Factors of dual-language tasks affecting the academic performance of bilingual fourth-grade students

This repeated-measures counterbalanced study explored the effect of language-switching on fourth-grade Hispanic bilingual students' academic performance. Oral retell tasks simulated the common classroom activity of listening followed by oral summarization. The Listening and Oral Retell Competence (LORC) measure involved listening to a recorded expository passage followed by oral retell. The randomly selected sample of 36 respondents were individually administered four tasks, two single-language and two dual-language. The single-language tasks involved listening and retell in the same language, one task in Spanish and one in English. The dual-language tasks involved listening in one language and retell in the other: listening in Spanish followed by retell in English, or listening in English followed by retell in Spanish. In addition, debriefing allowed for an investigation of students' personal responses to both single- and dual-language retell tasks. Also examined was the relationship of dual-language performance to teachers' judgements of students' classroom competence, as indicated by the Academic Bilingual Competence (ABC) rating scale, which was developed specifically for this study. Conducted over a 6-week period, the assessments for this study took place at three elementary school sites with 7 bilingual/ESL classrooms. The results did not substantiate that dual- vs. single-language tasks affect retell performance differently. The findings hinted that dual-language tasks may be slightly more demanding, but no consistent trend emerged. Debriefing results suggested that dual-language tasks posed more problems, particularly with word difficulty, than did single-language tasks. Interestingly, single-language performance in the native language alone was a strong predictor of dual-language ability and of classroom competence, supporting the importance of students' native language in language transfer and in academic achievement. The importance of students' native language is a substantive finding and supports researchers' claims that native language skills provide an important foundation for the development of second-language skills, which together facilitate academic success.