and realized that we humans define great thought in context of culture. We might or might not need language to perceive or appreciate, but we need it in order to formulate our thoughts, compare it to those of others, and build upon them. We need it to develop our intellectual potentials and achieve thought maturity, as least as it is defined in our cultural context as knowledge, wisdom, and well-supported opinions. What do you guys think thought is?

What about memories? I'm not sure how everyone else is, but I typically analyze in words and remember in images; my thoughts are usually in words, and my recalled memories are mostly visual. I say mostly, because I'm unsure where to draw the line between memories and thoughts, as memory leads new thoughts as often as it does other memories, and the switch back and forth is usually unnoticeable. Should we simply consider memory a form of thought, then?


Sources aside from articles mentioned above:

• My answer to the question: How do deaf people think?
• Sign language - Wikipedia
• 
  

Happy reading, and have a great weekend! =]

Nature vs. Nurture: Language

This week, the language alerts brought back several articles on Neanderthals, and the possibility that they shared the ability to create language with the modern human. Johannes Krause and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology "extracted DNA from two 38,000-year-old Neanderthals collected from El Sidron Cave in Austurias, Spain," and found a specific form of the gene FOXP2 or Forkhead Box P2--a variant form similar to that of humans that has been linked to language development.

FOXP2 is required for proper brain and lung development. Mouse studies and known gene mutations suggest its involvement in the development of tissues in these areas, as well as the gut. Scientists first discovered the gene's role in speech and language in 2001, when they studied the Pakistani KE family, in which "half the members suffered from a disorder that interfered with their ability to understand grammar and to speak." Brain scans of both affected and unaffected family members "limited the affected region to a spot on chromosome 7," and further gene sequencing pinpointed a point mutation in this chromosome. This is now called the FOXP2 gene, and considered an important language gene, " not only in humans but also in animals.

Indeed, many related animal-studies I found suggest FOXP2 as one of the specific genes that enable language learning. Though on humans (and Neanderthals) carry the version that allows for word formulation, grammar competence and complex language, many birds, mammals, fish and reptiles carry similar FOXP2 genes, with a difference of only a few amino acids. And studies on zebra finch shows that levels of FOXP2 in the brain "significant change when males are learning or practicing their song, but not when they are performing their song for females." If this applies also to human, it could have provide great insight into the human ability to learn language, and possibly also into the difference between learning a first and a second or third language. In humans, however, studies have only linked FOXP2 mutations with problems in the motor coordination required for speech. MRIs of individuals with mutated copies of the gene also reveal "underactivation of Broca's area and the putamen--brain centers thought to be involved in language tasks." In other words, FOXP2 could be associated with language only on a superficial level, affecting our ability to express language rather than that of producing language.

I am constantly amazed at the intricate complexity of the human body in general, and the human mind in particular, but it's hard to imagine how the evolution of ONE single gene by a few amino acids could possibly make a difference as significant as the human language. I have in fact always believed language to be an acquired skill, something of nurture that we learn through social interaction out of social necessity. This article did suddenly remind me, though, that our very bodies make us human--one of those basic yet profound facts that many kids seem to know, and many knowledgeable, analytical adults seem to forget. (That sounded funny, didn't it? =D)

Another interesting fact: By comparing different FOXP2 genes in different people, scientists have estimated the time our version of FOXP2 developed through natural selection to about 100,000 years ago--"the time when archaeological evidence suggests that we began using language."



Sources:

• Article: Neanderthals: Did They Have Language?
• FOXP2 - Wikipedia
  
• Another article I found: From Genes to Word
  

Spoken fluency

About four or five months ago, I was walking through the Berkeley campus one night, on my way back to my friend's apartment. In front of me walked two professionally dressed guys in a heated discussion. They were probably both either seniors or graduate students, as they looked to be in their early twenties. Alright, I'll admit I eavesdropped a little, but only because they were loud, and my ears would've caught their conversation involuntarily either way. And I was, well, surprised. Surprised to hear how intellectual their casual conversion was, and surprised how many times I heard the word "like" in the few minutes they were in front of me. I was in high school at the time, and "like" was an integral part of the daily vernacular, but I definitely didn't imagine it frequenting college campuses then.
"
"Like" seems to be the teenage version of "um" or "uh," what Ted Landphair in his article "Spoken Language Is, um, Difficult" would agree to be speech disfluencies. The article, in fact, presents Texan journalist Michael Erard's take on our daily "spoken blunders," which he categorizes either under "slips of the tounge" or "speech disfluencies" in his book Um...: Slips, Stumbles, Verbal Blunders and What They Mean.

Speech disfluencies, as defined by wikipedia, are "any of various breaks, irregularities, or utterances that are often not consistent with any specific grammatical construction and occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech." They are "among the characteristics distinguishing spontaneous speech from planned or read speech"--our way of covering up the gap whenever we could not find the right word fast enough in spoken conversation. The three most common types of disfluencies are:

• Filled pauses: and the use of pause fillers such as "uh" or "um"
• She will, uh, celebrate it tomorrow.
  
• I need to, um, find it first

• Repetitions: of words or phrases
• Did you, did you see her?

• Deletions: or "repaired utterances"
• He doesn't, didn't want to go.
  

[Source: Disfluency types]

The person I admired most during high school, now that I think about it, was the eloquent friend who never needed the aid of disfluencies when composing her oral sentences. All of us, I think, admire or strive for eloquence as human beings. As Erard reminds us, however, "only a rare and unusually brilliant person--such as the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill--can speak without a hesitation or flub." The rest of us will speak in disfluencies as we search our brains to find and analyze words. Disfluencies therefore do not imply stupidity in any way. With some conscious effort, relative eloquence is acquirable, however. If you simply slow down while you speak, and pause to gather your thoughts instead of blindly pressing on in disfluencies, you could soon find yourself sounding as knowledgeable and assured as you know you are. (And if only I could follow my own advice...)

Saving Languages

As globalizing becomes the only way for countries to survive economically, and as more people learn to speak "dominant languages" such as English and Mandarin, more and more aboriginal languages are dying out. Every two weeks, yet another language disappears somewhere in the world, possibly bringing with it centuries of history, of experience, of traditions never to be communicated again. "Australia, a very large island with over 250 plus languages with each language probably having 5 or so dialects is more at risk" of losing its languages. What could we do to stop indigenous languages' seemingly inevitable death in this modern age? What to do, Australia's Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association (ACRA) decided, but using modernization's very tool of globalization: the computer.

Winsome Denyer introduced the ACRA's solution in his article "How technology can save dying indigenous languages." In an attempt to revive and disseminate their own Arwabakal language, members of this cultural organization developed a computer program aimed directly at indigenous communities to save their languages. The program, called Miromaa, allows speakers (sometimes the last living speakers of a language) to record and explain a language with audio clips, still photos, and clips. Extremely user-friendly, the program works on both stand-alone desktops and within a network, and can aid not only in the storage, but also the teaching of a language. It is blank in its original form, allowing each user, each community to record and store their languages however they want to. Miromaa is protected by a secure network and a user-password system, and also has a learning tab, where you can access the information stored and begin learning right away.

In Arwabakal, Miromaa appropriately means "save." This program, indeed, might be the most effective way to save many dying oral languages--languages that can't otherwise be preserved after the last speaker passes away. Currently in Australia, Miromaa is used around Queensland, in New South Wales, and Victoria. Its developers hope to get it out to at least thirty eight language areas in the near future.

Miromaa, in my opinion, is a great and creative effort, but it will not be enough of an effort to save many languages. Many communities of indigenous speakers have neither the computer access nor the technological knowledge to make use of Miromaa, and most countries will not have the funds to support such an effort (especially poor, underdeveloped nations in Africa, where indigenous languages are in the most danger). As an effort to preserve cultural identity, however, Miromaa can help provide great insight into communities' history, customs, and views of the natural world: by listening to and analyzing the information each community chooses to record in their program, researchers, scholars and anyone interested can peek back into the past and pinpoint that community's most significant outlooks, beliefs, and values. This will allow to study these communities as building blocks of the larger community, city or country they together made up, and help us better understand this larger community as a whole.


Sources I used for information:

• The ACRA website
• How technology can save dying indigenous languages
  

Traveling the right way

My middle-school best friend used to excitedly email me stories of her conversations with American or European backpackers whenever she had a chance to meet one on the streets of Vietnam. Currently majoring in international relations at a Vietnamese national university, she studied English extensively during high school, and seized every opportunity she had to practice speaking the language. The best way to practice, she said, is approaching backpackers, especially backpacking native speakers. Just by asking them if they need help with directions, or by simply saying hi, she has struck up plenty of interesting conversations, improving her English pronunciation and speaking confidence while.... teaching strangers Vietnamese. (As it turns out, some backpackers are even more adept than us Vietnamese natives with directions and at our own game of bargaining, and just wanted my friend to teach them some more Vietnamese.)

Now why did I bring this up? An article titled "7 Tips for Learning a Foreign Language on the Road" appeared yesterday on Brave New Traveler, an online travel magazine. Its seventh and last tip encourages travelers to "reciprocate;" in trying to learn a language from the locals, an American traveler should "be patient and indulge them in conversation" when approached by locals "eager to practice their English." If my friend's stories are any evidence, this is a great way to immerse yourself in a new country's language and culture (and, as the article notes, to possibly find yourself invited to dinner during the conversation to sample more of the cuisine).

The columnist, Tim Patterson, also advises travelers to learn a few good jokes for conversation starters. If you know the locals are going to laugh at your funny accent either way, why not talk funny with an even funnier joke, and make them laugh at the joke instead? "Speaking with your stomach" and going shopping are other great ways to quickly learn to communicate the necessities: learn the word "delicious," followed by names of common and culturally relevant foods, as well as how to say "This is too expensive" or "I want the local price."

Behind these tips, the article makes a great point about traveling in the modern world. Why would an English speaker need to learn any languages while traveling, you might ask, if everyone else can speak enough English to communicate with you? Because you want a "more authentic, fulfilling, unique, and memorable travel experience," of course. As we already discussed in class, language can miraculously unite and open people up to each other. By learning just a few common phrases in a language and using them during your travel, you can much more easily connect with the locals, learning from them first-hand accounts of the country you are traveling in. Some language knowledge will enable you to actively interact with and participate in a new country's culture, which makes traveling a whole lot more rewarding than simple sightseeing and picture-taking.

Have fun learning!

Is language like cooking?

Have you ever wondered how the human mind pick up a language? Or why learning to speak a language take much less time than learning to properly read and write? Indeed, research shows that though ESL students take an average of five to ten years before they can read and write at par with native-speaking peers, they only need about two years to develop adequate speaking and listening skills. The same thing is true, also, for children learning their first language. Observe pre-school children, for example. Most of them still have absolutely no idea what the word "grammar" even means, and yet many can and do talk in properly constructed sentences. How? You guessed it. By memorization and imitation, of course. This is the basic of what linguists call the "lexical approach" to learning.

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that studies words and everything about words, including their nature, meaning, elements, groups, and relationships with each other. (The name originated from the Greek "lexicos," meaning "of words.") Lexis is at the heart of lexicology and the lexical approach to language. Lexis "describes the storage of language" in our brains as "prefabricated patterns that can be recalled and sorted into meaningful speech and writing." In other words, the words combination of our vocabulary. Unlike grammar, lexis defines "probable" instead of "possible language use."

Tom Hayton, in his article "Why language is like cooking," reiterates this difference to argue lexis' superior importance to grammar in learning languages. Since "most sentences have been uttered before" and much of language is like Maggi noodle, he claims, it is much easier to memorize and use "phrases as ready-made linguistic chunks" than to analyze and recompose a common phrase every time you use it, as it is much faster to simply pull packaged noodle off the shelf and cook it than to make the noodle from scratch every time you want them. In fact, this IS what people do, he states: the mastery of grammar is not as essential to learning a language as many believe or claim it to be.

The lexical approach holds similar claims: (1) lexis is the basis of language, and (2) "the key principle of a lexical approach is that 'language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.'" This emphasizes the importance of memorized word combinations in our brains, and has important implications not only to the learning, but also the teaching of a new language. Believers of the lexical approach indeed argue that lexis "should be a "central organizing principle" in any syllabus.

I myself believe in the necessity of polished grammar for fluency in a language, but I agree with Hayton that if communication is the goal, the lexical approach is much more effective than the grammatical approach in teaching language. I myself learned English by memorizing the common word phrases I hear during conversation, and imitating both their pronunciation and context of usage. (Up until today, whenever anyone asks me how I learned English, I jokingly answer: "I talked a lot.") I also read a lot of translated manga--Japanese comics--the first year, and this helped me see a lot of these common phrases in context and on paper to better remember them. Once I had the conversational basis, I could much more easily communicate with teachers and friends to learn advanced vocabulary and grammar structure. In this way, the lexical approach is not only a better beginners' approach, but also a great basis for the grammatical approach. Allowing us to communicate with each other and with the world, it provides each of us with the basics to experiment with and build our own unique brand of language from.

Thanks for reading, and have a great 3rd week of college =D


Other links I used beside the article:

• Student with limited English skills pose special challenges for testing
• Wikipedia - Lexis and Lexicology
• Lexical approach

Forensic linguistic analysis

Novelist and essayist Christopher Morley once said "There are no precedents: You are the first You that ever was." That, apparently, is true language-wise as well, and law-enforcement departments around the world have been using this to help them identify authors of criminal documents. Dr. Ernst Kotze--Head of the Department of Applied Languages Studies at a university in South Africa--is confident that this method of identification, called forensic linguistic analysis, is "a more reliable means of identifying the author of a document" than handwriting, fingerprint and DNA analysis. (Link: Language errors used to establish identity)

Forensic linguistic analysis studies a document's language usage, word pattern, stylistic errors, and literary techniques to pinpoint the author, typically employing a method called stylometric analysis. Stylometry originated from earlier techniques developed to verify authenticity and authorship for artworks and plays, emphasizing "the rarest or most striking element" of a work. In modern time, with the help of computers, stylometry can reveal identifying patterns in even seemingly common speech. Some common methods of stylometry are:

- Writer invariant: the computer scans an unverified text to find the 50 most common words, breaks the same text down into 5000-word chunk, and scans the chunks individually to determine the occurrence of these 50 words in each. The occurrences are plotted on the same plan as numbers from a verified text, and analysts can from this determine if the two texts are from the same author.
- Neural network: providing a network with texts of known authors to train it to identify texts written by the same authors.
- Rare pairs: analysts study the rate of occurrence of a sequence of words. People often associate and use some words with a certain other word, so rare pairs can be a powerful tool in identifying authorship.

(If you would like more information on stylometry and the methods, here is the wiki link: Stylometry)

Even when it does not have sufficient information to identify authorship, forensic linguistic analysis can point out astounding connections and similarities between texts to estimate testimonies' reliability, etc. Language Log's Roger Shuy, for example, mentioned one such example in his September-27th post titled "Treason in Georgia." Shuy was a language analyst in a trial condemning Maia Topuria--a Georgian opposition-party leader--of plotting to overthrow the Georgian government. Using topic sequencing and phrase comparison, Shuy proved all eleven, supposed "independently produced" witness statements to be composed by the same person, in this case possibly the main-party police: the statements all introduce different topics in an almost identical order, and all contain phrases such as " "elucidation by television," "pretext of protection," "to liquidate the ministers," etc. worded in exact same ways. I won't go into more details, as all of you are probably familiar with this case already. (Link: Language Log-Treason in Georgia)

To me, it is extremely interesting that language can act both to unify us and to identify us. It connects us with the world, and yet at the same time allows us to add our own personalities and styles to the world through it. Languages and cultures are constantly evolving and transforming. Probably, in part, because of this unique feature of the language itself.

A side note: I decided to bring up this article because of what Professor Boroditsky said in class the other day: "We all speak English, but you probably speak your own English, and I speak my own English, and chances are our English are very different." (Or something along the line. I'm not sure of the exact quote, but I couldn't agree with it more.)

Language Learners and Standardized Testing

"Whit Johnstone of Irving ISD: Students with limited English skills pose special challenges for testing" appeared as an interview between columnist McKenzie and Dr. Johnstone--a testing director of a Texas school district--on the Opinion column of the online Dallas Morning News. Though not a traditional "news" article, it presented some very interesting research. The article, for example, mentions that English-learning students who have previously "had some native-language instruction before entering a U.S. school" could "reach parity in academic English" faster than those who have not, at a rate of five to seven years compared to seven to ten years.

(I wonder what Dr. Johnstone means exactly by "native-language instruction"--having learned your native language or having attended school in your native language. If he means the former, my mother would be triumphant when I forward this article to her. She used to always tell me: "As long as you learn your native language well, you will pick up others relatively quickly, no matter how different those languages may be to each other or to Vietnamese." I haven't yet attempted enough languages to confirm this statement. What does everyone think?

If he means "prior native-language instruction" as "having attended school in native country," this research dismisses all I have ever been told about learning English as a second language. Shouldn't it be easier to learn a new language if you start school fresh out with that language? Also, what about the age issue? If a student spent some years in school in his native country already before immigrating into the United States, he should generally be an older student. Don't older students take longer to learn and master a language than younger children?)

Alright, getting back on topic. The No Child Left Behind Act currently allows states to test new English learners in their native language in academic subjects for the first three years. Congress is considering extending this period to five years. If the research conclusion mentioned above is accurate, this would barely allow the average student with "prior instruction" enough time to catch up to native English speakers.

Now we say "average," because some students can and do pass through English-learning programs such as ESL (English as a Second Language) much more quickly than others, for a variety of reasons:

(1) the first language. Native speakers of languages similar to English such as Dutch or German will learn English faster than native speakers of, say, Chinese or Japanese.

(2) whether English is the SECOND language (or third/fourth/etc.) The more languages a student learns, the more language-learning skills he acquires, and therefore the faster he learns a new language.

(3) a student's attitude toward English and the associated culture. The more happy and comfortable a student is in the new environment, the faster he learns the language.

(4) teachers and classroom culture. If a student feels comfortable that his native values and culture are accepted by his teachers and friends, he will learn English more quickly as a second language.

(5) the student's personality. A confident student who is not afraid to speak up and take risks will learn and master a language more quickly than a timid student.

[Source: Questions about learning a second language]

(4) to me is extremely interesting. It is a great argument for a bilingual education in the teaching of English as a second language in the United States, but I don't agree that it is always true. At a school where an English learner is one of the only few native speakers of a certain language, an accepting environment may work to provide comfortable learning. But, in schools where a high percentage of English learners are from the same country, where students who can't communicate with English speakers can simply find and socialize with friends who speak their same native language, an English learner within an "accepting," open-minded classroom culture may not have any motivation to quickly learn English.