Page 40 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

40 Chapter 2 Learning thousands of words as a first language learner seems to be effortless, while acquiring a large vocabulary as a second language learner seems to be more difficult. There are multiple factors that make second language learning harder. First, second language learners are likely to be exposed to a reduced sample of the language they are learning. Furthermore, the context in which they are learning is more complex than that of first language learners. While first language learners learn their first thousand words in the immediate context surrounding them when they were a baby, second language learners are exposed to new words in their second language that may be more difficult since they might not refer to physical objects to point at. The first thousand words of a second language learner are likely to also include words that refer to meanings outside of the immediate context, concerning for example abstract mathematical concepts (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). Another aspect which might cause differences between learners is exposure. Exposure to the new language can be investigated in two ways: the quantity of exposure and the quality of exposure. Additionally, both these aspects can be measured in multiple ways. Montrul (2008) poses the problem of how exposure to input is operationalized. Is it just measuring the exposure quantitively by number of hours, days, months and years, or do you measure the quality of exposure by asking what is actually said during the hours of exposure? The amount of exposure can be used in investigations concerning different kinds of target language properties (e.g., Gathercole & Thomas, 2009; Hoff, Core, Place, Rumiche, Señor, & Parra, 2012; Paradis, 2011; Jia & Fuse, 2007). The acquisition of some aspects of language requires less exposure than others. Furthermore, for some language aspects, once that aspect is acquired a ceiling effect is reached, while for other aspects more exposure continues to improve scores on that aspect. Multilingual children have by definition less exposure to one particular language than monolingual children since they must split daytime for language exposure into time for exposure to two or more languages. However, between multilingual children there is also great variance because some only receive input to the L2 in school while others also have L2 input in the home via a parent, siblings, other relatives, television, or other social contacts outside the house. Linguistic researcher should therefore take exposure into account as an influencing variable in language development, but also need to explain how exposure was defined in their study. The field of multilingualism is complex since “multicompetence is not the sum of monolingual competences” (Cook, 1992; Grosjean, 1992; Cenoz & Genesee, 1998; Herdina & Jessner, 2000). Individual differences should therefore be carefully be considered in second language research.