By age three to four, monolingual Spanish-speaking children master gender marking and agreement in noun phrases. It is unclear whether bilingual children acquire gender marking rules by the same age as do monolingual children, and whether they in fact ever acquire these rules with 100% accuracy. This study tested sixty 6 to 11-year-old bilingual children attending a Spanish-English two-way immersion school in Chicago divided into two main age groups: younger (ages 6 -8) and older (ages 9 -11). Thirty-eight children came from Spanish-speaking homes (heritage speakers) and 22 came from English-speaking homes (L2 learners of Spanish). A group of 29 monolingual children from Mexico matched for age formed the comparison group. The children were first asked to narrate the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and then they were asked to complete an elicited picture description task with colored animals. Results of the two tasks showed that the bilingual children produced more gender errors than the monolingual children. In general, heritage speakers were more accurate than L2 learners, although there were differences by age of onset of bilingualism in both groups. Crucially, there was no evidence of language loss with increased age. Our results suggest that a dual immersion school curriculum is conducive to both language acquisition and maintenance.

In dual immersion classrooms, students from different language backgrounds are immersed in the minority language for large portions of the school day with the expectation that they will become equally proficient in their first language (L1) and in their second language (L2). Research on dual immersion indicates that students reach above-average levels of academic achievement and linguistic proficiency, but, to date, very few quantifications have been made of how much of the minority language is used in these environments. Given that actually speaking a language is crucial for L2 acquisition as well as for heritage language maintenance, this study explored how much Spanish was used and for what purposes by 4 students (2 Spanish L1 and 2 two Spanish L2) in a Spanish/English dual immersion classroom.Over 2,000 turns of natural classroom speech were recorded during a 5-month period. Overall, the students used Spanish 56% of the time, with 4 major trends: (a) The girls used more Spanish than the boys, regardless of L1; (b) the students averaged 82% Spanish when talking with the teacher, but only 32% when talking to peers; (c) Spanish was used primarily for on-task topics; (d) the students' English when speaking with peers covered a wider range of functions than did their Spanish. These findings lend support to proposals

The current study compared the effects of two second language (L2) instruction typesprocessing instruction (VanPatten, 2004) and traditional output-based instruction-on the development of the Spanish past subjunctive among U.S. Spanish heritage language speakers and traditional L2 learners. After exposure to instruction, both the heritage learners and the L2 learners showed significant improvement on interpretation and production tasks. Only the L2 learners showed significant improvement for grammaticality judgments. Overall, the L2 learners outperformed the heritage learners. The results suggest that heritage speakers' language development may differ from that of L2 learners, although they also suggest that heritage speakers can benefit from focused grammar instruction.In the United States, heritage speakers are individuals who grew up in homes in which a language other than English was spoken and who have receptive and often some productive competence in the non-English (heritage) language (Valdes, 1997). Between 1990 and 2000, the U.S. Latino population grew 40% while the rest of the population increased 10%, a change that has profoundly impacted the American education system at all levels of instruction. Spanish courses designed for heritage speakers have existed since the 1970s and, Versions of this article were presented at the

No abstract

No abstract