The CSULB program is among the first in the U.S. to implement specialized pedagogies in language acquisition for Spanish speakers. The project responds to the realization among professionals in the language sciences that the growing number of students with competency in Spanish need a language acquisition curriculum that takes advantage of their preexisting skills. Thanks to generous funding from the French government, the California State University, Long Beach French program began offering French for Spanish Speakers courses in 2007. In 2010, Italian for Spanish Speakers courses were initiated as well. While a small and growing number of universities offer Portuguese for Spanish Speakers to minimize acquisition time by focusing on the more than 85% of shared linguistic material between the two languages, our courses in French and Italian for Spanish Speakers use intercomprehension to stimulate a student’s metacognitive abilities by using both English and Spanish as languages of departure for learning French and Italian. In intercomprehension, students are taught a number of strategies based upon the “natural bridges,” i.e., the morphological, syntactical, and vocabulary resemblances, that exist between languages and dialects that belong to the same family. As students acquire these tools, they learn to rely upon their natural tendency to scaffold language competencies by moving freely and indiscriminately through the input they either already possess (from Spanish and English, for example) or input that they have acquired in the French or Italian language classroom. However, this input is not only limited to French or Italian, but also includes content from other Romance languages, as well as English, thanks to the intercomprehension modules we have created. languagemagazine/?page_id=11125
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 02:27:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015