Immigrants and Natives Learning L2 – While kids head back to school this month, some adults are also hitting the books and creating relationships through culture and language.
For 19 years, the Educate Ya language exchange program in Portland has helped hundreds of immigrants reach their goals of becoming bilingual. The program helps both new immigrants looking for ways to better their future, as well as native-English speakers looking to learn Spanish and a new culture.
Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Katu.
Paper
Sociologists typically assume that immigrants’ acquisition of English as a second language follows the opportunities and motivations to become proficient in English, while many linguists argue that second language acquisition may be governed by maturational constraints, possibly biologically based, that are tied to the age at onset of language learning.
In this article, I use U.S. census data to investigate the relationship between age at onset of second language learning and levels of English language proficiency among foreign-born adults in the United States. The overarching conclusion is that proficiency in a second language among adults is strongly related to age at immigration. Part of that relationship is attributable to social and demographic considerations tied to age at entry into a new country, and part may be attributable to maturational constraints.
Learn more about this topic by reading this article in this link.
After reading “Immigrants and Natives Learning L2”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.