Read this article in Catalan
For six years, Elsa Tragant and Carme Muñoz, two professors from the Faculty of Philology and Communication of the University of Barcelona, ??have monitored the English learning of 140 Catalan boys and girls, from first to sixth grade and have followed to almost thirty until the end of ESO, over almost ten years.
With this longitudinal study, the largest ever carried out in Catalonia, the authors of the research have determined that facilitating the stimulation of children to the English language contributes positively when it comes to assimilating language knowledge. Although there are also other factors that end up promoting a higher degree of learning, such as reinforcement classes or the child’s own profile.
The family environment
For Carme Muñoz, one of the most determining keys is the immersion that a boy or girl makes in a certain language. The co-author considers that accompanying, as a family, the student to become familiar with English is very effective in facilitating her learning. Putting the cartoons in the original version is a good resource “because intermodality intervenes, because we have the image and we have the sound and, when they can read, we even have the subtitles in English as well, and this has been proven to help receive the message better”. For the teacher, they are receptive skills that will later go very well to have a much richer vocabulary with which to interact richly in a conversation.
But this support is not only limited to watching series or audiovisual content in a foreign language, but is also viable with reading books, stories, playing games or other activities where English, in this case, is the code. Communication. In fact, “many students of a certain language come through products that are derived from that language: ‘anime’, in the case of Japanese, or pop music, in the case of Korean; to give an example,” explains Muñoz.
In any case, the difference between children who have received a favorable environment to be stimulated with English, have had greater performance in terms of learning compared to students who have not had it. “This difference between favorable and less favorable family environments widens as the years go by and is difficult to address from the classroom,” complements teacher Elsa Tragant.
English as extracurricular
According to the study by Tragant and Muñoz, English classes outside of school are also a key factor for their learning. “The majority of students who obtained the best English grades at the end of secondary school are those who began doing extracurricular English from fourth grade onwards or at some point during secondary school,” explains Tragant. “On the other hand, none of the students with the lowest grades in the language had done it as an extracurricular activity during ESO,” says the UB professor.
On the other hand, there is a very important correlation between the results of the Catalan and Spanish language proficiency tests carried out in sixth grade with the results of the English language test of this same year. There is also a strong correlation between a test that measures the aptitude for learning foreign languages ??and the results of the skills test and other English comprehension and production tests, as well as the Catalan and Spanish skills tests.
«This evidence would confirm the hypothesis that the learning of first and second languages ??is fueled by common cognitive skills. They also indicate that verbal skills in first languages ??can subsequently predict foreign language learning abilities; hence the need to promote them from a very young age at home and at school, with activities and routines with a strong verbal component,” explains Carme Muñoz.
The profile of the students
The researchers have established four student profiles, according to the perception that these young people have of learning English as a third language. In the first group there are students who consider that learning English is an “unattainable” goal: they experience it as a frustrating experience, and an obvious lack of aptitude is detected. Secondly, students “lack effort on their part”, but consider that English is “necessary” for the future. In the third profile there are students who do not use English intensively in their leisure time and who are not attracted to this language either, but who are very willing to learn it and get good grades.
Finally, the fourth profile is made up of students who consider that English is a source of satisfaction, because in the academy or at the institute they enjoy the subject and it is a language that attracts them and that they already use regularly on a personal level.
