Juliet's Oral Language Development

Juliet is  a complicated case of a journey to bilingualism: her DLI program at school is sequential, where she is only instructed in Spanish literacy, but at home she receives support in both English and Spanish reading and writing, and has been developing speaking and listening skills in both languages her entire life. I think after hearing the deep integration of both languages into her social language that she is closer to a simultaneous bilingual than a sequential one.  While I think Juliet is developing in a multi-faceted way, analysis of her language revealed English to be “dominant”. She has more control and linguistic complexity in English than Spanish, and defaults to English to explain complicated ideas.

In the classroom, Juliet is likely to respond to people in the language she is addressed in. When her DLI classroom teacher spoke to her, she would answer in Spanish, even if the reply was, “No sé”. When addressed by a classmate in English she would respond as spoken to, except when she would attempt to translate to the other language on behalf of a peer. Twice while translating—once from English to Spanish, then again from Spanish to English—I observed Juliet code switch mid-translation (“She wants you to put down the marcadora”, and then, “dame the marker”).  These intra-sentential switches were common in Juliet’s language, with both peers and adults. It was witnessed in purely social language, but primarily in settings where one or more school-related vocabulary word was being used. In fact it was hard to get a “pure” language sample from Juliet. In every language sample (accept one)I took Juliet displayed code-switching, linguistic blending, copying or semantic extensions.  

The language sample I was able obtain almost entirely in English involved a lot of modeling in that language. After “switching” our English hat, Juliet describes her drawing with great linguistic complexity, varied sentence structure, and technical language related to the content area. She qualifies as a level 6 because of her Native English Language label (she is not qualified as an ESL student), and demonstrates abilities as such. While the one sample I found was free of linguistic transfer, most of the samples I obtained were peppered with individual Spanish words or phrases ("We don't [clean the room] because we have to, we do it so we can get un minuto mas. And if we do it, if we get to the alfombra, you have to give us un minuto mas"). This indicates to me that in some moments, Juliet has the Spanish vocabulary more close at hand than the English. I think this was especially true in talking about writing and classroom vocabulary (the colors of her drawing, for example).

Juliet’s Spanish language sample shows a willingness to use the language when vocabulary is readily available and she is in a familiar context (colors, animals, directions to do next). With me, she wasn’t as open to producing language in Spanish, but we only met a few weeks ago. With her peers, her classroom teacher, and especially in response to Spanish prompts, she is more likely to try out her Spanish. When she uses her Spanish she often copies syntax from English. She shows partial grasp of gender and plural agreement ("este" for "estes", "la palabras", "la osito"). She also used improper verb conjugation occasionally (tieno/tengo, esto/estoy). Her discourse patterns stayed fairly child-like and playful (lots of "ah-ha!' noises and such), but otherwise typically English-speaking and linear. She was likely to swap single phrases or words intra-sententially between languages, especially after hearing the vocabulary used in a model. In spontaneous discourse, Juliet would do the same ("En Rango. Es una, es una, es una movie."). She often repeats her words a few times before switching back to English, indicating that she is actively searching her Spanish vocabulary ("No es malo, pero es also, es also--como se dice mayor? El alcalde es malo, too.)

Her attempts only revealed one shot at an extended sentence, and her vocabulary stayed high-frequency and concrete. She was able to follow multi-step directions in Spanish but categorization was difficult. For these reasons I think of Juliet as a level 2, beginning, Spanish speaker.  Her language control did feel very fluent (again--when the complexity and vocab were well known, and with peers or trusted community members), however, leading me to believe that Juliet is on the edge of a level 3 language development level.