Language Learners and Language Article Review

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Psycholinguistics: A Review

Gamez, P., Lesaux, N., Rizzo, A. (2016). Narrative production skills of language

minority learners and their English-only classmates in early adolescence. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37: 933-961. DOI: http://dx.doi.org.proxy.tamuc.edu/10.1017/S0142716415000314

The study by Gamez, Lesaux and Rizzo (2016) compares early-adolescent Spanish language speakers to same-age English-only language speakers in terms of narrative production skills. The researchers provided the subjects with picture books and then asked them to produce a narrative based on the pictures. What the researchers found was that the Spanish language speakers and the English language speakers utilized the same story structure in the creation of their narratives. Both groups produced narratives that had a "goal -- action -- outcome framework" (p. 952). However, the Spanish language speakers had less grammatical diversity than the English-only speakers; they demonstrated a tendency to revise and to commit errors when using prepositions; also, their narratives were longer than those produced by the English-only speakers. Thus, the researchers concluded that both groups share a sense of how a narrative should be constructed, but that the language minority learner may require more training and education in the area of microstructuring.

The article is interesting primarily because it builds on the work of previous researchers, particularly those related to language minority students and how they craft narratives -- or, more specifically, how culture plays a part in the way they stylize their narrative creations (Gamez et al., 2016, p. 953). The way in which the Spanish-speaking learners utilized internal responses within their narrative structures could indicate that there is a cultural influence at play, though the study assessed here did not find any strong statistical correlation; nonetheless, the researchers recommend it as an area that could use further research. So this was an interesting finding and topic of discussion in the study, as it showed that there is at least one area of research that can stand to be explored more fully so as to open up the world of psycholinguistics and deepen our understanding of specific concepts related to culture and narrative construction.

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What I learned from the study is that "sources of strength for LM learners" -- language minority learners -- can be found by comparing their output with that of English-only speaking learners (Gamez et al., 2016, p. 953). This is actually a very useful finding because it illustrates a new way in which helping language learners can be approached and it also suggests that diversity of influences (culturally speaking) can have a positive impact on the overall nature of a classroom that is devoted to developing language and narrative skills. Exposure to these differences can be helpful in seeing how various styles and techniques are reinforced through cultural imperatives, which could in turn prepare young language learners to be more open to diversity and cultural complexities -- and particularly how language impacts and is impacted by them -- as they age and mature.

Another finding that I learned from was that the language minority learners had difficulty using prepositions correctly. This is an interesting indication because it draws attention to the nuanced manner in which English-only speakers embrace prepositional usage, developing a sense of how prepositions are utilized over time and accepting that usage based more on exposure to conversational English than necessarily on grammatical pretext. For language minority users, the difficulty can be perceived in the sometimes apparent clash between how a preposition may be intended to be used based on its meaning and/or definition and how it is actually used in English….....

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