Impact of Interlocutor and Task on Second-grade One-way Chinese Immersion Students’ Language Use

Abstract

This case study explores patterns of first language (L1) and second language (L2) use by three second graders attending an early total one-way Chinese immersion program in the U.S. as they carried out classroom tasks and activities with different interlocutors in the classroom. Their naturally occurring verbal interactions in the classroom were audio-recorded all day long for six near-consecutive days. Data were transcribed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, Rbrul was used to model each of the three children’s choice between Chinese and English to identify which contextual factor(s) consistently contributed to their choices. Qualitative analysis was then performed to provide contextual information for their verbal interactions that cannot be captured by the quantitative results, and to explore possible explanations for the quantitative patterns. Findings show that the three children differed from one another considerably in their overall use of Chinese: one child almost always spoke Chinese, and the other two children used more English, depending on contextual variables. The contextual factor that most affected all three children’s use of either Chinese or English was their interlocutor. The teacher, researcher, and particular student (Filip) as interlocutors strongly promoted the children’s use of Chinese; other students as interlocutors variably promoted their use of English. The different social roles that each of the three children played in the classroom also seemed to relate to their use or non-use of Chinese. A leadership role that involved a child’s identification with the teacher appeared to promote that child’s L2 use, while another child’s resistance to the teacher’s authority tended to promote that child’s L1 use. Peer leaders, either emulating or resisting the teacher, appeared to exert strong impact on language behavior of other children who played the role of follower. Such followers tended to accommodate to the language preferences of peer leaders moment to moment in oral interaction. Other contextual factors also affected the three children’s language use. Academic contexts overall promoted their use of Chinese while non-academic contexts promoted English. Within academic contexts, the content areas of Chinese language arts and math promoted Chinese and the content areas of science and health, while less well represented in the data base, seemed to promote English and Chinese respectively. Teacher-fronted activities promoted Chinese for all three students, while writing activities and interactive activities impacted different children’s language use differently. When the children were on-task, they spoke significantly more Chinese than in off-task situations. Theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings are explored. In particular, the social role a child plays is an important and useful construct to understand language use in immersion classrooms. These findings suggest that when teachers assign children to small groups, they need to pay attention to the roles that the children are playing and try to strategically alter group membership to maximize the children’s use of the immersion language. Pedagogically, the findings support the use of inductive teaching approaches, rather than just lecturing, to promote children’s use of the immersion language.