The Social Presence of School Languages and Their Effects on the Development of Immigrant Students' Linguistic Proficiency. An Empirical Study in Catalonia

Study of the key variables related to school language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual contexts has resurfaced due to the influx of immigrant students in Spain's educational system. In this sense, because of its unique sociolinguistic situation, Catalonia has become a perfect observatory for the study of language acquisition in immigrant students. This paper reports part of the data obtained in the assessment of the linguistic performance in Catalan and Spanish of 668 immigrant students attending 6th grade in 57 schools in Catalonia. The aim is to study the effects of the social presence of school languages and their uses in the linguistic proficiency of immigrant students in Catalonia. The main hypothesis is that immigrant students' linguistic proficiency in written Catalan and Spanish depends on the opportunities they have to develop conversational skills in those languages in the social context. Or, in other words, their proficiency depends on the opportunities they have to use the target languages in informal communicative exchanges with peers and adults inside and outside school. The conclusions point out interrelationships between the development of conversational skills and cognitive/academic language proficiency (Cummins, 1979b) and indicate that immigrants' proficiency in written Catalan and Spanish is related with each person's prior level of conversational skills in both languages. It is suggested that the transfer of cognitive/academic language skills between Catalan and Spanish does not occur directly but depends on the languages' social presence in the social context and uses. Thus, as a large number of immigrant students fail to develop enough proficiency in conversational skills in Catalan or Spanish, the process of second language acquisition takes them more than six years.