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Why and How Grammar Matters for Post-puberty Immigrants with Limited Formal Schooling

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English and Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 54))

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Abstract

Grammar provides a basis for oral proficiency and reading comprehension. Research indicates that second language learners—regardless of educational background and age—follow similar developmental routes. In this chapter, we explore the wealth of research from over more than half a century on the acquisition of grammar by post-puberty immigrants with and without formal schooling. To accomplish this, we cover seminal studies of older learners with varying levels of formal education and recent studies of immigrants with little or no formal education acquiring English or Italian. The cross-linguistic comparison between English and Italian shows the developmental progression in their acquisition of morphosyntax through comparable stages, even when one language is more highly inflected than the other. In both English and Italian, learners’ subconscious application of mental mechanisms to the input they receive prompts their creative construction of a new language, even after puberty. In understanding the processes responsible, practitioners can see how learners’ errors are a natural and encouraging sign of learners’ progression towards higher levels of second language (L2) competence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At the international level, those past the age of compulsory schooling who may or may not be students, are known as LESLLA learners, based on the organization by that name—Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (see www.leslla.org). For the purposes of this chapter, we consider any learner aged 13 and over to fit the demographics of those we focus on. In this chapter, we use the SLIFE acronym to refer to these LESLLA learners and at times we also use ‘adult’.

  2. 2.

    The term ‘interlanguage’ was introduced in Selinker (1972) to refer to the mental system an L2 learner uses at a given point during their development. This system is influenced by their native language, by the target language they are learning, and by much the same universals we observe to be in operation during child language acquisition.

  3. 3.

    For more information, see https://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile and https://www.unistrapg.it/profilo_lingua_italiana/site/index.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Egle Mocciaro

  2. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Martha Young-Scholten

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  1. Egle Mocciaro
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  1. The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Luis Javier Pentón Herrera

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Mocciaro, E., Young-Scholten, M. (2022). Why and How Grammar Matters for Post-puberty Immigrants with Limited Formal Schooling. In: Pentón Herrera, L.J. (eds) English and Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86963-2_18

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