Human Language Series on Second Language Acquisition

You are enrolled in a California State University summer course on documentary video production in their Communications Department, hoping to improve your videography skills to use on special projects with your students. The class project is to produce a documentary video, and one of the models introduced by the instructor is an award-winning documentary series, The Human Language, produced by Gene Searchinger of Equinox Films. (You have parts 1 and 2 on your course CD, by permission of Mr. Searchinger). The film weaves interviews of top linguists (those who study the formal structure of language) and developmental psycholinguists (who study children and how they acquire language) with vivid examples of language use and language development. As the first step in production, the class assignment is to develop a prospectus for a sequel documentary on some other aspect of human development.

Because of your interest in second language acquisition, you decide to develop a prospectus on this topic. You have a number of background papers to help guide your work. One is a pair of influential papers by Stephen Krashen and Jim Cummins that was prepared for the California State Department of Education in the 1980's. Another resource is a paper by Kenji Hakuta written for the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute that talks about how long it takes English Learners to develop proficiency in English as a second language.

Having watched the Searchinger videos and read the papers, you are now ready to start framing the questions. As you start thinking about venues for your documentary, your instructor hands you a set of short edited videos taken in some San Francisco elementary classrooms that focus on ESL instruction. (These videos were made to accompany an on-line teacher professional development case produced by Teachscape, Inc.) He says that he knows the people who were involved in the production of these videos, and that perhaps they could provide some of the settings in which you could do your filming.

In your prospectus, you should address the following questions:

  1. What are the key themes from linguistics and child language acquisition research that can be extended into our understanding of second language acquisition? i.e., what are some commonalities between first and second language acquisition?
  2. What are some differences between first and second language acquisition that should be highlighted in the documentary?
  3. What are some concepts from the papers would you highlight in the documentary?
  4. If you were to interview some individuals for the documentary, what sorts of questions would you ask?
  5. If you were to set up six hours of a video shoot of second language learners in various settings, how would you allocate the time and what kinds of learners and activities would you shoot? Be creative!

The prospectus should be no longer than 5 double-spaced pages; you may present the ideas in bullet form.

Resources

Searchinger, G. (n.d.) The Human Language Series (video). Part 1: Colorless Green Ideas: Discovering the Human Language. Part 2: Playing the Language Game: Acquiring the Human Language. (on course CD #1)

Crawford, J. Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory and Practice. Chapter 6.

Krashen, S.(1984). Bilingual education and second language acquisition theory. In. C. F. Leyba (ed.), Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework. Los Angeles: CSU Los Angeles and the California State Department of Education. (on course CD #1)

Cummins, J.(1994). Primary language instruction and the education of language minority students. In. C. F. Leyba (ed.), Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework. Los Angeles: CSU Los Angeles and the California State Department of Education. (on Course CD#2).

Wong Fillmore, L. & Snow, C. (2000). What teachers need to know about language. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics.

Hakuta, K., Goto Butler, Y. & Witt, D. How Long Does It Take English Language Learners to Attain Proficiency? University of California Linguistic Minority Research Insititute (LMRI) at UC Santa Barbara.

Solomon, J. & Rhodes, N. (1995). Conceptualizing Academic Language. Center For Applied Linguistics Washington, DC and National Center For Research On Cultural Diversity And Second Language Learning. http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/ncrcdsll/rr15.htm