Linguistic structure and educational achievement in second language acquisition

Scientific Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Pedagogy - Miscellaneous Topics, University of Hamburg, language: English, abstract: The widely decontextualised educational language, its abstraction from everyday relations and its exemption from personal-dialogical communication have lead the Canadian researcher Jim Cummins to distinguish between 'basic interpersonal communication skills' (BICS) and 'cognitive-academic language proficiency' (CALP). Against this conceptual backdrop, educational discourse is seen to focus on CALP, a language with higher cognitive requirements, lower contextual transparency and a higher demand for abstraction. It presupposes on behalf of the students a differentiated vocabulary, the ability and coherence to discern and articulate, as well as the competence in dealing with complex linguistic structures. According to Gogolin, Kaiser, Roth et al. 2004, in evaluating the relationship between linguistic competence and educational achievement it is less relevant to focus on the students' general linguistic resources than on CALP-related, hence educational specific, capabilities and strategies. In their research on Turkish-German and Russian-German students and their linguistic, as well as mathematical competence, a correlation was found between the successful verbalisation of a mathematical problem and the reaching of its correct solution. A six-year project following a German-Portuguese bilingual class in Hamburg learning in a dual language program provided data related to several aspects of these students' linguistic acquisition. This paper, however, aims to examine the type of relations which can be derived from the students' semantic, syntactic and discoursive structure and their achievement at school. Therefore, the students were asked to compose a narrative text having a series of images as prompt. The data were treated both quantitatively and qualitatively with special relevance given to the students' linguistic resources in a CALP-related perspective.