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The Social & Cognitive Challenges
of Middle School Japanese Immersion
The ACIE Newsletter, February 1998, Vol.
1, No. 2
By Carl Falsgraf, Director, Japanese Language
Project,
Oregon State System of Higher Education, Eugene, Oregon
"To teach is to learn." --Japanese proverb
I was reminded of the wisdom of this proverb recently when
I was asked to speak to a group of parents from the Japanese
Magnet Program in Portland, Oregon. The parents wanted to
hear what the research said about language acquisition in
Japanese immersion programs. I think I did a credible job
of presenting this to the parents but, as the proverb suggests,
ended up learning more than anyone else in the room.
I focused my presentation on the findings we are pretty confident
about: Immersion children perform as well as or better than
students in non-immersion schools in all curricular areas
while learning a second language and culture; young children's
cognitive make-up argues for starting early; second-language
learning at a young age offers a number of cognitive and social
advantages.
Of course, I also had to deliver the "bad news" that immersion
alone usually doesn't lead to "native-like" production skills
due to the limitations of classroom input and output.
I also mentioned that, cognitively speaking, middle school
students are ideal language learners. They still have some
of the cognitive advantages of children, while also having
more complex learning strategies. This is where my learning
really started.
Cognitive data notwithstanding, parents, teachers, and researchers
all agree that middle school is the most challenging time
for immersion students. Kids often lose interest in learning
the language. Some drop out the program, others just tune
out. In a sense, it doesn't matter how much we know about
language acquisition, how good our curriculum is, or how inspired
our teaching may be, if willful adolescents are dead-set against
learning.
I set out to learn more about this perplexing phenomenon.
Middle school Japanese immersion teachers explained to me
the curricular and pedagogic contradictions that challenge
them. By middle school, students' mastery of complex subject
matter and higher thinking processes has outstripped their
Japanese abilities. This also appears to be true for cognate
languages such as French and Spanish, but is exacerbated by
the complexity of the Japanese orthographic system. The teacher
then faces the dilemma of either abandoning the immersion
ideal of "teaching through the language" or leaving students
with gaps in their subject matter knowledge.
It also became clear, much to my dismay, that acquiring Japanese
is a relatively minor concern to parents, teachers, and students
alike. The parents want their kids to do well in all areas
and to stop complaining about how much they hate school. The
teachers want to make sure that their kids meet the state
standards for math, language arts, and so forth. Their administrators
will never know if the students' Japanese is lagging, but
they will know immediately if scores on the state math assessment
fall. And the students themselves can see no reason to learn
Japanese.
And this is really at the heart of the middle school dilemma.
Learning Japanese is no longer cool. Showing off their ability
to write exotic characters and sing songs, a great motivator
for third graders, marks a seventh grader as a dweeb. Adolescents
want so badly to fit in, and their participation in this special
program marks them as different. And since their parents decided
to enroll them in this program, their continued participation
is a mark of their (former) dependence and submission to parental
authority.
As I struggled to understand these complex and interrelated
issues, and to offer some help and advice to concerned parents
and teachers, I came to some humbling realizations:
- What we know about the cognitive processes of language
acquisition and language pedagogy is of limited value in
addressing the problems of middle school immersion.
- Social development is primary for adolescents. It takes
precedence over intellectual development.
- Regardless of curriculum, technique, or method, middle
school students will resist learning a language if it is
seen as a social handicap.
Though humbled, I still feel that those of us who do language
acquisition research can contribute to efforts to improve
middle school immersion. But to do so, we must go beyond measurements
of linguistic and cognitive variables to include social and
personal context, and then show how these interact with language
learning. In doing so, we will surely have to rely on the
cooperation and expertise of educators who have spent their
professional lives working with adolescents, and of social
psychologists who have a research tradition that has much
to teach us about perplexing problems we face.
The pedagogic solutions to these thorny problems must be
informed by cognitive, social, and linguistic understanding.
As an applied linguist, I hope that our field can bring some
of this information to the table. But in actuality, parents,
teachers and students best understand the interpersonal and
social nature of middle schools. Working together, I hope
that we can address some of the following questions:
- What does it mean to be a bilingual teenager?
- Does bilingualism necessarily have to be a negative social
attribute in North American society?
- Despite apparent disengagement from language learning,
do middle school students continue to acquire underlying
communicative competence even if that competence is unexpressed
in the middle school years?
- Do students "snap out of it" and regain enthusiasm for
language learning in high school?
- Is the immersion model itself responsible for some of
the problems experienced at middle school? If so, what modifications
do we need to make to that model to ameliorate these problems?
I would like to thank Fred Lorish, Michael Bacon, Cliff
Walker, Ellen Jones-Walker, and Elaine Tarone for their comments
and guidance. The views expressed and errors committed are,
of course, mine alone. --CF
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