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TESOL Matters Vol. 9 No. 6     (December 1999/January 2000)

by Virginia P. Collier and Wayne P. Thomas
This article is based on Virginia Collier's plenary speech at the 33rd Annual TESOL Convention in New York City. Parts 1 and 2 appeared in the August/September and October/November issues.

The 21st-century challenge to our field is to move school programs away from focusing on remediation (fixing what is viewed as a problem) to enrichment (adding to what the students already know). Part 2 of this article provided some brief glimpses of teaching in enrichment classes designed for all students, including English language learners. This final segment focuses on understanding why enrichment strategies work so well for our students.

To experience accelerated academic growth, language minority students need a school context that provides the same basic conditions that the majority group experiences. This includes attention to the ongoing developmental processes that occur naturally for any child all through the K-12 school years. For students who come from a bilingual community, these interdependent processes -- nonstop cognitive, academic, and linguistic development -- must occur in a supportive sociocultural environment through their first language (L1) and their second language (L2) to enhance student learning. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

Sociocultural Processes

At the heart of the figure is the individual student going through the process of acquiring an L2 in school. Central to that student's acquisition of language are all of the surrounding social and cultural processes occurring in everyday life within the student's past, present, and future, in all contexts -- home, school, community, and the broader society. Sociocultural processes include individual students' emotional responses to school, such as self-esteem, anxiety, or other affective factors. Also included are community or regional social patterns, such as prejudice and discrimination against groups or individuals, that can influence students' achievement in school negatively, as well as societal patterns, such as the subordinate status of a minority group or acculturation versus assimilation forces at work. Enrichment programs can lessen such negative forces by creating a socioculturally supportive environment at school where all students are affirmed, valued, and respected as important partners in the learning process.

Language Development

Linguistic processes, a second component of the model, consist of the subconscious aspects of the students' language development (an innate ability all humans possess for acquisition of oral language) as well as the metalinguistic, conscious, formal teaching of language in school and the acquisition of the written system of language. This includes the acquisition of the oral and written systems of the student's L1 and L2 across all language domains, such as phonology (the pronunciation system); vocabulary, morphology, and syntax (the grammar system); semantics (meaning); pragmatics (how language is used in a given context); paralinguistics (nonverbal and other extralinguistic features); and discourse (stretches of language beyond a single sentence). To assure cognitive and academic success in the L2, a student's L1 system, oral and written, must be developed to a high cognitive level at least through the elementary school years. Enrichment teachers recognize that each language is best acquired throughout schooling by means of natural and rich language use, oral and written, across the curriculum.

Academic Development

A third component of the model, academic development, includes all schoolwork in language arts, mathematics, the sciences, and social studies for each grade level, K-12 and beyond. With each succeeding grade, academic work dramatically expands the vocabulary, sociolinguistic, and discourse dimensions of language to higher cognitive levels. Academic knowledge and conceptual development transfer from L1 to L2. Thus enrichment teachers know that it is most efficient to develop academic work through students' L1 while teaching the L2 during other periods of the school day through meaningful academic content. In earlier decades in the United States, schools emphasized the teaching of the L2 as the first step and postponed the teaching of academics. Research has shown that postponing or interrupting academic development while students learn an L2 is likely to promote long-term academic failure. In an information-driven society, language minority students cannot afford to lose the time, with native English speakers constantly surging ahead. Enrichment programs prevent interrupted academic development, thus allowing language minority students to keep up with native English speakers.

Cognitive Development

The fourth component of this model, the cognitive dimension, is a natural, subconscious process that occurs developmentally from birth to the end of schooling and beyond. An infant initially builds thought processes by interacting with loved ones in the language of the home. All parents (including those nonformally schooled) naturally stimulate children's L1 cognitive growth through daily interaction and family problem solving in the language the parents know best. Students bring 5-6 years of cognitive development in their L1 to their first day of school. Enrichment teachers affirm this as a knowledge base, an important stepping-stone to build on at least throughout the elementary school years. Extensive research has demonstrated that children who reach full cognitive development in two languages (generally reaching the threshold in the L1 by around age 11-12) enjoy cognitive advantages over monolinguals.

L2 educators in the United States mostly neglected cognitive development until the past decade. Language teaching curricula were simplified, structured, and sequenced during the 1970s, and when academic content was added to language lessons in the 1980s, academics were watered down into cognitively simple tasks. Too often neglected was the crucial role of cognitive development in the L1. Now we know from the growing research base that educators must address language, cognitive, and academic development equally, through L1s and L2s, if they are to ensure students' academic success in the L2.

Interdependence of the Four Component

For the child, adolescent, and young adult still going through the process of formal schooling, development of any one of the three academic, cognitive, and linguistic components depends critically on the simultaneous development of the other two. Also, sociocultural processes strongly influence students' access to cognitive, academic, and language development in both positive and negative ways. It is crucial to language minority students' long-term success for educators to provide a socioculturally supportive school environment that allows natural language, academic, and cognitive development to flourish through L1s and L2s.

Enrichment schooling builds on the knowledge base that our students bring to the classroom and accelerates linguistic, cognitive, and academic growth. In a socioculturally supportive environment, schools and families become partners in the enrichment process.

Virginia P. Collier and Wayne P. Thomas, professors at George Mason University and researchers with the national Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence, are internationally known for their research on long-term school effectiveness for linguistically and culturally diverse students. Their research reports can be downloaded from http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/ and http://www.crede.ucsc.edu/.