How do Students with Specific Learning Differences Learn Additional Languages?

We will soon be publishing the second edition of Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith. In this post the authors explain what’s new in this edition.

When we published the first edition of our book, Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences, in 2012, there was limited awareness among language teachers, teacher educators, material designers, language testers and researchers regarding how students with specific learning differences (SpLDs) acquire additional languages and how to support their success as language learners. Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest and increased effort to design and implement inclusive language teaching programs that cater to the diverse needs of students. In a wide range of contexts, it is now mandated at the policy level that language learners with disabilities should be provided with equitable opportunities to acquire additional languages. There has also been a remarkable shift away from medicalizing and viewing disabilities from a deficiency perspective, instead recognizing them as part of the inherent diversity of human existence and experience, highlighting the importance of removing socially constructed barriers in all aspects of life.

The new edition of our book has been fully revised to reflect these changing conceptualizations of specific learning differences and places emphasis on barriers to participation, inclusive language teaching, and assessment practices in all its chapters. Accordingly, the first updated chapter includes a detailed discussion of discourses and conceptualizations of neurodiversity and draws attention to the fact that individual learners may have different types of intersecting disabilities and disadvantages simultaneously. The chapters on the general principles and specific techniques of inclusive language teaching have also been thoroughly revised to incorporate recent advances in research and practices related to accessibility and universal design.

Since the original publication of our book, a considerable amount of research has been conducted, not only on the potential challenges that students with SpLDs might face in language learning but also on how various instructional approaches and methods can support second language learners with diverse cognitive profiles. While many recommendations for teaching language learners with SpLDs were previously based on teachers’ intuition and prior experience, there is now substantial evidence from the field of second language acquisition research showing that these recommended approaches, such as multi-modal teaching techniques, benefit all language learners, not just those with SpLDs. The updated chapter on language teaching techniques has also been expanded to include detailed recommendations from first language literacy research that can assist in the development of reading and writing skills for second language learners with SpLDs. Not only has the number of studies investigating the language learning processes of students with SpLDs grown in the past decade, but there has also been an increased effort to make assessments fair and equitable for test-takers with SpLDs. The updated chapter on assessing students with SpLDs includes these latest developments and the studies supporting current inclusive assessment designs.

The field of inclusive language teaching and the study of disabilities in language learning are likely to continue expanding and branching into new directions in the future. Our book provides a current and comprehensive overview of how students with SpLDs learn additional languages, the barriers they might face, and how their language acquisition experiences can be enhanced. We hope that it will serve as a valuable resource for teachers, teacher educators, language testers, and academics, and that it will inspire future research and initiatives to make multilingual language education accessible to all.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña.

How to Help Second Language Learners Develop Their Literacy Abilities

We recently published Second Language Literacy Pedagogy by Kimberly Buescher Urbanski. In this post the author explains what led her to write the book.

The seeds of this book began when I was a high school French student. As an avid first language reader and a dedicated second language learner, I found it difficult to use my first language reading ability and my knowledge of French to read authentic French texts. Once I later became a high school and college level French teacher, I found it equally difficult to help my students to do the same. I wanted to find a way to better understand the second language literacy development process and how we can help students. My research as a scholar began during my Master’s after reading Michael Cole’s (1996) work with struggling L1 readers and his solution using Sociocultural Theory. Through many iterations and investigations during my PhD and after, as well as much reading and thinking, I continued to develop my own understanding of how to best help second language learners develop their literacy abilities. In general, my research focuses on needs that are present in pedagogical contexts, draws on theory to inform and guide my efforts to improve the practice of teaching-learning, and returns to test the theory through my research-teaching.

In this book, for my research-teaching, I used Concept-Based Language Instruction from Sociocultural Theory (e.g., Lantolf & Poehner, 2014; Vygotsky, 2012) and a Division-of-Labor Pedagogy (Buescher, 2015). This unique combination allowed me to help students develop their understanding and use of the concepts of literacy such as Foundation, Organization, and Genre while reading authentic French narratives collectively. Each concept had four roles, which were prepared, shared, and then rotated among the students so that at the start, they each had responsibility for one portion of the intricate task of reading, yet gained the full understanding of the text through their collectivity. In addition, they were mediated individually and collectively through the researcher-teacher’s real time attuned mediation. The aim was to address the well-documented curricular gap (e.g. Byrnes et al., 2010) in second language teaching between the introductory courses, focusing mainly on language, and the advanced courses, focusing mainly on reading literature by working with learners aiming to bridge this gap.

If you are interested in learning more about second language literacy development or to learn more about Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory as applied in both small group and full classroom settings, I hope that you will find the detailed pedagogy and results of that pedagogy as helpful guides for your own teaching and researching.

Kimberly (Buescher) Urbanski
Pronouns: she, her
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Linguistics
University of Massachusetts – Boston
kimberly.urbanski@umb.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Literacy Practices and Language Learning Outside the Classroom by Miho Inaba.

Why Should Forced Migration be Considered in Research on Language Learning?

This month we published Language Learning and Forced Migration edited by Marte Monsen and Guri Bordal Steien. In this post the editors explain why it’s important to consider forced migration in language learning research.

When you listen to debates about migration in some European countries, you might get the impression that the rest of the world spend their life waiting for an opportunity to pack their bags and penetrate the European borders. As academics living in Norway, we are used to a discourse where adult language learners are portrayed as people who came to Norway voluntarily and need to meet strict Norwegian language requirements to prevent too many others taking the same journey. Researchers on second language acquisition also tend to view second language learning for adults as voluntary, and of course, many people both move across borders and learn new languages voluntarily for work, for studies or even just for the sake of new experiences.

However, many people experience that they are moved across borders with force. In Norway, the immigration policies are strict, so migrants coming to Norway from outside the EU will not be able to settle in Norway unless they are in special need of protection, such as UN resettlement refugees. Adult second language learners in Norway are thus usually forced migrants. In our work, we have met people who have been forced from their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often by means of cruelty beyond our imagination. They have fled on foot to Uganda, where they have lived a rough life in a sort of limbo, as they know their life in Uganda is only temporary. Under these circumstances, many of them have learned new languages through communicating with people “in the streets”, and many of them have large language repertoires. After years in transit, sometimes decades, they have been resettled in Norway, where few or none of their current language resources are valued. Entering many countries in the Global North entails forced attendance of classes to learn the host language, as is also the case for Norway.

The language courses and language tests that the migrants will come up against in Norway and other European countries are based upon the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A well-known critique of this framework is that it allows policymakers to easily use language proficiency levels as standards and gatekeepers, while the empirical foundation for these standards is weak, and while the descriptions of language proficiency in CEFR initially was developed to measure foreign language learning by students. Well used concepts within SLA that might further guide the language courses, like Selinker’s theories on interlanguage or various models of motivation or investment in language learning, are also based upon knowledge from students or voluntary migrants. This means that a large number of people that attend language classes in the Global North enter a system that lacks knowledge of their language backgrounds, their needs and their lived experience.

Because of the unique situation of refugees and other forced migrants, we believe we need a research agenda that takes into consideration the experiences of people who have been forced to cross borders. That is what we hope to initiate with our book Language Learning and Forced Migration.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Crossing Borders, Writing Texts, Being Evaluated edited by Anne Golden, Lars Anders Kulbrandstad and Lawrence Jun Zhang.

It Takes a Village to Write a Book: Mastering Idiomatic Expressions

This month we published Idiomatic Mastery in a First and Second Language by Monica Karlsson. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book and talks us through the thinking behind each chapter.

Some years ago I was teaching a proficiency class, when my student teachers and I came across some idiomatic expressions in a text that one of my students had brought with her. Her intention was to use the text in one of her own teaching sessions as it dealt with a topic relevant to a particular lesson, but she had problems understanding a few sections of it. Quite a long discussion ensued which, to begin with, was concerned with meaning only, but, when meaning had been resolved, came to be more about how exciting it would be to deal with such vocabulary on a more regular basis. This discussion with my students was the very first step in an extended process that has now resulted in the book Idiomatic Mastery in a First and Second Language.

Setting to work, the first thing I did was to explore differences between comprehension in a first and second language, so that I would get a better understanding of problems related to second language acquisition specifically. In this respect, the research literature clearly shows that there are four main facilitators: age, context, transparency and frequency, and so the second chapter came to deal with these basic concepts, as well as exploring L1 and L2 quantitative and qualitative differences.

Next I wanted to investigate how I could teach these kinds of items in a way that would promote both comprehension and retention, as well as give an understanding of how my students could approach these kinds of expressions in their own L2 classrooms in the future. Chapter 3 is therefore concerned with multimodal and visualization techniques that may help L2 learners of different ages and proficiency levels.

One of the idioms found while searching for suitable scenes from various TV shows to be incorporated in the multimodal tests implemented in the third chapter was paint the town beige. During testing, I realized that this type of manipulated idiom warranted its own chapter, as it caused students to experience quite a few additional problems. The fifth chapter hence deals only with L2 learners’ comprehension of these twisted relatives.

While testing groups of informants, I also noticed that even if many of the expressions were understood and remembered with the help of multimodal and visualization techniques, many more idioms regrettably remained very difficult to grasp, and so, to enhance learning further, it also felt important to deal with persisting ignorance and various types of misinterpretations in a structured way. Chapter 4 is thus dedicated entirely to these tokens.

Presenting my results on L1 and L2 idiom comprehension to a group of other researchers, the last part of a discussion with them came to be about idiom production, at which point I felt I had more to learn. Reading up on the research literature, I found that while sentence completion tasks have been comparatively frequently researched, very little has been done in connection with free composition writing. The sixth chapter therefore focuses entirely on an analysis of L2 learners’ use of idiomatic expressions when writing essays, often considered one of the last frontiers of L2 mastery.

Lastly, it is usually said that it takes a village to raise a child. Based on the above, I now realize that the same can be said about writing a book, during the process of which comments, ideas and input from students, colleagues and friends certainly help decide what would be important parts of a book on a specific topic. I sincerely hope that you will find this book as interesting to read as I found it interesting to write.

Monica Karlsson
monica.karlsson@hh.se

For more information about this book please see our website. 

The Motivations of Adult Language Learners in Continuing Education Settings

We recently published Identity Trajectories of Adult Second Language Learners by Cristiana Palmieri. In this post the author explains what inspired her to conduct this research.

The reasons I became interested in conducting the study presented in my book are connected to both my professional and personal life. Having an academic background in social sciences with a specific interest in the nexus between languages and cultures, I have always been very interested in the relation between L2 language learning and processes of identity development, to better understand how languages influence the way we think and interact with other people. My interest in this area has been compounded by my personal experience as a second language speaker and my professional practice as a teacher. In my role as an educator I have taught a variety of subjects, including Italian language and culture, both in Italy and Australia. When I started teaching Italian as a second language in Australia I realised that the Australian sociocultural context presented specific characteristics connected to the history of Italian migration to this country. I was surprised to discover that my native language is one of the most widely-studied languages in Australia, in spite of the large geographical distance that separates the two countries. What makes this finding particularly remarkable is the fact that Italian is spoken by a relatively small percentage of the world population, about 64 million speakers in Italy and in a few other countries in Europe and Africa, which equates to less than 1% of the world population. Moreover, it is not considered a language of business, and its command it is not an essential requisite for Australian travellers visiting Italy.

Having been myself a second language learner, I am very well aware of the fact that strong motivation is needed in order to sustain the effort and to cope with the frustration that the learning process sometimes brings about. In my case, my motivation was relatively easy to frame: I wanted to learn English, a global language, to be able to live and work in English-speaking countries, and to travel the world with an international language as a passport at my disposal. While teaching Italian to adult learners in Australia, looking at my students, highly committed individuals striving to master a second language which is not an international language, I could not stop wondering about the factors sustaining their motivation.

This book explores the motivations of adult second language learners in continuing education settings. It focuses on their learning trajectories and related dynamics of identity development triggered by the learning process. By presenting an in-depth analysis of motivational drives and their interconnectedness with the sociocultural settings in which the learning process occurs, the book contributes to boosting our understanding of adult second language learning, a rapidly expanding field of research of language and identity in multicultural contexts. In a nutshell, this book is about the fascinating experience of learning another language and understanding another culture.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Teaching and the Older Adult by Danya Ramírez Gómez.

Experiential Learning in Second Language Contexts

This month we published Creating Experiential Learning Opportunities for Language Learners edited by Melanie Bloom and Carolyn Gascoigne. In this post the editors explain what inspired them to put the book together.

The idea for Creating Experiential Learning Opportunities for Language Learners grew out of the frustration we both experienced when we researched supporting articles and publications for the internship and externship programming we were designing for second language learners. In developing our own programming in this area, we were expecting that we would be able to find models or ideas from which to work, but instead we found a paucity of information. At the same time, Melanie was conducting research on the research on students’ development in intercultural sensitivity in the study abroad context and stumbled across an article on students’ development of cross-cultural adaptability an international internship (Batey & Lupi, 2012). This connected the work she was conducting in the study abroad setting with potential models of internship programming, which served as the impetus for the volume.

In our initial discussions about the structure of the volume, we determined that focusing only on professional engagement opportunities might be too limiting and might steer the volume’s focus to Spanish as a second language in the United States. As our intention was to offer a selection of research and models of domestic projects for a range of second language learners and contexts, we decided to broaden the scope of the volume to include community-based service learning activities, professional engagement activities and a variety of other unique engagement contexts. This allowed us to invite contributors from different language teaching contexts and explore new directions in experiential learning on which few publications have been produced.

As we sent out invitations to contributors, we tried to strike a balance between authors who are widely known in the field of experiential learning in second language contexts and scholars who have begun to contribute to the field more recently. This allowed us to capture many different voices and also present a wide-range of contexts from which our readership could learn. To this end, we were able to provide both an historical backdrop for experiential language learning, as well as examples of different applications, and lessons learned, across various languages and course types.

Our hope is that this volume is able to begin to fill the hole in the literature that we found as we started to develop internship and externship programming at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Readers passionate about creating meaningful language learning opportunities and preparing their students for professional life beyond the classroom will find inspiration and ideas for moving forward. In addition, we hope teacher scholars working with second language students in experiential learning contexts will see this volume as an invitation to continue the scholarly conversation and be encouraged to publish their own work.

For more information about this book, please see our website. 

Cultural Migrants and Optimal Language Acquisition

This month we published Cultural Migrants and Optimal Language Acquisition edited by Fanny Forsberg Lundell and Inge Bartning. Here, Fanny and Inge discuss the relationship between language learning and culture.

How well can you actually learn a second language if you start later on in life? As linguists interested in second language acquisition, this is an obvious question. Recent years have seen a growing body of research within the fields of nativelikeness and ultimate attainment, often evolving around the famous Critical Period Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis (depending on the individual researcher’s interpretation), it is impossible to acquire a second language at the level of a native speaker after puberty. More than a hundred studies have tried to confirm or reject this hypothesis and the current state-of-the art, to simplify things, is quite unanimous: yes, for some subtleties of linguistic competence, such as phonetic and grammatical intuition there seems to be a major obstacle for many individuals when acquisition starts after puberty. However, there is much more to language than some detailed aspects that have generally been the object of critical period inquiry, which do not necessarily have an impact on everyday communicative competence.

What is more, there are also other populations of second language learners than those which have traditionally been included in studies on nativelikeness. For quite some time, we have followed a group of Swedish long-term residents in Paris, France. We were amazed by how well many of them had learnt French, although they were late starters. In a study published last year, Forsberg Lundell et al. (2014), 30% of them passed as native speakers in a native speaker evaluation test, which is a high figure compared to earlier studies. The socio-psychological advantage of these learners was striking: most of them were self-declared francophiles, with good experiences of integration, both on a professional and personal level. Could we find a more optimal setting for language learning? If we want to investigate the potential of adult second language learning, these are the speakers we should go after.

Luckily, we are not the only ones interested in the link between second language learning and cultural motivation. Colleagues from Sweden, Ireland, the UK, France and Spain have contributed to this volume and illustrate the relevance of studying the link between migration experience and language. It is our belief that the book presents a number of studies which convincingly argue for a tight link between second language attainment and culture.

Our hope is that our book will open up for new exciting research projects where migration experience is considered to a much larger extent in studies on adult second language acquisition. Furthermore, it would also be desirable if social scientists, studying migration and integration, would accord a more pivotal place to the role played by language, a key aspect of human culture and cognition.

For more information about this title please see our website. If you found this interesting you might also enjoy Linguistic and Cultural Acquisition in a Migrant Community edited by David Singleton et al.