How Much? How Soon? How Fast?
How long should it take to learn English? There is no simple answer to this question. How long does it take to learn to play chess or the French horn? It depends on the individual. Of course, there will be great variance between students. Talent and motivation for language learning vary greatly, as do opportunities to practice. Still, you will need one or several timelines.
BICS AND CALP
University of Toronto professor Jim Cummins invented and popularized the acronyms BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive academic learning proficiencies). By Cummins’s reckoning, it should take a learner at least two years to achieve BICS—that is, enough English to communicate effectively in social situations—but at least five years to master CALP—sufficient academic skills to compete in English language classes with native speakers.
Cummins stresses that CALP transfers from one language to another. If you are teaching upper elementary or secondary levels, most of your students will have academic skills in their native languages. Some will likely have academic skills that match or exceed those of the native speakers in your school’s gifted and talented program. I have found that students who have attended escuela preparatoria, the Mexican equivalent of high school, are much more knowledgeable and have stronger academic skills than the typical American high school student. To be fair to my compatriots, let it be noted that most American students attend high school 12 and only a minority of Mexican students attend preparatoria, so this is not a truly equitable comparison.
If you are teaching secondary school you will likely have several students who have not attended as much school as their age would indicate. In many states, such students are placed in ESL classes based on their age rather than on their academic record. You will also probably someday have some students who have never attended school anywhere. Because these students have few academic skills in any language, they will require more time, probably several years more, to master English CALP.
It is true that most English learners will score below national norms on standardized tests during their first few years of English study. Still, for English learners who are at or near grade level in their native language, five years to CALP seems longer than it needs to be, unless we define CALP as a command of English equal to that of an educated native speaker. Again, many academic skills will transfer from the native language. Although one needs a decent command of English for academic study, absolute mastery is not necessary. Many students with decent, albeit limited, English do quite well in regular classes even though their written work may contain some errors. A great many valedictorian speeches have been delivered in flawed English.
Most students should be able to attain BICS in one year and CALP in three, assuming that they have the latter skills in their native language. Although the research on BICS and CALP points to a timetable to mastery as wide-ranging as one to seven years, and a fuller discussion of the topic could easily fill an entire book, this is my goal for students. I must admit that some of my students have failed to meet this goal. Given human nature, not all students will give their best effort, and not all bilingual and ESL programs will be as good as they should be. Some students may drag their feet for a year or two before getting serious about their English studies. Materials may not be adequate for the diverse students in an ESL class. Some languages differ more from English than others. Speakers of languages with many English cognates and parallel grammatical structures will find English easier to learn than those whose native languages bear little similarity to English. Those who require more than one year to master BICS and three for CALP should be forgiven, especially those who are learning disabled or who attended little school before immigrating. Having large numbers of students spending more than three years mastering English should, however, raise a red flag, and students who are not on track to meet these goals should be targeted for extra help.
PIE-IN-THE-SKY GOALS
One of the greatest frustrations we ESL teachers face is dealing with planners who set pie-in-the-sky goals and then ignore them. I once taught in a program that professed to prepare Southeast Asian students to succeed in American university or technical school classes after only nine months of language study. To my knowledge, none of our students met that ambitious goal, and some students repeated the course as many as five times. In one middle school, my pleas to establish a timetable that included partial inclusion after the first semester and ESL classes and support for a total of three years fell on deaf ears. At the planning stage, we were supposed to make our students fluent in one year. After all, we must have high expectations. When at the end of the year few students had met this ambitious and unrealistic goal, we had the usual excuses: These kids are poor and disadvantaged. They come from slums and goat farms. The result was that many students repeated beginning ESL. I recall that one of the administration’s champions of high standards chastised me for giving my students 75 to 100 vocabulary and spelling words per week. She suggested that I lower the number to 15, a pace that would enable my middle school students to write English reasonably well by the age of 40.
Know the truth, and the truth will set you free. If the stated standards are not being met, change either the standards or the program. If the standards are unreasonable, change them. If they are reasonable but are not being met, improve the program.
IS ONE YEAR ENOUGH?
At the time of this writing, the voters of at least two states had faced referendums to limit English instruction to a single year. One year is cutting it pretty short. It is ironic that a nation that sometimes tolerates university professors of foreign languages who have limited command of the languages they teach would demand that children master a language in so little time. I suspect that the one-year goal may have been an overreaction to a system that had left many students with limited English skills after five or more years of study.
This is not to say that there are no students who can learn English in a single year. Some, but not all, very young students master new languages very quickly. Among older learners, linguistic prodigies do exist. Once in my career I recommended that a middle school student exit from my class and enter all-English classes for the gifted after only one semester. Although she did not yet possess full native fluency, she could carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation in English and had superb academic skills in her native Spanish. She was able to handle grade-level academic work in English with the aid of a bilingual dictionary, and she was willing to take the time necessary to do so. She was not, of course, a typical student. I have also had a handful of students who were ready to fully enter the mainstream and succeed there with only minimal support after only a year. All of these students still had deficits in their English and would have benefited from after-school tutoring sessions with ESL specialists. For students of average ability, however, mastery of English in three years is a reasonable goal.
Do not be surprised if, at the end of three years of language instruction, even your best students’ English is still a bit flawed. There will likely be some errors in the use of difficult structures and prepositions, and vocabulary will likely be weaker than that of native speakers. The students as a group will likely score lower on English reading and writing tests than their native-speaker peers for a few more years. Do not let this discourage you or your students. Students who test out at the thirtieth percentile in one language and at the seventieth in another need not feel inferior to students who test at the ninetieth percentile in the only language that they know. Students with flawed English can achieve much in the mainstream, especially if they use their equalizers, their dictionaries.
WHEN SHOULD STUDENTS EXIT TO REGULAR CLASSES?
The CALP argument is sometimes used to keep students out of the mainstream longer than necessary. Many students who possess oral English BICS and rudimentary English writing skills can do quite well in the mainstream for at least part of the day. One does not need to speak English perfectly in order to study successfully among native speakers. Just think about your university classmates. Some of the most successful were foreign students who spoke imperfect English. We have heard about the disadvantages of sink-or-swim language immersion. At least as bad, however, is stay-out-of-the-water-until-you-are-sure-you-can-swim segregation. Your students should spend some time in classes with native speakers as soon as they know enough English to make some sense of what is going on there. There will be more on this subject in Chapter 15.
STEEP HILLS AND FRUSTRATING PLATEAUS
Do not be discouraged by what appears to be lack of progress. Often bits of knowledge build up in the language learner’s mind, link themselves together, and then later manifest themselves in chunks. This is true of all language skills. The student who could not pronounce a single English word intelligibly might, after months of seemingly pointless practice, appear to master half a dozen sounds all at once. One who could not produce a grammatical sentence a few days ago might suddenly start using several structures correctly, and one who failed every vocabulary test in the first semester might start correctly using words that were studied and seemingly not learned months before. One who could not spell more than a handful of words even after months of practice might grasp a dozen rules of English spelling at once. Just when you start to feel like a sculptor who has been trying to carve granite with a butter knife, you will see students rise to new levels.
When students reach a new level, they fill with pride. Once they become comfortable with their new skills, however, they will see the next level and become frustrated that they have not arrived there yet. Beginning language learners are delighted the first time an English utterance is understood. Soon they will not be content with utterances but will want to join in conversations. Once conversant, they may feel frustration at the inability to give a formal speech in English. A reader who was once delighted to read warning signs may some day be frustrated at an inability to understand James Joyce or William Faulkner, a frustration that most of us native speakers of English share. As a teacher, you can use this cycle of pride, comfort, frustration, and pride again to keep your students moving forward.
You can help assuage feelings of frustration with video clips. You can videotape your students at different stages of their language development. When they start feeling that their progress is inadequate, show them clips of themselves struggling with a concept that they have since mastered.
MOTIVATION INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF CLASS
Motivation figures heavily into the formula. As teachers, it is our job to make our subject as interesting as possible. Some motivating factors are, however, out of our hands. When students find English personally useful, their level of motivation increases exponentially. If your students make English-speaking friends or take summer jobs working with English speaking supervisors, co-workers, and clients, expect a surge of interest. If a student becomes romantically involved with a native speaker of English, expect interest to skyrocket. Reaching a plateau, any plateau, also makes a great difference. After a reluctant student understands a movie or a popular song, expect a positive attitude adjustment. You may find that, after dragging their feet for a year or two, some students suddenly decide that they are ready to buckle down. You will then, of course, welcome the prodigal students into the fold of serious learners. When you see a new level of motivation, take advantage of it.
Working With Younger Students
Younger students tend to master languages more quickly than do older ones. This is in part because they do not have as far to go. A four-year-old with a vocabulary of a few thousand words would be considered a near-native speaker. A twelve-year-old with the same vocabulary would be considered a beginner.
There are other factors as well. Linguist Noam Chomsky hypothesizes that the minds of small children possess a language acquisition device, or LAD, that enables them to absorb language easily. Not all linguists and psychologists agree that the LAD exists. It is certain, however, that those who are thoroughly immersed in a language as small children can eventually learn to speak it without syntactical errors or an accent. This rarely occurs with those who begin to learn a language during or after adolescence.
Language Learning and Early Literacy
When considering how long young children should stay in an ESL or bilingual program, it is important to consider their double academic burden. Those who begin school not speaking English must learn their new language and basic literacy skills concurrently. If they are taught reading in their native language, there will be less time to learn English. If they learn to read in English, initial reading progress will likely be slower than that of students who learn to read in their native language. Young children will not out read their oral vocabularies. A young student is likely to learn enough English to communicate more quickly than an older one, but that progress may have come at the expense of early literacy skills. A program that stresses early oral English above literacy is not necessarily bad, as long as the literacy issue is adequately addressed at an appropriate time.