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But they also follow common sense: To do so they set up artificial environments in which the foreign language of interest becomes necessary for communication and academic success, through four basic actions: But the very little research done in bilingual schools reveals that their administrators can easily ignore important facts of language acquisition. Although there is no evidence from research of bilinguals exhibiting the same skills of two monolinguals, and it is not expected that they do so, a considerable reduction of skills in the first language is not justifiable in a monolingual sociolinguistic context.
The goal of bilingualism cannot override a central fact of language acquisition: After 4 or 5 years of age, the main stimulus for the development of language is the school experience. This is because entering school creates for the child the need to communicate with a variety of new people, in a variety of new communicative situations, and in the context of a variety of new topics and discourse types associated with them. Additionally, reading and writing start formally in school, and they become the largest possible source of linguistic expansion Barriga-Villanueva, ; This is true for the foreign language when its development is a school goal, but it is first true for the first language, the development of which should not be neglected in school.
In addition to this, children born monolingual can become bilingual in school, but they will be consecutive bilinguals, having acquired a lot of their first language before entering school. This means that they will naturally use their knowledge of the first language to learn the second one and will need to be able to consciously recognize differences between the two. Schools which commit to the goal of bilingualism in our monolingual context need to find ways to respond to the needs not only of foreign language learning, but of sophisticated development in the first language.
The difficulty posed by monolingual sociolinguistic contexts for the learning of English varies in intensity in the very different circumstances in which communities live in a country as diverse as Colombia. For example, it is a little easier in our big cities to find English speaking people, books in English, and places where English is in use, in touristic and commercial activities, for example. But in our smaller cities, the use of English is farther away from the daily life of children and youngsters.
However, many schools in mediumsized and small cities have followed the model of bilingual institutions, without considering the extra difficulty posed by the socio-linguistic contexts in which their students socialize. The school where the present research was conducted is located in a medium-sized Colombian city, so we felt it illustrated this problem well. The school had struggled for around 15 years to produce bilingual individuals by undertaking the above-mentioned actions, with poor results.
The students did not speak English easily, naturally, or willingly, they often showed actual resistance to using it, and instead of English they used something like Spanish with English words. Among the possible reasons for this situation, the school administrators mentioned the level of English and of pedagogic effectiveness of their teachers, the lack of foreign teachers, and their inability to put English into use in enough classes, school events, and places in the institution.
Nevertheless, they were open to their consultants' explanations, based on the attitude that the students had regarding the absence of a need for the use of English in their lives, and to trying curricular ideas not typical of the model Colombian bilingual school.
The consultants developed the curriculum with a group of some of the English and Spanish teachers chosen by the school and the coordinators of the two language areas. For eight months the group discussed language development in the school, the curriculum in use, and a few theoretical documents that illuminated new possibilities for achieving bilingualism. At the end of this year, the collective experience was made into a new curriculum with the following characteristics:. The characteristics of the curriculum are consistent with four basic constructivist principles taken from the work of different researchers who have contributed to the complex construct that is, today, this description of human learning.
The first one points to the fact that learning occurs when doing things. Authentic activity with language is always the representation, transmission, and purposeful use of meaning in communication among interlocutors or writers and readers. Hence the curriculum is composed of authentic communicative performances, communicative actions or processes performed in specific contexts and with specific purposes by people who use their knowledge in their daily or professional life. Applied Linguistics enables us to identify authentic communicative performances in the real world, on the basis of the pragmatic conditions that define communicative acts: These conditions have been specified by researchers during more than 30 years of development and use of the communicative approach to language analysis Widdowson, ; Van Lier, The curriculum, then, focused on authenticity.
Its implementation depended completely on the teachers' ability to analyze their own and others' real-life communicative actions, processes, and products and turn them into learning situations. They could enact the communicative performances in their classrooms or take the students to environments where they would naturally occur.
Authenticity for specific groups of students was further supported when performances were related to the students' contexts and interests; when the students themselves participated in decision-making about what to learn, what to do to learn, and how to do it; and when communicating required the use of different sources of information, knowledge from different disciplines and of different types, and interactions with multiple others. The recognition of work with others as an authentic feature of real life performance is reinforced by the second constructivist principle.
Socio-cultural in nature and initially established by Vygotsky , it recognizes interaction with others as basic for individual learning. As a result, teaching and learning on the basis of this curriculum are highly based on collaborative work. The third constructivist principle indicates that all learning occurs naturally as process Piaget, For this reason, the curriculum indicates starting points for work on specific communicative performances, but not ending points. After a communicative performance and its associated language are introduced, they appear and re-appear repeatedly in different contexts.
As a result, the same or very similar performances also appear in different grades, to be done in increasingly complex ways according to the age of the students and their accumulated language repertoire, which is maintained in permanent use. This corresponds to Dewey's description of a cyclical curriculum , whose purpose is not to differentiate learning periods or school grades on the basis of content, but to guide learning processes.
The fourth constructivist principle contributes to this cyclical nature of the curriculum, as it states that all new learning is built on knowledge previously constructed Piaget, ; Ausubel, The application of this principle requires the curriculum to constantly connect the performances and language already used to the new performances and language presented. It also supports building the skills in the foreign language on the basis of those in the first language, a feature that defines the curriculum as bilingual.
The curriculum is bilingual, then, because all communicative performances occur first in Spanish and then they serve as support for similar ones in English.
Spanish and English teachers, then, have to work together in planning and designing instruction. In many occasions, starting from the students' interests in really communicative, authentic activities that they cared about in Spanish, the curriculum allows teachers working in collaboration to motivate the students to do them in English, too. Thus the two languages end up being used for similar communicative purposes and bilingually in the same performances whenever possible and natural, with the support of teachers from both areas e.
This also allows teachers to complement each other's knowledge when the students need help in comparing their two languages to understand how they work similarly or differently. Finally, the three contexts for communicative development covered in the curriculum - daily life and the media, academic, and aesthetic-cultural communication - are not unknown to language teachers. However, one or more of them can be forgotten or at least neglected in their classes.
The curriculum consistently reminds teachers to include communicative performances in the three contexts and to connect them whenever possible. The research, the partial results of which we present here, began at the end of with financial support from the National University and in agreement with the school. It started with trying out of a few performances planned by the design group and some others created by the teachers. The first data come from information provided by both Spanish and English teachers about these piloting efforts.
A qualitative methodology was consistent with the nature of the changes that the curriculum was intended to produce initially, which had to be apparent in what happened inside the language learning classrooms, in the actual performance of teachers and students, and through their opinions and experiences. The impact of the curriculum on the first and foreign language development of the students, the final goal of the whole project, would need to be evaluated quantitatively through standardized tests after a longer period of time.
The part of the study we report on here focuses on the learning of English of the youngest students in the school and answers the following research questions:. We focus our present report on two kindergarten groups of 25 year olds each, taught by Colombian teachers. They were not formally trained as English teachers: We also used two videos the teachers made independently in their classes to record performances devised by the students and which were considered especially interesting. We described what the students were doing in the performances in the videos and transcribed the communicative interchanges recorded and the interviews; then we did discourse analysis on the transcriptions, looking for specific information to answer the research questions: To determine final results, we triangulated findings from the interviews and the class observations.
As this partial report focuses on work in English, there will not be much information about what was happening in Spanish that supported the English learning that will be shown. In spite of this, the following words by the Spanish teacher at the preschool level constitute a good indication of what happened throughout the year:. But now we reread the curriculum and there I really understood the importance of working with the English teachers, because the children assimilate English on the basis of their mother tongue Now we do meet We try to identify the language [we need to teach]; we plan a performance together For the children it has made it easier to understand many things more in English.
Preschool Spanish teacher interview, Sept. The data will also show our participant English teachers letting students use Spanish when necessary in the development of different communicative performances to get to the English they were interested in, and we will point to any other connections to Spanish development when possible. The teachers planned the performances for their groups together, based on the principles and the guide included in the curriculum and provided by the consultants in the few meetings organized during the year, every time data were collected.
Both teachers' testimonies and researchers' observations showed that the performances used were effectively adapted to the students' age and that communicative authenticity was achieved by using the students' ideas and interests. Due to their young age and short life experience and to the lack of authentic use of English in their lives, most performances were role play games about diverse topics the students proposed, which allowed for the introduction and practice of a varied repertoire of language they were interested in learning. Reading stories and learning and interpreting songs were equally successful performances.
Working communicatively helped the children develop positive attitudes towards the foreign language class. They produced English with real purposes and participated actively in pedagogical decision-making, which translated into effective learning and cheer enjoyment. According to their teachers, as a result of all this the kids improved their oral skills greatly and learned how to interact with English-speaking people outside of class.
In what follows we present evidence for these results. On the basis of its integral connection between English and Spanish development at the preschool and early primary levels, the curriculum dictated that communicative activity had to be only oral from preschool up to the third grade, to allow the children to advance in their Spanish literacy process before a different reading system was introduced. Games were the main source of English oral performances at the Kindergarten level, role play the preferred kind. One of the teachers stated that performances based on games made leaning more real and enjoyable for students:.
I do think that the use [of the new curriculum] has been an enriching experience because I can see the results in the children; I can see how they enjoy the class Besides being interesting for children, role play allowed teachers to support learning in environments close to reality: We are working on all professions, They wear costumes and come happy to class to perform the characters' actions. Different professions proposed by the children were the most popular topics for performances, especially those related to their parents' professions.
Children portrayed people working at hospitals, shops, hotels, and restaurants. As can be seen below, the students worked on a performance occurring in a doctor's office.
They organized themselves into groups and in each there was a doctor, a patient, a nurse and a receptionist. The profession of a chef was another one simulated in role play. Students prepared to present recipes they liked and recorded a video of a cooking TV show for their parents. The students got into groups of three: The host showed the ingredients and materials, the chef cooked, and the assistant helped the chef and presented de dish.
Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. An important part of this language learned, highlighted by the teachers, was the ability to ask questions and give answers to exchange information:. The students got into groups of three: Nevertheless, they were open to their consultants' explanations, based on the attitude that the students had regarding the absence of a need for the use of English in their lives, and to trying curricular ideas not typical of the model Colombian bilingual school. Now we do meet For the children it has made it easier to understand many things more in English. Pointing to pictures This, this, this.
Another interesting game for the children had to do with descriptions. Looking for authentic performances to work on descriptions, teachers used two types of games: In our April visit, students were playing "Guess Who? The hair is brown and black. Is this pointing to picture [sic. The mouth are big [sic.
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This, this and this. Has long hair [sic. Pointing to pictures This, this, this. T1 class video, Sept. Besides games, the teachers used story reading and songs as authentic communicative performances. Story reading was called "Story Time". One teacher indicated that " English reading was mainly done by teachers using big books with colorful images, frequently making children participate by saying words from the story.
This activity became a constituent part of every class. In our visit in February, the teacher was reading a big book and the students seemed very enthusiastic and participated actively. They learned new language by working with meaning in the context of the story and connecting what was said in the book and the pictures they saw. Learning and singing songs were constituent performances in most of the classes as well. In addition to enjoying singing, little children produced a lot of language in an easy and amusing way while practicing the songs.
One of the teachers enthusiastically said that children loved it T1 interview, Sept. Regarding the authenticity of the performances, teachers constantly expressed the difficulties they had to achieving it. However, through role play they made children portray characters and simulate activities from real life, thus learning the language used in real communicative situations.
Furthermore, teachers developed performances from children's ideas: In doing this, they also practiced communicating in Spanish before they tried it in English. Children's active participation was constantly stimulated by the teachers, and this in turn led the kids to work autonomously in their classes: Children lead you to authenticity No matter how much I plan, I have never carried out a performance as I planned it. Ideas are always coming up [from children] along the path. The students also helped solving problems that emerged when putting the performances into practice.
For example, students gave ideas to solve some difficulties in a performance about professions in a hotel:. Today we were playing 'hotel' and a student said [in Spanish] 'no, it doesn't look like a hotel, it is horrible. Remember that we are children and this is a game; everything is fake'. I said 'I don't have many materials to make the hotel,' and they said 'Hey!
Look, this is the food They organized everything and created a great space and also respected it: That's the pool, this is the Besides letting children participate, another way to achieve authenticity was establishing connections between performances and children's real contexts, mainly their daily activities out of class or activities organized in the school: They like it [the chef role play] because they say that at home they help their parents prepare food: Other authentic activities came simply from the children's real life and what they felt like sharing with their classmates about themselves and their families.
In the following example, children bring information to class in Spanish, after obtaining it from people outside of the classroom:. We had a [performance] called "When I was a baby" First they [wanted to do] an interview with their parents asking them, obviously in Spanish, what they did when they were babies, if they cried a lot, what they ate, things like that. Please try again later.
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