> I'm guessing that when you speak of children not learning their home
> (native) language in an ESL environment that you mean they don't speak it
> well. Pinker, in his book _The Language Instinct_, writes:
>
> "Surprisingly, though practice is important in training for the gymnastics
> of speaking, it may be superfluous in learning grammar. For various
> neurological reasons children are sometimes unable to articulate, but
> parents report that their comprehension is excellent" (p. 279).
>
> Similarly, although I'm not well-read in this area, I imagine that ESL
> children do internalize the rules of their parents' language and have
> normal listening comprehension, but for various reasons do not learn to
> speak it well.
Being from an immigrant family (not me personally but one generation above me) and
being active in my ethno-cultural community, I am familiar with this phenomenon.
(You also get birth-order effects: the eldest speaks the best, the youngest barely
understands anything more than simple daily living commands.) I'm not talking
about this phenomenon. That can more or less be explained away by lack of
opportunity to use the home language in multiple contexts daily in the community
and/or to develop full academic literacy in it (we go to school in English). My
personal experience with it is that I can understand WAY more Japanese than I can
speak because in listening, I am reminded of words and more complex grammar I don't
ordinarily use, and I have some level of context that I use to figure out what
people are saying, even when I don't understand every word. When I have to talk, I
have to remember all the words and all the grammar and put the whole thing together
by myself. (Luckily, my "Krashen" monitor doesn't work too well, so I'm pretty
fluent, if not always correct!)
I'm talking about kids whose parents say, "All my other kids can at least understand
our language. This one seems not to understand much, and he never says much
either. Even his younger sister can understand and speak better." They are
comparing this kid with other kids in the displaced community, so it would seem that
the usual explanation for poor development of the home language given above has
already been considered and rejected.
> For a good introduction into second language acquisition, you might read:
> Rod Ellis. 1994. _The Study of Second Language Acquisition_. Oxford UP.
>
Thanks for the ref.
Tane Akamatsu