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Towards Enhancing Academic Language
Proficiency in a Fifth-Grade Spanish Immersion Classroom
The ACIE Newsletter, November 2002, Vol. 6, No. 1
By Andrew Cohen, Professor of ESL and Applied Linguistics,
MA Program in ESL, University of Minnesota, and Tania Gómez,
Doctoral Student, Hispanic Linguistics, Department of Spanish and Portuguese,
University of Minnesota
Research Design
This research report focuses on a study conducted in a Spanish immersion
school in St. Paul, MN. The study set out to examine the effect of a
multi-faceted pedagogical intervention on students’ oral and written
academic Spanish. Twenty-one fifth-grade Spanish immersion students
participated in an instructional intervention of thirty lessons which
included three classroom innovations: (a) collecting learning style
preference and language strategy use data from the learners, discussing
the results for the class as a whole and with students individually,
adapting classroom instruction according to the learning style preferences
of the students, and promoting the students’ use of a variety
of language learning strategies; (b) having the classroom teacher and
the research assistant model the use of Spanish oral and written academic
language in their own efforts to solve science and history problems,
and (c) having the teaching staff model use of the inner voice and then
support students in developing their own inner voice in Spanish academic
language.
The students completed before-measures of oral and written academic
language ability in science and history based on the local curriculum.
They also filled out a Learning Style Survey for Young Learners and
a Young Learners’ Language Strategies Survey. Additionally, the
students filled out a Young People’s Motivational Temperature
Measure which assessed their motivation regarding the use of Spanish
in general and for the specific classroom task at hand. The data analysis
looked at the students’ ability to effectively use Spanish academic
language in oral and written skills as a result of the pedagogical intervention.
In the absence of an appropriate control group, the students were divided
into proficiency levels (high, intermediate, and low) on the basis of
a standardized achievement test (Metropolitan Achievement Test), a science
essay written in Spanish, and teacher judgment. Then the groups were
compared according to gain in Spanish academic language, in general
and with respect to four sub-scales: facility in describing the problem
in comprehensible Spanish, quantity and quality of academic vocabulary,
quantity and quality of complex grammatical forms, and ability to define
academic terms in Spanish.
Findings
With regard to the effects of modeling in solving science and history
problems, the intervention seemed to motivate students to use more sophisticated
language to explain their ideas. It was observed that even though complex
grammatical forms were used sparingly, the students did tend to make
use of them when the grammatical input was explicitly provided. The
following is an example of students’ actual use of academic language,
such as depende del peso and depende del tamaño, which was explicitly
taught during the sessions. The teacher and research assistant were
discussing various ways pulleys are used in our daily lives to make
the topic more real to the students:
Researcher: ¿Cuántos libros podría
empujar sin que rompa el hilo? (How many books could you push
before the cord breaks?)
Susana: Depende del tamaño. (It depends
on the size.)
Paul: Depende del peso. (It depends on the weight.)
Julia: Pero depende de la fuerza del cuerpo, sí
porque depende de la fuerza que tiras la caja. (But it depends
on the force of the object, yes because it depends on how hard you
pull the box.)
Likewise, the students’ use of their inner voice appeared to
assist them in explaining the processes involved in problem-solving
to others. Students practiced using their inner voice with various techniques:
asking and answering questions while speaking to themselves on cardboard
cell phones, looking at a picture of themselves, or looking at themselves
in a mirror.
With regard to the effects of the instructors’ modeling of task
performance, the intermediate-proficiency and low-proficiency groups
were both found to have significant gain scores on the oral and written
science measures, and the low-proficiency group also had significant
gain scores on the written history measures. In the analysis of written
performance by subscales (facility in describing the problem in comprehensible
Spanish, quantity and quality of academic vocabulary, quantity and quality
of complex grammatical forms, and ability to define academic terms in
Spanish), the low- and intermediate-proficiency groups benefited most
from the intervention. For instance, both groups performed better in
describing the problems in history and in science on the after-measure.
Likewise, these two groups did better in quality and quantity of academic
vocabulary and in defining academic terms in Spanish.
With regard to the motivational temperature of the students, before
starting the task, 38% of the class indicated that they were highly
motivated and the other 62% fairly motivated. Upon starting the task
a few more students joined the "fairly-motivated" group. During
the task, several slipped down into the "not motivated" category.
At the end, the number of highly motivated actually increased beyond
its original level, while the not-motivated group picked up yet another
student. What does all this say? That motivation is far from being static,
but rather is constantly in flux, depending not only upon the task but
upon the moment in time with regard to that task.
Some of the individual items on the instrument also served to provide
feedback as to the motivational level of the students regarding the
immersion program altogether. The intermediate-proficiency students’
motivation to perform the problem-solving task in Spanish increased
in three ways as they proceeded through the stages of task accomplishment
as a result of: (1) a realization that they would learn new grammatical
structures by doing it, (2) a perceived opportunity to learn Spanish
from their more proficient peers, and (3) a heightened interest in the
topic of the task. The motivation of the low-proficiency students to
do problem-solving through Spanish increased as they moved through the
four stages of task accomplishment as a function of: (1) a heightened
interest in learning more academic vocabulary and (2) an urge to demonstrate
that they knew more academic vocabulary than their peers.
Implications for Immersion Teachers
If by grade four or five, immersion students are tending to demonstrate
increasingly reduced proficiency in the academic language associated
with the curriculum, then it may be appropriate for the instructional
staff to intervene, as in this study, with an emphasis on explicitly
taught academic language.
When students are accustomed to having the instructor teach both content
and content- specific language to use, students’ attention to
the topic increases. Furthermore, having students working on academic
language helps them in learning how to define terms, make associations,
and use the new academic language appropriately. It would also appear
that there is a need to encourage students to read extended prose, as
in history lessons, and to emphasize vocabulary and grammar processing
strategies that might make the effort easier. The challenge is to have
students persevere in such extended reading tasks rather than rely on
detailed explanations from the teacher to comprehend a text and respond
to it.
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