Contribution
Description: This paper intends to examine the type of relations deriving from the students' semantic, syntactic and discoursive structure and their achievement at school. The data were drawn from a six-year project following a German-Portuguese bilingual class in Hamburg learning in a dual language program and thus providing information related to several aspects of these students' linguistic acquisition.The widely decontextualised educational language, its abstraction from everyday relations and its exemption from personal-dialogical communication have lead the Canadian researcher Jim Cummins to distinguish between "basic interpersonal communication skills" (BICS) and "cognitive-academic language proficiency" (CALP). Against this conceptual backdrop, educational discourse is seen to focus on CALP, a language with wider cognitive requirements, lower contextual transparency and a higher demand for abstraction. It presupposes on behalf of the students a differentiated vocabulary, the ability and coherence to discern and articulate, as well as the competence in dealing with complex linguistic structures. According to Gogolin, Kaiser, Roth 2004, in evaluating the relationship between linguistic competence and educational achievement it is less relevant to focus on the students' general linguistic resources than on CALP-related, hence educational specific, capabilities and strategies. In their research on Turkish-German and Russian-German students and their linguistic, as well as mathematical competence, a correlation was found between the successful verbalization of a mathematical problem and the reaching of its correct solution.
Methodology: Two images, one focusing on a scientific theme and the other dealing with a technical/social topic, were applied as impulses, leading to oral verbalisation in both languages. The data were treated both quantitatively and qualitatively with special relevance given to the students' verbal resources in a general approach, as well as in a CALP-related perspective. Further, the subordinate clauses and their connectors were used as an indicator for discoursive complexity, having been later correlated with the students' argumentation complexity. The results of this linguistic analysis were then compared with the students' achievement in the international assessment test PIRLS as regards reading literacy and mathematical competence.
Conclusions: It is expected that CALP-oriented linguistic structures, such as they were defined for this study, will correlate positively with the results attained by the students in the PIRLS international assessment study, both in reading literacy as well in mathematics. Thus it can be predicted that a direct stimulation of certain linguistic structures in the two languages of instruction will be able to lead to a higher educational achievement of the students in those both idioms.
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