second language acquisition
- According to research, children develop social language in 1-3 years, but it takes around 5-7 years to develop their academic language. This is something educators should keep in mind if they have an ELL student in their classroom, because they should know the stages and process of their second language acquisition. Although this student may communicate perfectly on the playground and with friends, that student's academic language could be severely lacking, which causes them to fall behind in their academics.
- These differences are described as conversational fluency and academic language fluency.
- These two types of speech are very different and develop at significantly different rates
(Cummins, 2001).
- Students also go through stages of second language acquisition and these stages call for different teaching styles.
- According to researchers, students go through 5 stages of second language acquisition: pre-production, also known as the silent period, early production, speech emergence, intermediate fluency, and advanced fluency.
- This chart shows the stages of second language acquisition of academic language. Researchers agree that students do not reach advanced fluency until around 5-7 years.
(Rico & Weed, 2002)