The Threshold Hypothesis Applied to Three Languages in Contact at School

This study was designed to investigate whether the threshold level hypothesis (Cummins, 1976, 1979) could be applied to a three-language-in-contact school situation. The learning of three languages at school is becoming more and more commonplace throughout the world, some cases in Europe being reviewed. One of these three-language-in-contactschoolsituations is that of the Basque Country, a bilingual Community wherein both Basque and Spanish are official languages, and therefore taught at school. English is taught as a foreign language. The sample was made up of 252 students; 126 of them enrolled in Grade 5 (10-11-year-olds) and who were in their second year of learning English at school, and 126 enrolled in Grade 8 (13-14-year-olds) and who were in their third year of learning English at school. The participants completed Basque, English, and Spanish tests, as well as a background questionnaire and Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. The dependant variable was measured via a test of metalinguistic abilitie...

[1]  L. Ricciardelli,et al.  Bilingualism and cognitive development in relation to threshold theory , 1992, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[2]  Carolyn Kessler,et al.  Cognitive Development in Bilingual Environments , 1982 .

[3]  R. Diaz.  Bilingual Cognitive Development: Addressing Three Gaps in Current Research , 1985 .

[4]  J. Cenoz,et al.  Teaching english in primary school: A project to introduce a third anguage to eight year olds , 1994 .

[5]  Rene Merino.  The effects of L1 and L2 instruction on the metalinguistic awareness of Spanish-speaking children , 1983 .

[6]  L. Göncz,et al.  Exposure to Two Languages in the Preschool Period: Metalinguistic Development and the Acquisition of Reading. , 1991 .

[7]  Edward A. De Avila,et al.  Bilingualism and Cognition: Some Recent Findings , 1979 .

[8]  C. Baker.  Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism , 1993 .

[9]  Kenji Hakuta,et al.  Subject-specific and task-specific characteristics of metalinguistic awareness in bilingual children , 1988 .

[10]  W. Lambert,et al.  Trilingual Education for Majority-Language Children. , 1983 .

[11]  J. Cummins,et al.  Orientation to Language in Ukrainian-English Bilingual Children. , 1978 .

[12]  N. Lebrun,et al.  Trilingual Education in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , 1991 .

[13]  Jacqueline Thomas,et al.  The role played by metalinguistic awareness in second and third language learning , 1988 .

[14]  James Cummins.  The Influence of Bilingualism on Cognitive Growth: A Synthesis of Research Findings and Explanatory Hypotheses. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 9. , 1976 .

[15]  M. Gulutsan.  Third Language Learning. , 1976 .

[16]  C. Hoffmann.  Language acquisition in two trilingual children , 1985 .

[17]  Craig W. Nickisch,et al.  European Models of Bilingual Education , 1994 .

[18]  B. Mclaughlin,et al.  Novices and experts: An information processing approach to the “good language learner” problem , 1986, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[19]  The Relation of Local and Foreign Languages to National Needs in Africa. , 1992 .

[20]  J. Cenoz,et al.  The role of bilingualism in foreign language acquisition: Learning English in the Basque country , 1992 .

[21]  M. Swain,et al.  A longitudinal study of bilingual and cognitive development(1) , 1976 .

[22]  Nando Mäsch.  The German Model of Bilingual Education. , 1993 .

[23]  J. Cummins,et al.  Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children , 1979 .

[24]  Jasone Cenoz,et al.  Beyond Bilingualism: Multilingualism and Multilingual Education. Multilingual Matters Series. , 1998 .

[25]  Marianne Sanders,et al.  English as L3 in the elementary school , 1995 .

[26]  Gillian Sankoff,et al.  2. Language Use in Multilingual Societies: Some Alternate Approaches , 1980 .

[27]  Joseph H. Danks,et al.  The effect of bilingualism on cognitive ability: A test of the level of bilingualism hypothesis , 1995, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[28]  M. Byram,et al.  Bicultural and trilingual education : the Foyer Model in Brussels , 1990 .

[29]  D. Hart,et al.  The role of mother tongue literacy in third language learning , 1990 .

[30]  D. Edwards,et al.  Bilingualism, literacy and meta‐linguistic awareness in preschool children , 1988 .