ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Bilingual Children

Vignette “A Family Experiment”

1.1 Dismantling Myths and Legends of Bilingualism

1.2 The Guide for Bilingual Parents

1.3 The Graduate Medical School of Hanover

1.4 The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

1.5 The Dual System Hypothesis

1.6 The Unitary Language System Hypothesis

Chapter 2 Nativist and Cognitive Positions

Vignette “Language is the dress of thought”

2.1 The Research on Second Language Acquisition

2.2 Behaviorism and a Black Box

2.3 The Universal Grammar and Noam Chomsky

2.4 The Minimalist Position of Recursion

2.5 The Input and Output Hypotheses

2.6 Language Learning as a Social Process—The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Chapter 3 Nature versus Nurture

Vignette “The American Experience”

3.1 The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis

3.2 Linking Nature and Nurture

3.3 Anthropology Sheds a New Light

3.4 The Neuro-biological View

3.5 The Task-based Approach

Chapter 4 Learning (Foreign) Languages in Cultural Contexts—Historic and Current Developments

Vignette “The Dunera Boys”

4.1 Communicative Language Teaching and the Grammar Question

4.2 The Common European Framework for Languages

4.3 Rethinking Foreign Language Teaching

4.4 The Two Tales of CLIL

4.5 CLIL Example—Teaching “Bauhaus” Professor Ingrid Zeller; Northwestern University

Chapter 5 Dimensions and Contexts of Bilingual Teaching

Vignette “Intercultural Encounters in Student Exchanges”

5.1 Scotland

5.2 Canada and the US

5.3 Australia (& Deutsche Schule Melbourne)

5.4 Germany and Europe

5.5 Learning Principles

5.6 Principles of Quality Teaching (Luther College)

5.7 Teaching Design as an Instructional Model (McKinnon Secondary College)

5.8 Linguistic Risk Taking (Ottawa)

Chapter 6 Building Blocks of CLIL

Vignette “Windows in the Foreign Language Classroom”

6.1 Features of Multi-perspective Learning

6.2 Guiding Questions for CLIL Lesson Planning

6.3 The 4 Cs Framework

6.4 Discourse Competences—Bridging BICS and CALP

6.5 The Language Triptych

6.6 The Bilingual Triangle and the Third Space

6.7 Task Design Wheel and Task-verbs

6.8 Primacy of Content

6.9 Scaffolding as a Dual Teaching Strategy

Chapter 7 Literary CLIL

Vignette “Intertextuality”

7.1 Literature as Part of the Bilingual Curriculum

7.2 Literature in the CEF

7.3 Selection Criteria

7.4 Narratives of Literary CLIL

7.5 Literary CLIL as a Theory of Practice

7.6 Study Design for Literary Analysis and Criticism

7.7 Literary Studies in Contexts, Genres and Target Countries

7.8 Intertextuality

Chapter 8 CLIL Tools and Skills

Vignette “Worksheet Compass”

8.1 Scaffolding as a Tool in CLIL

8.2 Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT)

8.3 English Unlimited (blended content-language learning)

8.4 The Visual Turn

8.5 Learnscapes

Chapter 9 CLIL Modules

Vignette “Teaching Units”

9.1 Measuring Your Media (A2)

9.2 Refugees (A2)

9.3 Analysing Political Cartoons (B1)

9.4 Jacobites and Enlightenment (B1)

9.5 Caledonia—Creating a Podcast (B2)

9.6 War and Peace—Calvin and Hobbes (B2)

9.7 Herringbone Technique (B2+)

9.8 Absolutism (B2+)

9.9 Reciprocal Teaching (C1)

9.10 International Relations—Libya (C1)

Chapter 10 CLIL Challenges and Desiderata

Vignette “Venn Diagram”

10.1 CLIL as a Catalyst for Change

10.2 The Innovative Potential

10.3 Competence and Content—a CLIL Example

10.4 Future Directions

Glossary of Teaching Strategies and Learning Skills

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

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why bilingual education has become increasingly popular with young families and even influences their choice for later and better schooling? And why the expectations of effective and successful language learning are connected with interest in language programs that allow for more focus on authentic topics and intriguing themes rather than on grammar and vocabulary training? The story of acquiring foreign languages at the same time as studying relevant and real-life events and issues sounds, at least at first sight, like trying to square the circle.

But the story of bilingualism is neither new nor spectacular. It has been around since times immemorable and even the Romans had to learn Greek to usurp their neighbor’s culture and rule the Aegean region. Yet acquiring modern languages nowadays is not a question of dominating another culture or ruling other people, but rather learning about their perspectives and ideas in an inter/transcultural way and meeting in a Third Space—to be discovered later in this narrative. So how can we make sure that students will be able to access the necessary information in a language other than their own? How do we support learners to achieve the aims and objectives set to them and help them move forward in their Zone of Proximal Development, which will be outlined further below? And how will they be empowered to develop their own linguistic and critical thinking skills without reneging on the challenges involved? The solution to this puzzle comes from balancing the two bilingual goals in a Content and Language Integrated Learning process. The acronym CLIL gives direction and priority in the interplay between subject matter and discourse function with “language as the dress of thought”—a well-known saying since Dr. Johnson’s 18th century.

Thus, the methodology of CLIL in question here would best be described as a blueprint of integration itself, namely that of content and languages in a combined teaching strategy. The worldwide growth of bilingual programs inside and outside of school contexts has raised different expectations of students and instructors as far as successful and effective language learning is concerned. These reach from more exposure to the target language (and better marks as a result) to deeper content-based studies (generating higher levels of critical thinking). And this is also why an Integrated Methodology needs to cover content-based issues as well as teaching strategies and learning theories, since for the first time such programs endeavor to deal with two teaching objects at the same time, albeit in a well-defined sequence of which may be called “language follows content”. The way to deal with didactic, content-related questions without neglecting methodological procedures involves different perspectives and comprehensive approaches in selecting appropriate topics and related discourse concepts. In other words, the task at hand requires a dual way of organizing the linguistic dimension of teaching subject matters in another than the native language—in our case for social sciences, history and geography. The assumption is that this approach will work for other content subjects (Sachfächer) as well, because the didactic-methodological issues involved are the two sides of the same coin like in content and language.

At the same time, a theory of practice is needed to enable practitioners to decide at which side of the coin they need to look first and after certain stages in the teaching/learning process, the aforementioned Zone of Proximal Development (according to Vygotsky 1962). In the definition of Do Coyle, a long-standing proponent of CLIL from the University of Aberdeen, a theory of practice:

emerges when the teacher begins to articulate his or her implicit knowledge and understanding about teaching and learning. The teacher’s implicit knowledge becomes explicit through this process—that is, the teacher is aware of his or her knowledge (theory of practice) and can begin to actively develop this. The starting point for a theory of practice is the teacher’s own professional beliefs (Coyle 2010: 45).

The multifaceted pathway in this Integrated CLIL Methodology (ICM) will take you from theoretical assumptions and collated knowledge about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) to practiced and proven concepts in Teaching Foreign Languages (TFL) as one of the foundations of bilingual programs. The other side of the same coin will have to be minted by the content subject (Sachfach) core curricula or educational state standards (Common Core), depending on the target country.1 As much as our students profit from the language and content awareness of what they are required to study, best practice in the teaching community can rely on the conscious implementation of the findings in language research and subject matter. But only the combination with effective teaching strategies, as epitomized in functions of scaffolding and direct instruction of Visible Learning will eventuate effective and sustainable learning processes.

Bilingual programs, immersion situations and CLIL itself, however, are foremost concerned with people and the younger, learning generation; therefore, a good starting point for bilingual didactics and methodology is provided by dismantling the myths and legends of bilingualism, especially as they occur in dealing with young children and growing-up adolescents. Various hypotheses have been tried and rejected, enlivened and surpassed, from the black boxes in behaviorism, the famous Universal Grammar right up to constructivist learning theories and the findings of neuro-biological research. In this, surprisingly, the almost old-school sounding controversy between nature versus nurture “won’t go away” (at least according to Steven Pinker), but from all these theories and more or less proven assumptions interesting conclusions can be drawn for applying relevant ideas to the implementation of CLIL programs or modules. Worth noticing are also quite profound discrepancies due to cultural differences in the target countries, but CLIL has emerged as a global pedagogical concept and there is no reason one should not appreciate diverging practices and learn from their advantages and fallacies.

The building blocks of bilingual approaches, shared by an ever-growing bilingual community, are at the center of a common core of CLIL teaching strategies: be it the 4 Cs Framework, bridging BICS to CALP, the Language Triptych, the Bilingual Triangle and the Third Space of inter/transcultural competence or the Task Design Wheel in a taxonomy of cognition. All these features of multi-perspective learning support bilingual lesson planning and scaffold the development of discourse strategies in CLIL programs. In this they also create windows in the traditional foreign language classroom of TFL without necessarily forestalling the inclusion of the students’ native language (L1) additionally to the target language (L2) as the vehicular language of teaching and communication. The precise relationship between L1 and L2 remains open to debate in the light of contradictory research findings and the interpretation of “bi” in bilingual programs.

Apart from honing inter/transcultural skills, a further common ground between TFL and CLIL can be found in literature studies with Literary CLIL as a particular focus of this methodology. Whether conceived as a content subject in its own right (Literaturkurs) or transferred from traditional language teaching as an enrichment of CLIL-content, selection criteria of high “L” or (popular) low “l” are needed and study designs for literary analysis and criticism have to be developed. Different genres are presented to open up this new domain for bilingual teaching and allow for the inclusion of music, poetry as well as the established fields of short stories and novels. Literature remains a concern for CLIL, because—taken content subject curricula word-for-word—its implementation is still exceptional. In this context, the primacy of content might shed a new light on the differences between TFL and CLIL indicating a potential fusion of both approaches without replacing one by the other—a discussion taken up in the desiderata and challenges posed by CLIL.

On the practical side—bearing in mind the theory of practice—the tools and skills of CLIL deserve special emphasis in that they make the concept work, and whether using a worksheet compass or learnscape as advance organizer, focusing on task-based teaching or embracing the Visual Turn they can be studied in their application in ten sample CLIL modules. These and, for that matter, all chapters are presented with a section of “review—reflect—research” that invite further trying out and finding out the essentials of a teaching concept that is not only increasingly popular but also meets the needs of modern language instruction allowing for new and changing perspectives in a contingency of linguistic and content-based version of seeing learning through the eyes of our students—the Visible Learning paradigm. It is hoped the vignettes introducing each of the ten chapters will whet the reader’s appetite and be able to highlight the gist of information and discussion points presented.

Photo © Andrew Krause and McKinnon Secondary College, Department of Education and Training, Victoria, Australia.

“Die Deutsche Schule Melbourne liegt auf dem Land der Wurundjeri ..., und ich möchte sie anerkennen als die traditionellen Besitzer dieses Landes. Ich möchte meinen Respekt aussprechen für ihre Stammesältesten, in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, und die Ältesten von anderen Stämmen, die heute hier sein könnten” (Bernice Ressel, Principal).

Helmsman of Chicago. © Photo Bernd Klewitz

1 In some terminology (e.g. the United States) there is a distinction between the Common Core, indicating what students need to know and are able to do, and the curriculum outlining how students will learn it. Pedagogy in Europe formulates along similar lines with didactics delineating the what, methodology the how of learning (for more details see chapter 6, footnote 62).

Chapter 1

Bilingual Children
Vignette “A Family Experiment”

In the South of Germany, a young family has gone bilingual. Four-year-old Ava has already developed a ready understanding in English and, from time to time, expresses herself in words and short phrases in what is going to be her second language (L2). Her brother Paul has just celebrated his first birthday and listens to his father’s English attentively. Peter, who attended a High School in California and passed his IB there, speaks to his children only in English, whereas his wife Sophia uses German in family conversations. Frequently, the grandfather, an English teacher himself, on his visits addresses the children in English as well, in order to “support” the English atmosphere a little. But recently he was taken aback when Ava, with a certain panache, asked him: “Warum sprichst Du Englisch mit mir, Opa?” Obviously, his grandchild had noticed that he every so often switched between languages and did not trust him in his role as a genuine English speaker.

The example raises questions like these: Does bilingualism really work at an early age? How does it develop in the long run? Can it eventually result in a balanced command of two languages? If we take these questions further and to the level of language acquisition and learning in a school context, we would have to scrutinize bilingual programs like immersion and its European counterpart CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). With regards to terminology, “bilingual” might appear as a misnomer or, at least, ambiguous, because it can either refer to the (pedagogical) aim to enhance a native-like command of two languages or the strategy of using two languages in the process of instruction. In any case, it makes sense to disentangle or even dismantle some myths and legends of bilingualism.

1.1 Dismantling Myths and Legends of Bilingualism

Following a wider definition of the term bilingualism as “the use of more than one language in daily life” (Meisel 2019: 2), it is far more common than practicing one language only, so we can safely say that “the majority of the world’s population is bilingual” (ibid.: 3). But apart from a certain ambiguity the term bilingualism1 refers to a variety of contexts and diverse situations where the exposure to more than one language is inevitable—including labor migration as well as minority languages in multi-ethnic societies, but also deliberate parent-decisions to foster language learning. As a result, simultaneous or successive bilingualism will eventuate, depending on existing motivation and societal conditions or pressures. In predominantly monolingual environments parents might consider bilingualism as an advantage for their children and encourage the use of more than one language in their families.

The latter is the case in the aforementioned family from Southern Germany where according to the parents “to go bilingual” was a process-driven decision due to their previous stays abroad in Anglophone countries for a longer period of time. Peter, in particular, refers to his experience that addressing his children in English allows him to communicate with them in a more reflective manner. In other words, in situations where he would normally have reacted more emotionally or even sternly he would take a moment to consider what to say as a kind of inner translation, sometimes even looking for the right expression. Reflecting first what he was going to say would create some space for consideration, if only just for a couple of seconds. As he was, in part, brought up in English speaking countries and attended schools there, he also developed a very emotional relationship with the English language. He thought this might help him to better express his feelings and convey emotions in a more authentic manner to his children.

What started as an experiment four years ago developed into a way to create a special relationship within his family, hoping that his love of another language would take root in his children and allowing for intimate communication without excluding other family members. Also, and not the least part of his motivation, was the chance to pass on a perspective of daily life and routines that would open another door to the world. Ava and Paul, hopefully developing simultaneous bilingualism, could be given better opportunities to travel the world and work in different countries later on. And last but not least, Peter enjoys this language experience thus creating an intrinsic motivation to continue speaking English to his children.

In reflecting this ongoing process from his children’s point of view, the feedback he gets from his older daughter Ava is overall positive in that she can safely differentiate between the two languages, accept that there is one person, one language (later on to be referred as the OPOL principle, see 1.6) and that her comprehension of two languages is getting on very well. She enjoys, for instance, listening to English children’s books read to her and nursery rhymes and already knows a number of English songs by heart. Opening windows into another culture are thought by both parents to be a tremendous advantage.

1.2 The Guide for Bilingual Parents

The conviction that bilingualism is right for his family and even intensifies their relations in a special way is shared by longstanding scientific research on bilingualism in early childhood presented in a most recent Guide for Bilingual Parents by Professor Jürgen M. Meisel. The former Chair of the Research Center on Bilingualism at the University of Hamburg has been counselling parents for more than 35 years in both Germany and Canada (University of Calgary), and expertly confronts the advantages and—in his own words—“mostly mythical drawbacks of raising children with a command of two or more languages” (Meisel 2019: cover). A closer look at risks and benefits will become useful for an integrative bilingual methodology which aims at successive bilingualism in the long run.

Discussing so-called risks of early childhood bilingualism, Meisel’s parental guide draws upon the following “rumors” first, namely

 whether two languages can be kept apart,

 how to avoid a “macaronic language mix” (Meisel: 8; 58),

 that balanced bilingualism is not possible and puts excessive strain on mental capacity,

 that fusion of two languages affects cognitive development and would lead to semi-linguals with children torn between two languages and cultures, thus unable to develop their own personalities (cf. ibid.: 7 ff).

There seems to be sufficient evidence, however, that children can distinguish between different languages at an early stage already and Ava’s reaction to her grandfather is a case in point (see case vignette above). Various, even opposing theories of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) support the view that the mental grammars of bilinguals develop independently, whether one follows a generative SLA with Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG), the so-called Human Language Making Capacity (LMC; supported by Meisel: 35), its radical version of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH, Bley-Vroman 2010) or more recent approaches in cognitive theory, constructivism and the findings of neuro-science. The alleged “macaronic language mix” turns out as code-switching and the sign of a conscious choice as “the ability to select languages according to interlocutor, situational context, topic of conversation etc.” (Meisel: 72). All these paradigms do not only refer to childhood simultaneous bilingualism but also pertain high relevance for successive bilingualism in CLIL programs and are therefore discussed in the following juxtaposition between a nativist and a cognitive position (see chapter 2). Code-switching itself becomes part of CLIL-tools and as “translanguaging” works together with other linguistic skills such as mediation, visual representations and digital implements in the context of interactive methods, instructional strategies and scenario techniques (see 8.2-8.5).

On the bilingual credit side are the following aspects:

 accelerated language acquisition is one of the undisputed benefits of bilingual development,

 native-speaker competence seems possible, provided a sufficient input is available,

 reading skills and favorable intelligence tests are counted as further added value, based on neurological advantages,

 bilingual children become part of another social world,

 they are able to express the same ideas in two languages,

 they are immersed in cultures negotiating different meanings and values.

Meisel’s guidebook for “bilingual parents” is listing these and further benefits to encourage these processes and advising adults to persevere in their attempts to create rich, multi-lingual situations (cf. Meisel: 7 ff, 221 ff).

1.3 The Graduate Medical School of Hanover

These perspectives are confirmed in an extended “Bilingual Speech Production Review”, conducted at the Graduate School of Hanover Medical School (MHH–Medizinische Hochschule Hannover; MHH-Review: 2013). Conducted as a systematic review of studies from the last 50 years the review investigated speech acquisition in bilingual infants (under the age of four) and children (up to 12 years of age), amounting to 66 studies, analyzed thematically and summarized in terms of methods, key findings and underlying theories. Main findings suggested that bilingual children, only in a few cases, developed speech at a slower rate than the monolingual comparison group but showed “qualitative differences and increased variation in speech production”. The review also stated that “more recently researchers have moved away from investigating whether there are one or two phonological systems and accept that there are two systems that interact” (ibid.: n.p.). These interactions (details in chapter 2) between the stronger (L1) and weaker (L2) language had positive and negative effects working both ways. The fact that positive transfer becomes “more evident with increased age and length of exposure to a second language” (ibid.) will be an important parameter when studying CLIL programs which often begin with Year 7 students and aim at successive bilingualism.

Apparently, it is hardly possible to quantify sufficient linguistic input in both simultaneous and successive bilingualism:

We do not know what the ‘normal’ amount of exposure to a language is. The number of child-directed utterances or, more specifically, of verbal interactions varies enormously across families, monolinguals as well as bilinguals. Consequently, we have an only approximate idea of what the minimum amount of input is for a child to be able to develop a native competence. It should definitely not drop below 20 per cent of the total amount of verbal interactions a child receives. More reduced amounts of exposure to a language may suffice to trigger linguistic development, but this will happen at a significant slower rate and it is unlikely to result in native competence (Meisel: 177 f).

Among the benefits and advantages of child bilingualism, as could be seen, was the opening up to another culture and the ability to, at least in part, express the same ideas in two languages. In order to facilitate this, although not measurable in definite numbers, a minimum threshold level of language exposure does exist and children would profit enormously from verbally rich environments. The result of such an acquisition process—especially from early on—“will almost certainly be vastly superior to what is normally achieved in foreign language classrooms” (ibid.: 185).

1.4 The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

However, studies in language acquisition also need to look at the gap between knowing and doing, in other words the difference between competence and performance. Whereas the most important components of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge are their lexicon and grammar, the ability to activate their linguistic competence in communicative interaction is equally decisive. As an illustration the well-known “tip-of-the tongue” phenomenon (TOT) is often quoted, a situation where speakers fail to recall a word or term, although they feel retrieval is imminent, “on the tip of their tongue”. It occurs at all ages and happens frequently enough to interfere with learning or in everyday situations:

Speakers experiencing it are momentarily not able to retrieve a word that they have used many times before and that they can use in spontaneous speech shortly afterwards. Thus, they obviously do know it. In fact, when offered a list of words, they reject the wrong ones. Even more interestingly, they may be able to identify certain properties of the word, like its initial sound, its number of syllables, or its meaning; or they can cite words that are similar in sound and meaning. This shows that the irretrievable element is not missing; yet it is only partially, not fully, accessible. It furthermore suggests that items in mental lexica can be retrieved in a number of different ways, not merely by their initial sounds (ibid.: 16).

There is no one explanation for this phenomenon. Either a speaker’s memory strength may not be strong enough to recall an item (direct-access view) or incorrect, but similar responses to a query come to mind; in this explanation these answers are termed blockers because they block the possibility to recall the correct item, once they are overcome retrieval will be possible again (blocking hypothesis; cf.: ibid.). If there are, then, different ways of activation, a successful retrieval depends on appropriate cues and lexical access, at the same time, occurs in stages. “Language learners must therefore develop both a grammatical competence and the proficiency to put it to use in a wide array of communicative contexts” (ibid.: 16). Thus, the question arises: What about bilinguals? Do they experience similar phenomena or is there a double load in their mental lexicon because of their increased linguistic load?

Experiments conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA 2020: n.p.) indicate that bilinguals, compared to their monolingual peers, are involved in a “doubled processing load” which can lead to difficulties in specific situations but otherwise be advantageous. Given the descriptions of visual objects and people’s names, Spanish-English bilinguals showed relatively better results in retrieving proper names, being more difficult to reproduce, than monolinguals:

… for a harder task, bilinguals showed relatively better performance. Bilingual disadvantages may be limited to representing multiple forms for individual meanings; proper names improved naming because they have essentially the same form across languages (ibid.).

1.5 The Dual System Hypothesis

Whether this can also be seen as a confirmation of the Dual System Hypothesis (DSH; cf. Meisel: 48), also called Dual Language System Hypothesis (cf. Genesee 1996) is open to debate, but at least it hints at further differences in linguistic knowledge and performance between monolinguals and bilinguals—that are useful to know when it comes to study CLIL performance in more detail. The DSH proposes the

idea of early differentiation of linguistic systems, characteristic of the developmental pattern through which simultaneous bilinguals typically proceed … a hypothesis widely accepted today on the basis of findings obtained by a steadily increasing number of case studies carried out over the past 30 years (Meisel: 48, 72).

According to the proponents of the DSH, bilingual children acquire two different language systems from the beginning of language acquisition, which as a process results in two distinct mental grammars (cf. Meisel: 52); their rules do not cross over from one language to the other (cf. Bradley: 2020 n.p.) without denying a linguistic interaction between the two systems. Interaction would occur “primarily in settings where one language is dominant and the other one weak, either in the social context or in the mind of speakers” (Meisel: 53). Since bilingual programs like CLIL inevitably have to deal with a stronger (L1) and a weaker language (L2), this would have a number of consequences for teaching strategies and learning processes, which are discussed when looking at CLIL tools and skills (cf. chapter 8). But despite this assumption based on observation and common sense the terms “strong” and “weak” need some qualification:

Empirical justifications for qualifying a language as ‘weak’ or as ‘non-dominant’ commonly refer to one or more of the following observations: a) The language in question is rarely or not at all used actively; b) the other language is strongly preferred; c) the development of the allegedly weak language is less advanced than that of the other language (ibid.: 130).

The strong point pertinent to the DSH is, then, that bilingual children do not move through stages to be eventually able to distinguish between two languages. On the contrary, they are able to have two language systems and are aware which system is related to which language (cf. Bradley: 2020 n.p.). There are recent studies that ascertain bilinguals’ capacity to use the correct system for each language without “mixing” them, and an individual’s capability to differentiate which language is spoken—Ava’s example comes to mind—and a test showing that bilingual children responded with the same language spoken to them (cf. ibid. and Genesee: 1996).

This shows us that bilingual children under the age of two could differentiate the language being heard and respond with the same language, which supports the idea that children have two different language systems (Bradley: 2020 n.p.).

How code-switching and the concept of interlanguage can be accounted for is part of the challenges still connected with CLIL and dealt with in a final look at desiderata of this approach (chapter 10).

Overall and also according to the MHH-Review, studies provided a mixed and complex picture in terms of the relationship between mother tongue (L1) and the foreign language (L2) acquired. Established was some transfer from L1 to L2 and vice versa and hence the existence of two language systems, not independent but inter-connected. The question of a unitary phonological system was regularly abandoned in favor of the evidence of two separate systems by a majority of the studies reviewed. The observation that phonemes are shared in both languages was substantiated by the experience that they are acquired in one language before another. This interconnectedness does not only account for the fact that researchers found robust evidence for transfer from the dominant language to the language acquired later (L1 to L2), but was also mirrored by the existence of only two older studies (from the 1970s and 1980s) arguing for a unitary language system. This is to say that empirical data help to determine the validity of language acquisition theories of past and present to a degree that is relevant for teaching bilingual programs at schools.

1.6 The Unitary Language System Hypothesis

Its predecessor models go back to scientists like Noam Chomsky and his Universal Grammar proposals that it was commonly thought that children learning two languages simultaneously during infancy go through a stage where they cannot differentiate their two languages. Bilingual children, in other words, mix elements from their languages regularly. The empirical basis of this assumption was re-examined in the 1990s (see above: Genesee study 1996) with the result that from the beginning bilingual children develop differentiated language systems and are able to use their developing languages in contextually sensitive ways. In this context it is important to remember that code-switching is not a sign of a strong language (L1) dominating the weak one (L2) or even leading to the aforementioned “macaronic language mix” (Meisel: 8, 58), but rather signifies the competence of bilinguals to choose their language according to who and why they are talking to, and in which situation.

Equally important is the possible role of parental input in the form of mixed utterances and its opposite, the “one person, one language” (OPOL) method. Since the beginning of research on bilingual development, which the bilingual guide book (Meisel: 86) situates in the middle 1910s, OPOL has played a major role. It has been modified much later, and in a German context, by the well-known “enlightened monolingualism approach” (Butzkamm: 2019 “Aufgeklärte Einsprachigkeit”) and is still an issue in both bilingual theory and CLIL strategies. Without science-based evidence, the OPOL approach is recommended because “this principle or method is based on common-sense considerations rather than reflecting insights into mechanisms underlying bilingual acquisition” (Meisel: 87). Accordingly, Meisel’s guide book does “not recommend mixing languages freely in child-directed speech” (ibid.: 118):

This is to say that adult interlocuters should make it a habit to adhere to one language in addressing the child, in accordance with the OPOL principle, keeping in mind, however, that it is a useful strategy, not a dogma. Language mixing or switching is thus not excluded, since there is no reason to be concerned about potential effects of mixed speech on bilingual acquisition. On the contrary, code-switching, inserting nouns from the other language, etc. can facilitate or even improve communication (ibid.: 118 f).

In how far the OPOL principle should also be applied to teaching CLIL programs, where the instructor needs to choose the appropriate strategy to scaffold the learning process, and ensure comprehensible input as well as maintain effective communication, would have to be considered separately. It is true that the question of mixing languages is not only a phenomenon in early childhood bilingualism but becomes even more relevant when looking at successive bilingualism as in CLIL. As far as the latter is concerned, the use of L1 and L2 in teaching situations is still a matter of contentious debate among researchers and instructors, whether supporting enlightened monolingualism or not, and will be dealt with in looking at the challenges and desiderata of bilingual teaching (see chapter 10).

Review—reflect—research

Compare the risks and benefits of childhood bilingualism.

Discuss the “experiment” of the young couple from Southern Germany. Would you bring up your children bilingually if given the opportunity? Why/why not?

Find out more about the debate of using L1/L2 in bilingual teaching programs. What is your inclination?

1 Some authors prefer the label “multiculturalism” in accordance with the European Commission to accommodate “Europe’s linguistic diversity” (cf. https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/council-recommendation-improving-teaching-and-learning-languages_en. Last viewed 03/05/2021.).

Chapter 2

Nativist and Cognitive Positions
Vignette “Language is the dress of thought”

Mixing languages on the very same island is, of course, a well-known historical phenomenon and could become a serious political problem as well, like in the case of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where English and Gaelic were spoken in the Northern parts to a great extend. But then English had gradually replaced Scottish Gaelic in the 18th century, because the latter was heavily suppressed during the infamous Highland Clearances following the Jacobite uprisings which ended with their defeat at Culloden in 17461.

The leader of the Jacobites, mockingly called “Bonny Prince Charlie”, had failed in his attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty—rulers for over three centuries—and was chased by a victorious English army throughout the Highlands. Disguised as a servant maid he was finally smuggled on a boat to the Isle of Skye by Flora Macdonald, in whose house he stayed for some time during 1746 and eventually fled to Rome where he died in poverty and as a drunkard.

Almost thirty years later (in 1773), Samuel Johnson overcame his resentment to the Scots and embarked on his famous 3-month Tour to the Hebrides. 20 years before, the English poet, essayist, and literary critic had just about finished a major publication: Johnson’s Dictionary turned out to become a standard lexicon for more than 150 years and formed the basis for all subsequent English dictionaries, namely the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1900s. After the final publication in 1755 he was given a doctorate and hence was often referred to as Dr. Johnson. His interest in languages went much further than presenting the meaning of words and their etymology, but typically included personal remarks and opinions, with even some derogatory comments about his Northern neighbors; a case in point is his definition of “oats”—usually referred to as a cereal used as food—: “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”2.

In this context, Dr. Johnson had read an account of the Hebrides and had been much interested by learning “that there was so near to him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude and simple as in the Middle Ages” (EB 1939: 114). Thus, the wish developed in him to explore the state of a society which was utterly different to all he had ever seen and whose Gaelic language he was not familiar with:

At length, in August 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line. and plunged courageously into what was then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness … [he wandered] about two months through the Celtic region … About the beginning of 1775 his Journey to the Hebrides was published, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles in which any attention was paid to literature. His prejudice against the Scots had at length become little more than a matter of jest; and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every part of Scotland (ibid.).

Dr. Johnson’s Scottish venture was even more popularized by the diary of his friend and travel companion James Boswell, in which he, among other Highland encounters, tells the story of how Dr. Johnson met the very same Flora Macdonald, who had helped Bonny Prince Charlie in his escape from the English soldiers, and even slept in the same bed:

Monday, 13th September [1773]. The room where we lay was a celebrated one. Dr. Johnson’s bed was the very bed in which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his rash attempt in 1745-46, while he was eluding the pursuit of the emissaries of government, which had offered thirty thousand pounds as a reward for apprehending him.” (Boswell 1785: 130).

Dr. Johnson’s fame in posteriority was also grounded on a later publication, his Lives of the Poets series (published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781) which contains his most famous surviving quote:

Language is the dress of thought: and as the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks; so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications. (https://cowley.lib.virginia.edu/small/johnsoncowley.htm Last viewed 03/05/2021.)

Dr. Johnson’s metaphor, here applied to the writings of the English poet Abraham Cowley, has been the subject of a variety of essays and comments in either an agreeing or disapproving mode3. It is, basically, a reflection of the connection between thinking and its linguistic expression and, at the surface, hard to contradict. When it comes to the analysis of higher order thinking skills (the so-called HOTS, cf. chapter 6.7), however, a couple of issues arise. If the kind of clothes you wear reflects in some ways what you are, your style of speech would indicate your thinking and, in Dr. Johnson’s own diction, spoil the quality of your most brilliant ideas and “drop their magnificence”.

The Lives of the Poets has been called the best of Dr. Johnson’s works: “The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound” (EB 1939: 115). But clothing seems to be more than “just having something on”, it is subject to fashion, sometimes hides more than it shows and it is also supposed to protect and support his or her bearer. When it comes to language “as the dress of thought” texts and translations have to fit the context and need to express your ideas and intentions. On a lighter note, it could be said that language is not the dress but the costume of thought4, disguising what people mean to say and, in this way, separating thoughts from the language supposed to express them. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, underwrote the possibility that language could deceive people and Noam Chomsky as a linguist underlines the creative and innovative character of language which leads him to his conclusion of language innateness and the nativist quality of his frequently cited Universal Grammar. Other writers have engaged in similar discussions, George Orwell pointed at the corruption of language and thought working in both ways, and Hans Christian Andersen described the admiration of missing garments in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” as a sign of subjugation and the fear of being left out by praising the stuff they do not see.

As much as the exact relation between language and thought might never be known, even the origins of language themselves are somewhat diffuse. Language in the widest sense of the word refers to any means of communication between living beings and in its developed form is decidedly a human characteristic, considered the distinctive mark of humanity:

On the ultimate origin of language speculation has been rife … Greek philosophers were divided into two groups on this question, some thinking that there is from the beginning a natural connection between sound and meaning and that, therefore, language originated from nature, while others denied that connection and held that everything in language was conventional. The same two opposite views are represented among the linguistic thinkers of the 19th century, the former in the nativism of W. v. Humboldt …, the latter in the empiricism of Whitney etc. (EB 1939: 702).

In this light, the assumptions about the origins of language, the connections between thought and its linguistic expression and the relationships between acquired native and learned foreign languages have remained open to discussion and provided a rich field for research and investigation in the language classroom.

2.1 The Research on Second Language Acquisition

Over the years and beyond bilingualism, linguistic research in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has yielded quite different if not controversial results. It seems to meander between the opposites of the Unitary System (USH) and the Dual System Hypothesis (DSH) and even goes back as far as the assumptions of learning psychologists (Lernpsychologen) like Carel van Parreren (1960). Van Parreren assumed a mental dual track system, where interferences occasioned distracting connections between the L1 and L2 “track” (like in the old-fashioned stereo tape recorders), and he considered the unitarian view as being harmful to the learning process. Over time, language teaching strategies went through a number of turns from behaviorism and the direct (Berlitz) method through to paradigmatic changes like immersion and generative SLA (see above: Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and the Language Making Capacity—LMC), and the communicative, competence-oriented and intercultural approaches. All these changes have strongly influenced teaching strategies and more recently were complemented by social-constructivist ideas, relating to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; cf. Klewitz 2017a: 15) and to research results from cognitive neuro-science and experimental neurolinguistics. A comprehensive and integrative approach towards learning processes in general is presently gaining considerable influence as the concept of Visible Learning based on the meta-analyses conducted by New Zealand’s educational researcher John Hattie.

One of the central issues remains, however, whether there are basic differences between acquiring your mother tongue (L1) and learning your second and/or foreign language (L2) and if so, how decisive these are. Apparently, L1 acquisition entails the parallel development of cultural and world knowledge and always happens successfully and effortlessly, if not automatically. Learning a foreign language, on the other hand, is perceived as being more difficult, can only be completed to a certain level, e.g. as described in the global scales of the CEF (see 4.2 and 7.2), and a nativelike competence is rarely, if at all, achieved. The language level arrived at depends, moreover, on vast individual differences, such as motivation, attitudes and types of learners and the respective contexts of societal expectations, school provisions and cultural environments. At the same type, there are certain parallels between L1 and L2 acquisition: similar mistakes occur in child- and adult-learning, for instance to-do-negations in English, syntax errors in German, fossilization in the development of the so-called interlanguage as a phase in the acquisition process that curbs learning progress or standstill as in the third-person-singular-“s” and other grammatical phenomena that deviate from the target language and seem difficult to “repair”. The answer to the question if learning L2 follows conscious (“learning”) or unconscious (“acquisition”) patterns5 depends on the learning theories operating in the background (cf. for details: Riemer 2010: 278 ff).

2.2 Behaviorism and a Black Box

Prevalent between the 1940s and 1970s in Anglophone as well as European countries, one of the early learning theories was dominated by behaviorism claiming that learning as part of behavior occurred through interaction with the environment in a process called conditioning. New behavior/learning was simply a response to environmental stimuli. Stimuli-response behaviors were to be studied in a systematic and observable manner as opposed to internal events like thinking or emotions, expectations and motivation. In this theory the nature-versus-nurture dilemma (chapter 3) was resolved in favor of nurture with the near exclusion of innate or inherited factors. Extended to language learning, the stimulus-response system plus positive and/or negative feedback was realized by so-called pattern-drills that allowed repetition and correction but very few situational or conscious operations, never mind language awareness. Since the learner’s brain was thought of as a black box operating between stimulus and response, results of learning activities were in the focus of instruction, they were measurable and comparable. This is probably why audiolingual and audiovisual methods, the direct application of the behavioral learning theory, are still being used to gain insights into learning and language development although the theory itself has since been refuted in many details, albeit keeping some relevance—in textbooks, exercise sequences and audiolingual practice.

The behaviorist approach maintained that all complex behavior, including language learning, was acquired from the environment, apart from a few innate reflexes and the capacity for learning, an assumption that was questioned by early Gestalt psychologists as well as later theories of cognitive development. It was the idea of machine-like human behavior that attracted much criticism and consequently a new psychology of learning and language acquisition came to the fore, including the Dutch psychologist Carel van Parreren with his theory of a dual track system (van Parreren 1960). The related Gestalt theory had already supported a concept of insight learning, meaning that people would learn most effectively by problem solving and recognizing a gestalt or organizing principle. Van Parreren, in turn, focused on the importance of perceptions and affect for the understanding of human learning. In their cognitive development learning would always be based on actions accomplished by students with the help of teachers or more knowledgeable peers. In this, van Parreren followed Vygotsky’s ideas of an educational concept, summarized in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; cf. chapter 6 in detail). Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist active in the 1960s, had proposed his theory about the relationship between speech and thinking (Vygotsky: 1962—Thought and Language), but the study of cultural historical psychology by that time—during the Cold War—was suspect for political reasons and only later taken on by mainstream scientists like Jerome Bruner and his concept of Scaffolding (see chapter 6.9).

2.3 The Universal Grammar and Noam Chomsky

As part of cognitive psychology, van Parreren focused on the problem of interference in learning processes, especially the relationship between two languages (L1 and L2) in language acquisition. Contrary to recent research results, where more complex distinctions are discussed, such as positive and negative interferences as well as inferences, his assumption of the mental dual track system posited that the linkage of two systems, in this case of two languages, would cause detrimental effects. Especially if languages were characterized by similarities in structure and lexis, there would be negative effects: one linguistic element (from L1) would influence another one (from L 2), because students would tend to create a cognitive linkage between related elements. Foreign language teaching, as a follow-through, needed to aim at preventing connections between mother tongue and foreign language(s), which would support convergence processes rather than facilitating correct and sustainable learning results. Mental tracks of the foreign language system would assimilate with the mother tongue elements and the “clumping factor” of similar elements would connect otherwise disjoined tracks of L1 and L2. Van Parreren explains this process of homogenizing when originally separated mental tracks are merged into one system (clumping factor). This is why the explicit separation of L1 and L2 should be encouraged and even safeguarded by avoiding tangency between the two linguistic systems to limit the interlingual transfer, predominantly seen as negative by the Dutch researcher and his school of cultural historical psychology.

Despite the differences in learning and language theories, language acquisition as a mere act of imitation appeared less and less convincing and the abandonment of behaviorism in the teaching community—or the greater majority—was encouraged by competing explanations of the role of innate or native dispositions in L2 learning. The paradigm of generative SLA, based on the concept of a Universal Grammar (UG) was already developed by Noam Chomsky and his school in the 1950s to 1960s. Following the Poverty of Stimulus (POS) the existence of a UG was deemed to explain why children—despite a limited input of language models—were able to develop linguistic structures that they could not have experienced in their own surroundings. This is what Chomsky analyzed as the logic L1 problem with the conclusion that there was every reason to argue in favor of an innate UG—meaning a cognitively language-specific endowment (“endowment” as a figure of speech will reappear in dealing with the LMC and its meaning for childhood bilingualism).

UG, believed to be an innate or native mechanism, would be described as the product of a specialized language organ in the human brains, a faculty dedicated to the mastering of language. The plausibility of linguistic nativism was not only supported by the above-mentioned POS but also by the everyday observation that infants and children develop their language almost effortlessly and successfully even in the absence of a caretaker’s formal instruction and active attempts to correct their children’s grammar. According to Chomsky, UG as a mental module would thus solve the problem of how children—and language learners in general for that matter—could acquire and/or learn the complex syntactic and semantic rules necessary to put together sentences and communicate just by sole exposure to the language(s) spoken around them. This faculty or mental module would also constitute your linguistic competence, but a lot more additional knowledge would be needed to enable language performance, in other words actual language use with all its limitations like the previously mentioned TOT as a case in point. As a nativist mechanism, it would be triggered off at contact with the mother tongue and develop its own dynamics; whether the same or a similar process is working or at least influential in L2 acquisition has been argued controversially ever since.

In the 1950s to 1960s Chomsky’s linguistic research and ensuing theories revolutionized and reoriented academic approaches to language worldwide. By aiming at delineating and explaining the tools and means through which infants and children acquire language(s) he developed a system of principles and building blocks that were to demonstrate an infant’s innate understanding of syntax and semantics. Criticism appeared quickly with the bottom line that Chomsky’s propositions remained a truism:

only humans have language, so sth. about our genome is “special” insofar as it enables us to develop a language faculty whereas other animals do not.

In other words, humans have UG, a genetic propensity for language that is quite rich, but it need not be and, given our understanding of the evolution of the language faculty as of now as well as our general understanding of how genetics works, quite likely cannot be 100 % specific to language alone (https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1269. Last viewed 03/05/2021).

Chomsky and colleagues—after 2002—have rejected certain assumptions of a “rich” UG and argued that the domain-specific faculty of language comprised only the property of recursion, as a linguistic property whereby phrases may be continuously embedded into other phrases:

Chomsky explains linguistic recursion as something that occurs when a grammatical sentence, which includes a noun or noun phrase and a verb, might or might not contain another sentence. In Chomsky's understanding, there is no upper bound, or outer limit, on how many sentences can be maintained within each other. In this understanding, recursion in language develops as we build increasingly long and complex sentences. … Chomsky has understood recursion in language to be indicative of the tremendous creativity of language. Since the number of embedded sentences is unbounded, there are multiple possibilities for human expression as occurring within recursion (Sterns: 2018 n.p.).

2.4 The Minimalist Position of Recursion

No longer arguing in favor of a rich UG, linguists from the Chomsky school now support a minimalist position purporting a lean version of the innate faculty of language, basically characterized by recursion. But particularly in the light of neuro-biological research findings even this reduced version of the UG is increasingly being questioned to a point that UG might not exist at all but would be part of the general cognitive human properties. Two misjudgments appear to be tenacious: that older people need more time to learn a foreign language and that they are best learned on the basis of grammar. Both are long-lived because, like Chomsky’s UG, they keep being repeated every so often. Developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, for instance, claims that specific grammatical principles and constructions have not evolved biologically and cognitive scientist David Everett goes as far as maintaining that UG does not exist at all. To Everett the question is not whether humans can think recursively:

The question is whether this ability is linked specifically to language or instead to human cognitive accomplishments more generally (it could be connected to both, but that is less likely given what we know about the organization of the brain) … Recursion is not fundamental to human language but is rather a component of human cognition more generally… Language does not seem to be innate. There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures (Everett 2017: n.p.).

There is, however, still sympathy in the research community for the Chomsky school of thought. In his book The Language Instinct (1994), psychologist Steven Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. But instead of proposing a Universal Grammar he calls this faculty an “instinct” developed in biological evolution unique to humans. According to the Canadian scientist, this instinct was instrumental for communication among social hunter-gatherers and is comparable to other animal adaptations like those of spiders (web-weaving) or beavers (dam-building). As a mental module, this instinct represents specific structures in the human brain recognizing the general rules of other humans’ speech and in this confirms that “Chomsky’s theory (at any time) has attracted a plurality of linguists, but never a majority, since there have always been rival theories …” (Horgan 2016: n.p.):

The misconception that Chomsky represents the dominant view comes from the fact that the opposition is divided into many approaches and factions, so there’s no single figure that can be identified with an alternative. … Another problem with the claim that Chomsky’s theory of language “is being overturned” (as if it had ever been accepted, which is not true), is that it’s not clear what “Chomsky’s theory of language” refers to. He has proposed a succession of technical theories in syntax, and at the same time has made decades of informal remarks about language being innate, which have changed over the decades, and have never been precise enough to confirm or disconfirm. And it’s not so easy to say what “Universal Grammar” or an innate “language faculty” consists of; it’s necessarily abstract, since the details of any particular language, like Japanese or English, are uncontroversially learned (ibid.).

Further insights into the properties of L1 development, taken up by Pinker and related to in the Guide for Bilingual Parents (Meisel 2019), allegedly confirmed three relevant findings: (1) that L1 acquisition is always successful, (2) that it happens at first rate, (3) that in L1 grammatical development is uniform and children proceed through identical developmental phases (cf. Meisel: 33). The explanation seems like a resurgence of Chomskyan thought and maintains that children are equipped with—what Meisel calls—a Language Making Capacity (LMC; see above) guiding linguistic development. This innate LMC

does not relate to specific languages but contains principles and mechanisms enabling children to whatever language they are exposed to. The LMC is genetically encoded and species-specific, i.e. only humans possess a faculty for language. It is innate, meaning that children are endowed with it at birth, although initially they cannot make full use of it, either because they are cognitively not yet ready or because parts of the LMC only become accessible in the course of development (ibid.: 34).

Similar to the older UG version but also in accordance with Pinker’s theories, the LMC is supposed to be genetically encoded and innate, and as part of nativist positions it means that children inherit this capacity at birth—or in the words of the Guide for Bilingual Parents “LMC is an endowment for bilingual children” (ibid.: 44, 47). The assumption that all children share a common language acquisition mechanism also describes the milestones of L1 development as language perception, comprehension and production (cf. ibid.: 37, 40). Whether this can also be applied to L2 learning is a different discussion and needs to be considered separately, mainly in the context research about L1-L2 divergence and the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH, see chapter 3). The focus here is on the acquisition of mental grammars, because grammar is considered the core component of linguistic competence (cf. Meisel: 30). Following this position, the consequences for language instruction are fairly obvious: no (formal) teaching would be required, neither any corrective feedback from parents:

… many parents try to foster children’s linguistic development by correcting their grammatical errors. It seems, however, that this has little effect on acquisition processes—these children do not fare better than those whose parents do not correct them. … they should know that language acquisition succeeds equally well without this kind of support (ibid.: 31).

In sum, the LMC position insinuates that for learning a language (and at that also foreign languages) no particular instruction is needed and best results are to be expected from immersion situations and programs. The further development of teaching strategies, however, has meanwhile acknowledged the differences between the acquisition of a mother tongue and foreign language learning, epitomized in the revision of the UG as a minimalist program—still as a rejection of behaviorist beliefs. In this context the FDH was established as a means to overcome fundamental criticism of the UG proposition and allow for different language development of children, adolescents and adults—with a growing need for effective instruction and more conscious learning. Details of the FDH will be discussed in the following juxtaposition of nature-versus-nurture in the next chapter (chapter 3).

2.5 The Input and Output Hypotheses

In conclusion, nativists—as exemplified by Chomsky and Meisel—tend to overestimate the challenges language learners have to face and underestimate the resources available to them. A child or adolescent does not represent a tabula rasa but they are able to lean on their own language development and can use their previous knowledge to perceive meaningful structures and extract helpful rules from further input. As a consequence for changes in teaching strategies and in the transition from young infants to older children, language learning appeared to be more convincing as a cognitive operation and replaced the assumption of a UG—even in its minimalist version or sole reliance on recursion—by a stronger focus on cognitive and mental solving capacities. In their theory of practice (cf. Coyle: 45) language instructors and linguistic researchers became convinced that, with growing age, conscious learning and language awareness would be more effective for developing grammar competence and lexical knowledge—always with a view to bridging the gap between competence and performance, as epitomized in the above-mentioned TOT and the Zone of Proximal Development.

This conviction and trend initiated a number of turns in (foreign) language learning and teaching encapsulating shifts from a previous focus on grammar to Task-Based Teaching and Learning (TBLT) and the growing importance of content. The ensuing transitions started with tendencies of learner-centered approaches and cooperative (group) working phases, a change in the instructor’s role from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” and once again back to Direct Instruction in the version of explicit teacher influence and control and as opposed to exploratory models of inquiry-based learning. The two main sources for the “revival” of Direct Instruction—apart from much earlier versions in the 1960s—turned out to be DISTAR and John Hattie’s meta-analyses recommending this teaching strategy. The “Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Writing” (DISTAR) and the “Project Follow Through” (1968-1977) was a “cooperation between policy makers and educational practitioners” (De Florio 2016: 99) and proved most effective for teaching academic skills and providing positive outcomes for children like empowerment, self-esteem and a feeling of achievement. It was, however, criticized for limiting creativity due to its strict and scripted procedures. Hattie’s encouragement of Direct Instruction (as interactive whole-class teaching), not to be confused with traditional teacher-centered instruction (the chalk-and-talk version of “Frontalunterricht”6), was based on synthesized research of 304 studies with over 42,000 students showing a major effect size (d=0.59) and significantly larger than any other curriculum Hattie studied.

The UG theory had suggested that the nativist/innate language capacity (aka Meisel’s LMC; see above) of a child would be—more or less automatically—awakened by L1 contact and that L2 acquisition would follow the same mechanism. The fact, however, that under “normal” conditions L2 learning does not result in native-like competence and performance indicates that a direct and effortless access to the respective UG properties cannot be substantiated. Thus, and in another renunciation of behaviorism, the nativist position, namely Chomsky’s innate language theory, seems to have been superseded by cognitive approaches and even more recently by learning theories based on constructivism and findings of neuro-science. Common to these shifts in the theory of practice is that they do not take a language-specific mental module for granted (like in the UG and its minimalist version). They rather assume that language acquisition and learning7 are creative processes and occur in processing information in multiple ways.

In a succession of consecutive steps to explain the relationship between language acquisition and learning, Krashen’s monitor hypothesis (1977) can be regarded as an important starting point and building block in assigning the learning system the role of monitoring or controlling utterances, whereas the acquisition system would act as the initiator of language production. His further theoretical assumptions, namely acquisition-learning, natural order, input, affective filter and reading hypotheses, were instrumental in discovering stages of language development referring, for instance, to basic grammar domains like English negations or German syntax as partly conscious and partly unconscious processes. One paradigm evolved concerning knowledge learned which cannot be transferred into knowledge acquired directly, but more recently it is suggested that previously acquired implicit knowledge can be turned into explicit knowledge of rules by reflection and analytical access through learners. Accordingly, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe: 2001) distinguishes four different kinds of general competences:

Declarative knowledge—savoir Practical skills and know-how—savoir-faire Attitudes, motivation, cognitive styles …—savoir-être Ability to learn—savoir-apprendre (ibid.: 101-106).

These areas of knowledge were complemented by Byram’s components of Intercultural Competence (1997), especially critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engagé) and will be further explored as pertinent parameters of an integrated bilingual teaching strategy in chapter 6.

Constructivist learning theories are a further development of the cognitive approach because they perceive the learner as an active agent, learning as an autonomous process of construction and gaining knowledge as a variable process in every individual. The most important conclusion would be that every learner gained something different from the same input (cf. Riemer: 279). But only linguistic input enables the learner to build on and restructure their language knowledge and performance:

For this to work, the input must be comprehensible. Interactionist approaches highlight the importance in this context of the conscious perception of linguistic forms. With respect to the linguistic interaction between target language speakers and target language learners (as well as among target language learners), they assume that input is made comprehensible for the learners through processes of negotiated meaning, for example via feedback, corrections or requests for clarification, and can then be processed by them in the optimal manner (Ohm: 2015 n.p.).

Interaction and cooperative activities in groups were considered to be the most supportive conditions for effective leaning. Yet, following the output hypothesis (Swain 2008), language input is not sufficient for successful L 2 acquisition, rather the language to be mastered needs to be actively practiced and used.

The output hypothesis completes this model of the cognitive and interactionist approaches by adding the idea that the learner’s production of the target language plays a central role in the learning process. The starting point for this is the observation that learners can frequently infer the meaning of target language input from the linguistic and situational context and thus focus their attention only to a limited extent on linguistic forms. On the other hand, when producing their own target language output, they are required for example, to engage to a much greater extent with the rules of word formation and inflection, as well as with word and sentence order (ibid.).

2.6 Language Learning as a Social Process—The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Considering both input and output hypotheses, language learning is then seen as a social process guided by interaction and fostered by cognition. In the tradition of Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky: 1962, see above) the origins of cognitive and mental activities are embedded within the social domain. The guiding concept here is the ZPD within which learning is enabled by problem-solving activities of learners if these are acting supported by more knowledgeable peers or teachers.

Writing about the relation of thought and language (Thought and Language 1962), Vygotsky devises a concept of (language) development and combines with it a theory of education. More based on common sense and observation than systematic scientific research, he monitored children learning to talk and solving problems. His concept of ZPD not only influenced contemporary Soviet psychologists but also elicited comments by leading Western educators like Jean Piaget and was only much later—and in fact after the end of the Cold War—known and appreciated in mainstream learning theories.

A further step needs to be discussed in this context. With the growing importance of cognition, the aim to acquire curricular content at the same time as language itself is connectable to language awareness. In the United Kingdom, for example, this process was embedded in the challenge to enhance literary education where children’s needs of language learning needed to be met (cf. the findings of the Bullock-Commission in Great Britain 1972-75). In order to link linguistic demands and content challenges it is generally expedient to realize that pragmatic speech functions and macro-operations correspond with each other and are intensified by reciprocal support—as expressed in task-verbs like describe, illuminate, assess, conclude etc. Content-based teaching, according to the language-across-the-curriculum approach (LAC; cf. Meisel: 160 ff), has always to be considered as language teaching, because linguistic and cognitive development show a close connection. The LAC approach has been interpreted as a specific version of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and is also closely associated with CLIL and immersion programs (cf. ibid.: 161).

Interdisciplinary teaching in the sense of LAC is not only of professional benefit for instructors but also facilitates the enhancement of literary competence in the classroom discourse where more often than not certain gaps have become conspicuous. This is particularly true for students with a migration background, but deficits in the “language of schooling” are visible in mainstream cohorts as well. The aim to develop aspects of academic language in all subject areas is still as much part of the aforementioned theory of practice as it is not consistently part of everyday classroom routines. Some initiating guidelines for this LAC approach have been explored by language-sensitive curricula, namely “40 learner tools” by the German teacher trainer and physics professor Josef Leisen8, but a comprehensive methodology does not seem to be available so far (cf.: Wolff 2011: 81).

“Language of schooling”, however, remains important within the constructivist theory of encouraging students to creatively build their own learning cycles and thus—at least in the long run—become their own teachers. This is at the heart of Visible Learning (VL), which according to the aforementioned NZ educationalist John Hattie, occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of their students and help them close the gap between their prior knowledge and the intended learning outcomes, language- or content-wise. Hattie’s concept of VL with Direct Instruction as one of its key components (see above) was developed more than ten years ago and has since become a world-wide influential approach to effective teaching and successful learning (cf. De Florio: 2016). It is based on his meta-analyses with data obtained from more than 300 million students comparing developments from the Australian, American and British education systems (Visible Learning 2009).

Key factors like cognitive task analysis, scaffolding, reciprocal teaching, feedback, direct instruction and behavior organizers will be discussed in detail in the context of dimensions of bilingual teaching (chapter 5 & 6), but at this stage it should be noted that three kinds of achievement factors played a major role for successful learning according to the data collected, i.e. feedback, student expectations and formative evaluation. These aspects represent strategies of best teaching practice and are instrumental to close the gap between student previous knowledge and aspired aims and objectives, applicable to learning processes in general and language acquisition in particular.

Hattie’s idea of Visible Learning is, other than the proposition of a Universal Grammar (Chomsky) or a so-called Human Language Making Capacity (Meisel: 34 ff), based on empirical research and provides a practical alternative to language-based teaching strategies to bridge the gap between (language) knowledge and performance and intercultural competence (cf. chapters 5 & 6.6), especially in a CLIL context. In order to bridge this gap—namely between students’ prior knowledge and successfully accomplishing relevant content-based and communicative tasks—their ZPD has to be taken into account. ZPD, as delineated before, is first and above all, an explanation of social interaction between a child and knowledgeable adults. Based on the theories of former Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (cf. Klewitz 2017a: 15 f.) the ZPD was made available for mainstream discussions by Jerome Bruner (ibid.).

It is in accordance with curricular research and official recommendations such as the German framework for final school examinations (Abitur), defining graded learning objectives (“Lern-zielstufen”) proposed by the Federal Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK: 2013). These recommendations encompass four general stages (to close the ZPD gaps) as reproduction, reorganization, transfer and problem-solving (also reflection), supported by action-based task-verbs (German “Operatoren”) that are mandatory in final school examinations and relate to different cognitive operations like analyze, examine, characterize, compare, assess, evaluate, discuss, develop, describe, name, outline (cf. Klewitz 2019: 28), also known in taxonomies of long-standing use (Krautwohl, Coyle 2010).

Review—reflect—research

What does Dr. Johnson’s reflection on “language as the dress of thought” tell us about the origin of language?

Consider the differences between language acquisition and language learning. Do you agree with the practice in academic literature to use both terms interchangeably?

Visible Learning might coincide with the Zone of Proximal Development, so which gains can be expected from this sustainable teaching strategy?

1 Speakers of Gaelic were persecuted over the centuries: in the Scottish Lowlands there was still a cross-over between English and Scottish Gaelic whereas in the 18th century the Highlands were more or less exclusively Gaelic. (cf.: https://www.visitscotland.com/about/uniquely-scottish/gaelic/. Last viewed 03/05/2021)

2 In: https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/oats/. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

3 Numerous entries in blogs also address this metaphor as a controversy, e.g. In: https://www.usingenglish.com/poll/63.html. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

4 An older essay by the late Columbia University Professor Nicolas Christy discusses variations on this topic in his essay “Is Language the Dress of Thought?” (Christy 1980: 98-106), on which the following considerations are based.

5 About the difference between “learning” and “acquisition” see footnote 9 and the respective entry in the Glossary.

6 The German daily newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine” published an article written by a Berlin teacher whose students had asked him when they could go back to frontal teaching—with the catching title “Wann machen Sie wieder Fron-talunterricht?” (FAZ 01/14/2016). More details about teaching styles can be found in the next chapters (3 & 4).

7 A proper and research-based differentiation between language acquisition and learning can be found in the respective glossary entry of our book.

8 Shown in “Methodenwerkzeuge im sprachsensiblen Fachunterricht“: http://www.sprachsensiblerfachunterricht.de/methoden-werkzeuge. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

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.

3.2 Linking Nature and Nurture

In effect, Vroman’s FDH was able to create a link between the nativist (UG-) position in primary language acquisition and the idea that L2 learning was predominantly influenced by external factors and “nurtured” by educational and societal settings rather than by an innate language “endowment”. This, however, does not completely answer the question how children and adolescents learn to develop their language(s), which boils down to the controversy whether language acquisition is enabled by this “endowment”, the language acquisition faculty, or a result of environmental influences—in other words facilitated by nature or nurture.

According to Chomsky, language acquisition has a biological foundation which would be backed up by the following considerations: sounds are acquired in a certain sequence and are common to all world languages. The Guidebook for Bilingual Parents documents identical developmental phases for all children from the discrimination of sounds, a focus on language properties, different reactions to function and property words and—after two years—a rapid increase in the number of lexical items acquired (Meisel: 37 ff). These processes would occur in all world languages and confirm the existence of an innate mental structure, the domain-specific mechanism of UG.

In contrast to that, behaviorist theory had proposed that a child’s environment was the most important factor in language learning and would include, even be based on imitation, a clear-cut nurture position. Whereas imitation certainly plays a limited role even in second language acquisition, learners do not imitate everything they hear and are selective in what they produce; this could be taken as a hint at an “internal language-monitoring process” (Lanir 2019: n.p.) rather than the nurture aspect of environmental conditioning. Further aspects that cannot be explained by the process of imitation are overgeneralizations like goed, putted, mouses and sheeps (in inflection) and non-existent language structures that children never heard. Language chunks acquired through imitation become locked in a child’s memory and are not assimilated in their language production and thus dysfunctional. At the same time, children produce many more sounds and combinations than they hear and understand much more than they can produce—this phenomenon is also known as Poverty of Stimulus (POS—cf. Riemer: 277). Overall, they are exposed to language performance instead of competence and can even extract linguistic rules from incomplete or faulty language they listen to (cf. ibid.).

These aspects come across as a critical view of behaviorist language theory and an appreciation of the innate position of a UG and domain-specific mental modules. And indeed, despite all recent rejection of Chomsky’s propositions—including his own revocation of UG and resort to paradigms like recursion (cf. Everett 2017)—a study of psychologists claims to have found new support for Chomsky’s “internal grammar” theory:

One of the foundational elements of Chomsky’s work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language,” explains David Poeppel, the study’s senior researcher and a professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology. “Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an ‘internal grammar’ mechanism (NYU: 2015 n.p.).

On the other hand, and conceding that a universal grammar is not impossible in principle, linguists like Daniel Everett do not see much evidence for it and maintain that it would not work in any case. In his view, a complex interplay of factors structures the way humans talk and what they talk about. In that he is supported by developmental psychologists, and Michael Tomasello (2008), for instance, agrees that grammatical principles and constructions have no neural foundation but stem from more general cognitive processes and are part of communication in particular linguistic communities, although aspects of language competence might have evolved biologically. Everett, in his book Language: The Cultural Tool (2012), argues that the rules of language are “not innate but spring from necessity and circumstance”:

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem. … The lesson is that language is not something mysterious that is outside the bounds of natural selection, or just popped into being through some mutated gene. But that language is a human invention to solve a human problem. Other creatures can't use it for the same reason they can't use a shovel: it was invented by humans, for humans and its success is judged by humans (Everett: 2012 n.p.).

3.3 Anthropology Sheds a New Light

Beyond the linguistic nativist-versus-learning debate, related fields in psychology (Pinker) and literature (Caliban/Ortega) have quite intensely mirrored the nature-versus-nurture controversy, which has a long history reaching even back to the beginnings of anthropology (Boas) in the late 19th century. Building blocks of this controversy will be helpful to consider in some detail because an integrative CLIL methodology not only needs to connect language and content, but also has to specify the various aspect of subject matters to establish content, which in addition to natural and social sciences also encompasses literature and cultural studies as key components. Therefore, it is essential to draw on some examples of how the nature/nurture debate has been documented in these CLIL related domains and which conclusions can be drawn for effective learning and successful teaching strategies in either focusing on the nature of (language) acquisition processes or tenets of Visible Learning trying to nurture content learning based on the three foundations of competence development, i.e. knowledge, skills and volition.2

A German expatriate like Franz Boas (1858-1942) is not commonly associated with developing linguistic theories or participating in discussing issues of whether acquired traits of character can be inherited. But he was one of the first scientists to refute the view that intelligence was innate and the assumption of “primitive races” justified, prevailing at his time. Boas emigrated to the United States and later earned the attribution of a Father of American Anthropology. A professor at the Columbia University in New York since 1899, Boas spent a lifetime, both in the US and Europe, to fight against the racist side of biological determinism. As a proponent of “cultural relativism” he argued that cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower and that all humans see the world through the lens of their own cultural perspective. At the turn of the century (19 to 20) it was a difficult stance to take in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendelson’s laws of dominant and recessive genes which spread the news that “acquired traits cannot under any circumstances be inherited; that is, our genetic material is sealed off from everything we learn” (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

Together with his students, among them Margaret Mead, whose bestseller Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) “turned the American culture upside down” (ibid.), his research and academic work clearly went against mainstream psychology; Boas did not believe in turning heredity against culture but he believed that each person should only be judged as an individual and was malleable by cultural influences:

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 (ibid.).

When Margaret Mead came back from Samoa, her research and ensuing publications established a new view of the concept of culture and a utopian perspective with the recognition of unknown freedom.

The extremes of nature versus nurture are spanned by literature and philosophy as well. In The Tempest (1610/11) Shakespeare has his Prospero, the Duke of Milan, say about Caliban: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick” (IV, 1), who as the son of a witch is denied any possibility to escape slavery. About three hundred years later, Ortega y Gasset, spent part of his studies of Philosophy in Marburg/Lahn and came up with quite the opposite opinion: “Man has no nature, what he has is—history” (History as a System, 1935). But in America, during the 1920s and 30s, the racist dimension of biological determinism—as so determinately fought by Boas—had peaked, not only in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan with four hundred new members but also with books on race and immigration such as The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant or The Rising Tide of Color (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard. Warning against the coming nonwhite population explosion after World War I, Stoddard’s racist book reappeared in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) when Daisy’s bullish husband Tom Buchanan provokes his wife and her cousin Nick with quotations from a book he calls “The Rise of the Coloured Empires, by this man Goddard? …The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved” (The Great Gatsby: 19).

The dire consequences of biological and racist determinism have culminated in the 20th century holocaust and would hopefully have been overcome by now. But have researchers in the meantime settled the nature-versus-nurture debate finally? Natural scientist Steven Pinker seems to say “no”—at least when he summarizes the situation in his book The Blank Slate—The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). It was John Locke in 1690 who envisaged the human mind as a blank slate, explaining everything people are and all their knowledge as malleable, easily influenced, trained and controlled, by their environment and experience. In his essay “Why nature & nurture won’t go away” (Pinker: 2004), Pinker argues, in a shift away from behaviorism, that the blank slate, the former cornerstone of behaviorism used to be “the ultimate safeguard against racism, sexism, and class prejudice” but was longer defendable:

Though human nature has been debated for as long as people have pondered their condition, it was inevitable that the debate would be transformed by the recent efflorescence of the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. One outcome has been to make the doctrine of the blank slate untenable. No one, of course, can deny the importance of learning and culture in all aspects of human life. But cognitive science has shown that there must be complex innate mechanisms for learning and culture to be possible in the first place (ibid.: 6).

Turning to language as a “paradigm case”, he maintains that acquiring languages is a human talent (also called “instinct” by him). Pinker summarizes “a common position on nature and nurture among contemporary scientists” as follows:

By now most scientists reject both the nineteenth-century doctrine that biology is destiny and the twentieth-century (sic!) doctrine that the mind is a blank slate. … modern biology has made the very distinction between nature and nurture obsolete. … Indeed, genes are expressed in response to environmental signals, so it is meaningless to try to distinguish genes and environments; doing so only gets in the way of productive research (ibid.: 7).

In a nutshell: a common realization in recent years has pointed at the fact that the question how much behavior—and language as a part of human behavior—is due to heredity or environment might be wrong in the first place. It would probably have to be replaced by investigating how much nature and nurture interact instead of defending extreme nativist or nurturist opinions. Similarly, the debate whether linguistic skills are innate (nature) or acquired (nurture) might be resolved by a combination of the two attitudes. Especially, a cognitive approach deals with processes in the brain that underpin language acquisition, socio-cultural approaches—preferred here!—reject the notion that SLA is a purely psychological phenomenon and attempt to explain language development in a social context. This will prove an encouraging idea for language teachers (and researchers). The assumption that all children are born with an instinctive mental capacity (mindful of Pinker’s dictum of language as an “instinct”) allows them to learn and effectively use language. The challenge for instructors here is to foster and enhance this mental capacity or instinct and create favorable methodological and didactic conditions, particularly when dealing with the double objective to teach language and content at the same time, as in CLIL programs.

3.4 The Neuro-biological View

In this context, the linguistic side of CLIL can draw on results from neuro-biological research (cf. Müller 2003, Videsott 2009, Ellis 1994) describing mental processes of language representation and functions. One of the findings has observed minor neural networking in processing abstract concepts, necessitating to anchor abstract contents in multi-modal ways and to include affective situations in language teaching such as role plays, cooperative learning and active participation in teacher-student dialogues. As tangible content effects greater neural networking the assumption of a definite language center in the brain seems to be evident—the question only is whether this capacity is innate or a result of active learning and whether there is a sensitive phase of this learning process/language acquisition in terms of student-age. A related finding concerns the neural transmission of L1 and L2 acquisition and if different parts of the cortex are involved; in this process neural substrate was found in different parts of the brain after seven years of age, on the other hand changes in the physiology of the brain during L2 acquisition were only established between the ages of 13 and 16 (Müller: 173). Neurophysiological examinations have, additionally, not been able to show coherent results of the existence of a sensitive or critical age of language acquisition in the long run (cf. ibid.: 174, Meisel: 200 f).

Most neurobiological studies refer to the question if a joint neural network is used for the acquisition of L1 and L2. It appears that late L2 learners’ language can be located in the left part of the cortex, the so-called Broca area, the part of the brain connected to speech production (Videsott: 162). Overall, a comprehensive neural network is observed in the classic language environment, including Wernicke’s area which is the part of the cerebral cortex linked to the comprehension of written and spoken language (ibid.: 160). But many issues in the neural context of language acquisition remain unresolved; a common denominator, however, regards the L2 learning process as being influenced by languages that the learner already knows and confirms language transfer, especially as a bidirectional cross-linguistic influence.

Activating different cerebral areas for language comprehension and production remains a very complex process, depending—apart from its neural location—on additional factors like exposure, age, fluency, motivation, proficiency and learning strategies. The latter are, at least in school settings of foreign language instruction, often based on pseudo-communicative situations: a teacher too often keeps asking questions the answers to which s/he already knows. Much more effective would be the negotiation of meaning as a real process of communication by which the students have the occasion to produce more spontaneous output and gain more insight in their own learning processes and thus the aforementioned language awareness:

Language Awareness can be defined as explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use.

It covers a wide spectrum of fields. For example, Language Awareness issues include exploring the benefits that can be derived from developing a good knowledge about language, a conscious understanding of how languages work, of how people learn them and use them.

Can we become better language users or learners or teachers if we develop a better understanding? And can we gain other advantages: e.g. in our relations with other people and/or cultures, and in our ability to see through language that manipulates or discriminates? Language Awareness interests also include learning more about what sorts of ideas about language people normally operate with, and what effects these have on how they conduct their everyday affairs: e.g. their professional dealings. (https://lexically.net/ala/la_defined.htm. Last viewed 03/05/2021.).

Overall, many standards of language learning have been confirmed by neuro-cognitive research, especially the fact that learning engages the entire person in terms of cognitive, affective and psycho-motoric domains. The research, however, has also indicated that many traditional language-teaching strategies are quite inefficient (Ellis 1994) and that the focus on teaching grammar and vocabulary does not lead to accurate and fluent L2 usage. Students need to be given opportunities to practice and use their language skills in communicative situations:

For language development to occur, interaction has to take place; language cannot be acquired passively. Although imitation and habit forming do have a role in language acquisition, children seem predisposed to acquire speech and competency in language by being able to map language, possibly onto what Noam Chomsky calls a ‘language acquisition device.’ (Lanir 2019: n.p.).

3.5 The Task-based Approach

Sometimes the focus on grammatical forms may be an advantage provided that L2 learners have reached a stage where explanations and the comprehension of rules and their implementation are possible (cf. Videsott: 11). But “the role of formal instruction itself has been a perennial area of debate, and more than 20 years of research have failed to yield firm guidelines for grammar teaching methodology” (Borg 1999: 157, cit. in Timmis 2012:119). This is why the use of tasks in language teaching has developed as a distinct concept of Task Based Teaching and Learning (TBLT; cf. chapter 6.3), connecting grammar pedagogy and task-based methodology. A task in this sense is embedded in a language project, “an activity in which a person engages in order to attain an objective, and which necessitates the use of language” (Ellis 2003: 1f). With a primary focus on meaning, task-based verbs are used to close particular gaps in information, reasoning and opinion—allowing for students to choose the necessary language skills and attaining a clearly defined non-linguistic outcome (cf. De Florio 2018: 80).

What kind of language is needed to close these gaps depends as much on the needs of the students involved as the selection of grammar skills and lexis. But “how much grammar is needed?” is an oft-asked question, in this context answered by post-modern language methodology with the proposal “not as much as commonly believed”. And the theory of practice is reflected in the guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL): “Meaning needs to precede form as the basis for comprehension: before looking at letters or characters, before looking for clues in grammatical forms or word order, before trying to figure out details, learners should search for overall meaning.” (ACTFL 2020: n.p.) Implications for teaching strategies in CLIL programs will be discussed in detail in chapter 8 (CLIL Tools and Skills, 8.2: Task-based Language Teaching—TBLT).

Review—reflect—research

Franz Boas would not have reneged on his strong believe that “America was politically an ideal country”. But would he, in the light of four years of Trumpism?

In the light of different theories about Second Language Acquisition (SlA), what can be inferred from these about how foreign languages can best be taught?

There are different opinions about “nature versus nurture” in the neuro-biological domain. Why does this controversy not go away according to Steven Pinker?

1 This part of my narrative is based on general literature, and individual contributions served as a blueprint, such as NYU 2015, Everett 2017, Lanir 2019, Meisel 2019.

2 Different and culture dependent aspects of standard-based learning and competence levels are referred to in “American Standards”, “Australian VCE” and “CEF”.

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