How Well Do U.S. High School Students Achieve in Spanish When Compared to Native Spanish Speakers?

Abstract

Foreign language educators have developed measures to assess the proficiency of U.S. high school learners. Most have compared language learners to clearly defined criteria for proficiency in the language (criterion‐referenced assessment) or to the performance of other monolingual English speakers (norm‐referenced assessment). In this study, the performance of monolingual English students enrolled in first‐ (n = 293), second‐ (n = 268), and third‐year (n = 51) high school Spanish courses on the Batería III Woodcock‐Muñoz Pruebas de aprovechamiento was compared to that of native Spanish speakers, which was normed with native Spanish speakers. Findings showed that after two years of high school Spanish, U.S. students’ achievement in Spanish word decoding and spelling was similar to that of native Spanish speakers in the fifth to sixth grades, and their performance in Spanish reading comprehension, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and writing was below that of the average native Spanish speaker in first grade. Third‐year students’ achievement was somewhat stronger, although more similar to than different from that of the second‐year students despite the added instructional time. The results are discussed in light of the U.S. social context in which monolingual English students learn to speak and comprehend a language at the same time as they are learning to read and write the language.

Individual differences in L2 achievement mirror individual differences in L1 skills and L2 aptitude: Crosslinguistic transfer of L1 to L2 skills

“…There were 11 instruments used to measure participants’ L1 skills. Six of these measures—the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test‐Revised/NU Basic Skills Cluster (Woodcock, ), the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, ), the Stanford Achievement Test 10 (Pearson, ), the Woodcock‐Johnson‐III/NU Picture Vocabulary subtest (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, ), the Test of Language Competence‐Expanded Edition Figurative Language subtest (Wiig & Secord, ), and the On‐Demand Writing assessment—were used and described in previous studies (see Sparks et al, ). These assessments measured L1 word decoding, reading comprehension, vocabulary, language analysis, and written language.…”

“…Two instruments were used to assess L2 skills. Both instruments—the MLAT (Carroll & Sapon, ) to measure L2 aptitude and an informal measure of L2 (Spanish) phoneme awareness—were described in previous studies (see Sparks et al, ; Sparks & Luebbers, ).…”

“…Six subtests from this standardized test were used to measure Spanish achievement. The instruments were described in detail in previous studies (see Sparks et al, ; Sparks & Luebbers, ) but are summarized briefly in the following six sections.…”

“…While referenced in the L2 literature, factors such as learning and cognitive styles, learning strategies, and personality have suffered from conceptual problems and studies have reported conflicting results (Dörnyei & Skehan, ; Skehan, , ). ID variables such as anxiety and learner beliefs have been shown to be confounded by students’ levels of L1 skills and language (L2) aptitude (Sparks & Patton, ; Sparks, Luebbers, Castañeda, & Patton, ; Sparks, Luebbers, & Castañeda, ).…”

“…In these studies, U.S. high school students’ Spanish vocabulary and listening comprehension skills were found to be similar to the average native Spanish speaker at a 2½‐ to 3‐year‐old level, even after 3 years of Spanish courses (Sparks & Luebbers, ; Sparks et al, b). Other studies have shown that despite IDs in L1 achievement, U.S. high school students learned to decode an alphabetic L2 (Spanish) well but still met criteria for a L2 reading “disability” because they exhibited extraordinarily poor reading comprehension and listening comprehension skills, largely because of extremely limited L2 vocabulary acquisition (Sparks, ; Sparks & Luebbers, ; Sparks et al, ). The constraint on L2 learning, in particular vocabulary learning, for U.S. students in high school is the social context in which the learning takes place—that is, most live in a home and a community where the target language is not spoken.…”