one example: how did Kao Kalia Yang, as a young Hmong refugee, manage to acquire oral English L2 in St Paul, Minnesota classrooms when, by her own account, she said almost nothing in her classes for years and years? She was not the traditional ESL learner that our SLA theories assume. Yet, as a graduate of Carleton College and author of a well-written memoir (Yang 2008), she was clearly a successful learner of L2 reading and writing. We do not know how she achieved this. We need longitudinal SLA studies of non-traditional L2 learners embedded in a range of real social contexts. Current SLA theory that minimizes the importance of social context leads to major omissions and gaps in our database such as these; models of SLA that incorporate social context, such as Preston (2000, 2002) and Lantolf (2000a), will help us address such omissions and gaps.
In this book, we would argue that the inclusion of less-literate L2 learners will contribute to SLA theory-building. Perhaps most fundamentally, it will enable us to examine the impact that some of our own uncritically accepted cultural assumptions and presuppositions, founded in our own literacy, have on our perceptions as researchers. In enabling us to do these things, research with this unstudied population will broaden our view of the nature of SLA and of the human potential for language learning.
The impact of native language literacy on second language literacy
As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, there has been virtually no research on the impact of literacy on L2 oral skills; however, a good deal of research has documented the impact of first language (L1) literacy on the development of L2 literacy. Cummins (1991) has taken the position that L1 literacy facilitates learners’ acquisition of L2 literacy. Collier (1989), for example, reviewed the published literature on L2 learner performance on standardized tests believed to correlate highly with academic language proficiency. One of the two major factors correlating positively with learners’ academic literacy in the L2 in all these settings was whether the learners were literate in their L1. Adolescent L2 learners who were not literate in their L1 took seven to ten years to learn age-appropriate L2 literacy-related context-reduced and cognitively demanding academic language skills; some never seemed to catch up with their native speaking peers. Those who did have L1 literacy skills took less time to acquire comparable literacy skills in their L2.3 According to this research, the length of time to full academic literacy increases with age of onset of initial literacy.
Table 0.1. Relationships between L1/L2 oracy and L1/L2 literacy
However, scholars have not examined the impact of L1 or L2 literacy on L2 oral skills. Even recent major research initiatives fail to examine this. The research questions typically investigated by SLA scholars deal with relationships between literacy and oracy, such as:
1 What is the relationship between L1 oral skills and L2 literacy?
2 What is the relationship between L2 oral skills and L2 literacy?
3 What is the relationship between L1 and L2 literacy?
Table 0.1 offers another way of understanding these relationships; the focus of most research is on relationships of various cells to Cell 4: L2 literacy.
However, what has been missing is any exploration of the impact of L1 or L2 literacy (Cells 2 and 4) on Cell 3 – the cognitive processing of oral L2. Using this table, we can better conceptualize such interesting research efforts as those of Keiko Koda and her colleagues (Koda 1989, 2005; Wang, Koda, and Perfetti 2003); these researchers have documented the impact of Cell 2 on Cell 4: literate learners’ knowledge of different types of L1 writing systems (alphabetical versus logographic) on their phonological or semantic cognitive processing of reading materials in L2. Koda and colleagues, while they have perhaps come closest in their work to that explored in this book, carefully documenting the impact of different L1 writing systems on L2 reading and writing, have not, to our knowledge, explored the impact of this knowledge on Cell 3: learners’ L2 oral processing. This omission has been widespread.
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