CHILDREN’S ESTONIAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT DURING A YEAR

Abstract

Estonia is currently in the process of transitioning the education system to Estonian as the sole medium of instruction. Several pilot projects with the aim to support Estonian language learning in day nurseries and upper secondary schools have been started. However, there is not much empirical data on how Estonian as a second language acquisition takes place: which categories are acquired in which order, what kind of role input and age of onset play in the acquisition process. There is no research that would cover learning Estonian as a second language during a certain time period in a child’s development from the point of view of language categories and forms. Also, no methodology has been tested for studying and assessing the grammar skills of children. In SLA studies (De Wilde et al. 2021; Jia, Fuse, 2007; Unsworth et al. 2014) it has been found that the more a student receives input (also cumulatively) the more successful he/she will be. De Wilde et al. (2021) have found that in addition to traditional language classes primary school children also need contextual contact with the language. Language learning is more successful if the child has other opportunities besides the language class to speak the target language. The amount and frequency of contact with the language are important in vocabulary learning (N. Ellis 2002; Puimège, Peters 2019). Hearing the L2 often also supports the acquisition of grammar forms (van Zeeland, Schmitt 2013). Contextual language learning is of great importance, especially in the acquisition of verbs because they need a situative environment (Puimège, Peters 2019). Differentiating the instruction means choosing the activities based on the needs of the students (Blaz 2006; Chamot 2012). Earlier studies have shown that although the need to differentiate is acknowledged and it is implemented, the more advanced students do not always get appropriate activities (Brevik et al. 2018; Gunnulfsen, Møller 2017). The purpose of the current study is to see how the skills in Estonian differ between two groups of learners after one year of learning when students at different language levels were all taught the same without differentiating instructions. The second goal was to test the effectiveness of the assessment tool. Each teacher participating in the programme “Professional Estonian language teacher in a multilingual classroom” chose two 7–9-year-old students who were at different levels: one student who spoke no Estonian at the beginning of the school year and one who spoke a little Estonian. The teachers evaluated the language development of 35 children using a questionnaire which was created specifically for that purpose. The questionnaire was composed of three parts: metadata, questions on general communication skills and a part about grammatical categories. The metadata included questions about the home language environment and contact with Estonian. The general communication skills part consisted of questions about managing in everyday language situations, sentence and text level skills, as well as the ability to describe things. These were evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale. The Estonian Language Institute’s grammatical category list for the pre-A1 level was utilized for evaluating the grammatical skills. In this part the teachers had to evaluate children’s abilities to understand and use certain grammatical forms (verb and noun forms, phrase types and word formation). A picture was used to ask questions to check for understanding and for the ability to use grammatical categories. When analysing data, the children were divided into two groups: those who spoke no Estonian at the beginning of the school year (18 children) and those who spoke some Estonian at the beginning of the school year (17 children). Most of the children in the study spoke Russian at home (27 out of 35). There were also 4 bilingual children (3 Estonian-Russian, 1 Russian-Armenian) and a Polish-speaking child, a Ukrainian-speaking child and an English-speaking child. 27% of the children started having contact with Estonian upon entering primary school at age 7. And except for the bilingual children, the rest had initial contact during the daycare years (between ages two and six). For 11 children school was the only place where they had contact with the Estonian language. When analyzing students’ general communication skills, the data showed that they were able to repeat words and expressions with only a few mistakes. The children were also able to use polite expressions without making many mistakes. They were also able to express commands somewhat better than they were able to ask questions, but both groups made mistakes often. The sentence formation, description and storytelling abilities of both groups were at a level where many mistakes were made and the teachers evaluated their abilities to handle everyday communications situations as meager. The differences in all the skills between the groups were not statistically significant. As we can see from the results, the skills of the children who did not speak Estonian at the beginning of the school year had improved, while the same cannot be said about the group who was more advanced at the beginning of the school year. Their language skills were not much better in any of the categories than the skills of the children with a weaker starting position. This result confirmed the importance of differentiating instruction, as mentioned in earlier studies, and supported the view that this influences mostly the students who are at a better starting position (see Subban 2006; Tomlinson 2001b). In the acquisition of the grammatical categories studied, the results showed that the children understood all the grammatical categories and forms, phrasal types and most common phrasal verbs and compound words at the pre-A1 level. However, they were only able to use a few of the forms. From the noun categories, the students can only use the singular nominative form. In regard to the verb forms, children know how to use first person and third person present indicative forms. We could not determine the usage skills for phrasal types, phrasal verbs and compound words. In some cases, it was difficult to determine if the results were low in some categories because the children had not acquired a certain form or construction or because there were problems with the assessment tool. The assessment tool was suitable for evaluating the understanding of grammatical categories, but in some cases problems were detected in evaluating the usage of certain grammatical categories. Often the children gave answers which were appropriate responses, but did not contain the form that was being evaluated. For example, many answers contained only one part of the phrase being evaluated. Hence, while the assessment tool worked for evaluating understanding of grammatical structures, it needs to be improved for evaluating their usage.