CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- If 6-year old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez were to settle permanently in the United States, by the time he reached adulthood, he would relate his horrific ordeal in fluent English. Elian's fluency primarily would be a result of sociological opportunities (length of residence in the United States and educational attainment) and maturational constraints tied to age at onset of language learning -- in his case, as a young child.
So says Gillian Stevens, the author of a new study of second language (L2) acquisition among foreign-born residents in the United States. Proficiency in a second language among adults is strongly related to age at immigration, said Stevens, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois. That was the "overarching conclusion" of her study.
"Age at immigration streams immigrants into different life paths, which have strong consequences for their levels of proficiency in English later in life," said Stevens, who used 1990 U.S. census data to investigate the relationship between age at onset of second language learning and self-reported levels of English-language proficiency among foreign-born adults in the United States. Results of the study were published in a recent issue of Language in Society.
Previous research by sociologists has attributed immigrants' acquisition of English strictly to social and demographic factors -- opportunities and motivations tied to age at entry into a new country, while linguists doing similar research have argued that L2 acquisition is governed by maturational constraints that may be biologically based. Stevens found that both sets of factors play a role in immigrants' second language acquisition.
Study respondents ranged in age from 18 to 40, and on average had been in the United States for a dozen years. More than half completed at least one year of schooling in the United States; more than half were married, some 20 percent of them living with a native-born spouse. Most of the residents were employed, and one-fourth were enrolled in school at the time of the census.
Stevens found that contrary to conventional wisdom, children do not "anglicize" the household and teach or introduce their parents to English. On the other hand, immigrants with native-born spouses report higher levels of proficiency in English than those who are not married or those who are married to a foreign-born spouse who shares the respondent's non-English language.
Immigrants from Spanish-language countries reported lower levels of proficiency in English than immigrants from other non-anglophone countries. More highly educated immigrants reported higher levels of proficiency in English than less educated immigrants. Foreign-born adults who completed at least some schooling in the United States were 1.5 times as likely to report a higher level of English proficiency than those who completed their formal education before entering the United States.
Journal
Language in Society