Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): A Methodology of Bilingual Teaching

Chapter 3

Nature versus Nurture

Vignette “The American Experience”

In her essay “The Measure of America” for The New Yorker (March 8, 2004), the journalist and Columbia University Professor Dr. Claudia Roth Pierpont discusses the connection between the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and “How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism”. She referred to the German scholar Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, “staunch in the belief that America was politically an ideal country” (Roth Pierpont 2004: n.p.). Boas was concerned about the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, which he pursued in a lifetime of academic and field studies involving his students. The Chicago Exposition marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of America and was opened as the “White City” on the marshy lands along Lake Michigan. What was deemed to be the achievements of the nation, displays of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address and replicas of the Liberty Bell, could be admired. Where criticism of the young German anthropologist came into play was the exhibit of human characters, called The American Experience:

… [an] extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred ‘living exhibits’—whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: ‘broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,’ a contemporary magazine expounded, ‘bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men’ (ibid.).

“The American experience” was a popular theme during the whole 19th century, epitomized by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (founded 1883 by Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody), which displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. The show was tremendously popular and also very successful in Europe (invitation by the Pope twice) but remained controversial. It was, for instance, not admitted to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and Cody had to set up an independent exhibition near the Fair.

In the days leading up to the Fair’s opening, Franz Boas in his turn organized setting up houses in which a group of Northwest Coast Indians were to live temporarily, near a location on a small lake marked “Anthropology”. Boas had spent the preceding years researching the lives of these Indians—motivated by the Indian exhibits and artefacts of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This location contained Native American artefacts like masks and decorated tools which Boas had collected during his research and which he hoped would attract the admiration of visitors through their wealth of imagination.

The Indians on the Fair were asked to perform dances and other rituals to demonstrate examples of their culture and had been assured that they would be paid the respect they were owed, although that had not been their experience in the US of the 19th century. Their lives were, in reality, dominated by the aftermath of the Indian Removals between 1830 and 1850 and the infamous “Trail of Tears”, on which more than 100,000 Native Americans and their black slaves were forcefully removed from their land by the US government and where thousands of their people died. This catastrophe had been justified in the name of the new field of Anthropology and seen as a result of the “natural racial order” proposing the right of white settlers to seize the natives’ land and the prevailing system of slavery (adapted from: Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

The issues of slavery and of using living exhibits as an excuse of anthropological “research” is also featuring as a predominant topic in Colson Whitehead’s recent novel The Underground Railroad, in which the African-American writer remeasures the atrocities of slavery in the US. In Whitehead’s novel Cora, a runaway slave from a particularly savage cotton plantation in ante-bellum Georgia (in the 1850s), is offered a job in the “Museum of Natural Wonders” (clearly reminiscent of the New York American Museum of Natural History). She serves as a living exhibit in three different theme rooms:

“Scenes from Darkest Africa”

“Life on the Slave Ship”

“Typical Day on the Plantation” (Whitehead 2016: 130/1).

Cora is suspicious of the accuracy of the presentations and wary of the visitors’ behavior in “disrespectful fashion” and “rude suggestions” (ibid.: 132). Neither is she too convinced that her “habitat” really “illuminate[s] the American experience” (ibid.: 138), because her life as a slave tells her otherwise (cf. ibid.: 137-140).

Back in the last century, the anthropologist Boas assigned his twenty-three-year old student Margaret Mead a study on adolescence which she accomplished as an interrogation of Samoan girls about their sex lives:

With an introduction by Boas and a cover showing a bare-breasted girl rushing to a tryst with her lover beneath tropical palms, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published [by Mead] in 1928, was both an aphrodisiac and a call to arms. … dwelling on her tales of teen-age girls choosing strings of lovers with lighthearted ease, Americans conspired in the fantasy of a society in which there was no adolescent angst, no unhappy marriage, no jealousy, no Oedipus complex, and no emotional suffering of any kind. The utopian aspects of Mead’s book were as gratefully seized on as the sex: if nurture could so conclusively trump nature, then we, too, could be anything we wished—sexually free, unneurotic, even happy—just by changing the cultural rules (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

Nature or nurture? Boas’ point of view supported Margaret Mead’s findings in that his data about immigrant children in the US had opened minds to possibilities that were not covered by the contemporary scientific claims of hereditary limitations. Thus, it might boil down to the question of heredity or culture?

In the twenties, people were discovering that they lived in a culture … Although Boas argued for the recognition of plural cultures, he suggested not that all human achievements were equal … but that the range of intelligence and virtue ran the gamut about equally in every group. Thus, each person can be judged only as an individual. The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives. It was nature versus nurture with the scales reset: against our sealed-off genes, there was our accumulation of collective knowledge; in place of inherited learning, there was the social transmission of that knowledge from generation to generation. “Culture” was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to create mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked. And then Margaret Mead came home and wrote a best-seller that turned American culture upside down (ibid.; my emphasis).

3.1 The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis

As a cultural phenomenon, whether language learning is effective and sustainable largely depends on interaction with the respective environment and (school) setting. But of similar importance is the question whether this learning is based on innate capacities (nature) or a result of carefully planned and effectively implemented teaching strategies (nurture). Especially for the purpose of an integrative CLIL methodology it is pertinent to differentiate, at the same time and if necessary, between children and adolescent language acquisition as it will have decisive consequences for any teaching strategy. The Universal Grammar theory and its derivatives had assumed an inherent biological feature as a linguistic mental module, whereas the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH) breaks a lance for external factors in language learning, especially the assumption that L2 learning contrasts with L1 development in two major aspects: SLA is nonconvergent and unreliable1.

(I) SLA is supposed to be nonconvergent, as domain-specific mechanisms available in early childhood—and part of the UG mental module—allegedly are not accessible for language learning in adulthood. Therefore, adults learning a foreign language need to rely on domain-general problem-solving skills, which develop during a maturation process and are part of dynamic cognitive skills. On the one hand, a fundamental difference between child-language acquisition and L2 learning is as much confirmed as, on the other hand, the existence of a UG—rich or minimalist in the sense of the aforementioned recursion. When Robert Bley-Vroman called this proposal the “Fundamental Difference Hypothesis” (1990), he argued that adult L2 learning would replace the domain-specific acquisition by his own native-language experience and a general abstract problem-solving system.

(II) L2 acquisition is deemed to be unreliable, as the development of knowledge and competence in a second—and further—language differs widely from learner to learner, his or her individual learning strategies and routines and very rarely ends with a nativelike performance. Overall, the answers to three questions are still contentious: Does a UG exist at all? If this is the case, is UG accessible to adult learners at least in part or as a “spin-off” from one’s own mother tongue and its lexis and grammar? When does the age of adult learners’ start? Frequently assumed to be the case for an individual to be above 18 years of age, the additional issue arises where adolescent learners, in other words pupils and younger students, can be placed. And if they are in a transition situation, how does this effect mental language modules (Chomsky) or general problem-solving skills?

In the light of conflicting evidence for positions that argue in favor of the availability or at least some role for UG in second language acquisition and the unresolved questions above, common sense and experience even point to the fact that older learners do not take longer to study another language successfully, but in fact acquire new languages often faster than their younger peers. What can be assumed from our “theory of practice” is threefold: some aspects of L2 features are not learnable from input but depend on former language learning experiences, some are not even part of the learner’s L1 and they are unlikely to have been taught by instructors, especially those competences linked to intercultural or transcultural knowledge.

As far as empirical differences between L1 and L2 (child and adult) acquisition and learning are concerned, a number of observations have been discussed (cf. Meisel: 192 ff, 200 f) and confirm the FDH in several ways. Adults learning a second language have, in contrast to children, a first language to relate to, so that their acquisition process—apart from being less uniform—follows different ways of input (see above) and can rely on prior knowledge and linguistic experiences. These differences are not a matter of controversy but establish themselves in multiple ways:

That the overwhelming majority of adult L2 learners does not attain native-like competences is the most crucial point but not the only one … A further particularity of L2 acquisition is that L2 learners exhibit a much larger range of variation, across individuals and within learners over time, than L1 children. This concerns the rate of acquisition as well as the use of target-deviant constructions and also the level of grammatical competence that they attain (ibid.: 194).

That first and second language acquisition differ fundamentally can also be inferred from the following observations: whereas a child’s brain is still developing, adults have a first language that guides their thinking and speaking; despite high levels of proficiency, L2 learners’ pronunciation mostly remains non-native; when an L2 learner’s proficiency reaches a certain plateau, fossilization occurs—and variations produced by non-native speakers are often similar or the same: failing to produce the third-person-singular “s” in English is a case in point. My conclusion is that an adult learner does not show the same but different potentials for (natural) language acquisition as a child, notwithstanding where the borderlines between a child, adolescent and adult are. Obviously, this would influence second language acquisition in the CLIL classroom where at the onset the typical age of students from Year 7 belongs to a transition period (cf.: Klewitz 2019).

In this light, a conclusion in the Guidebook for Bilingual Parents can be confirmed:

First and second language acquisition differ substantially, probably due to age-related changes of acquisition capacities … Although acquisition remains possible at all ages, some acquisition mechanisms become inaccessible in successive acquisition. Learners intuitively resort to others to replace them (Meisel: 200f).

Even if, like in this conclusion, certain principles of a UG are assumed to exist in some acquisition mechanisms, they might depend on other, external properties such as motivation, focus on study, communicative skills, cultural and age-related influences. Thus, it might yet be possible to reconcile nativist with nurture positions. Taking UG as a biological feature, it seems to be an “endowment” for language acquisition following certain phases in a child’s linguistic development—up to the age of four to five years. L2 principles, on the other hand, point at the abovementioned differences for older language learners. The solution might be to look at the transition from domain-specific mechanisms (nature) to domain-general modules (nurture) that allow for more conscious, effective and time-saving language studies, a quality especially important for CLIL and immersion programs. This transition would be in accordance with constructivist learning theories, observations from the concept of Visible Learning and not least from neurocognitive research, which testifies remarkable plasticity in the cognitive system throughout people’s lives.

Robert Vroman’s FDH tries to account for general characteristics of foreign language learning and his theory can consistently be connected with post-puberty learners, such as in most CLIL strands in schools. L2 acquisition in a classroom setting would resemble the process of general “adult” learning where there is no domain-specific module believed to exist and issues are the role of input, grammatical structures and the transfer of lexical categories. This is particularly important in CLIL programs where the transfer from subject-related concepts from L2 to L1 is one of the guiding learning objectives. Content-based teaching and learning demonstrates that processes of the language faculty—as in UG—are not exclusive to language and that “both native and subsequent languages draw on similar resources in acquisition and processing” (Herschensohn: 260). The “endowment” of the mental module or faculty in language acquisition allegedly declines with age in order to free up neural resources for other operations. Adolescents in CLIL settings would begin to rely instead on problem-solving skills to understand and handle content and consciously acquire L2 lexis and grammatical structures.