The language used to perform cognitive operations during full- immersion maths tasks

Abstract

Thirty-two students were selected from the third to sixth grade at a Spanish full-immersion school in St Paul. A team of five investigators collected data from the pupils over a five-month period: 1) verbal report; 2) questionnaire data about the pupils' abilities, attitudes and preferences with regard to thinking in Spanish and using Spanish as a vehicle for communication with peers and adults; 3) insights from classroom observation regarding language use patterns in the process of doing the particular task; and 4) background information on the selected learners, including achievement test scores available from the school office, the learners' school grades, sociolinguistic information on their exposure to Spanish language out of class, and so forth.

The findings revealed that, for the immersion students under study, English seemed at times to play a more prominent role in their internal language environment than Spanish. In responding to both numerical and verbal problems in maths, students reported favouring English in their cognitive processing and were also observed to be doing so. They read the problem in Spanish but would shift to English immediately or as soon as they had some conceptual difficulty. These findings may provide some contribu tion to the gaps that have been noted in the spoken and written output of immersion pupils.