THE CULVER CITY SPANISH IMMERSION PROGRAM: HOW DOES SUMMER RECESS AFFECT SPANISH SPEAKING ABILITY?

This study looks at one aspect of second-language mastery in depth: patterns of foreign language retention among young children after being removed from a language contact situation for a period of time. The subjects were 14 Anglo children from the Culver City Spanish Immersion Program, a pioneering project in American public school education. These children were immersed exclusively in Spanish during their kindergarten year. English was gradually introduced in first grade. This report deals with the effects of summer recess between first and second grade upon the spoken Spanish of the students. They were given an Oral Language Achievement Measure individually on a test-retest basis. The results showed that a summer recess of three months took its toll on Anglo children's performance in Spanish. Utterances became shorter; at least one grammatical class (prepositions) was used slightly less while another (verbs) became more prominent; the children made more errors proportionate to what they said; problems with article/adjective agreement not only persisted, but in the case of the definite article, shifted in nautre; the ser verb began to be used more than estar when children were in doubt; and inflection for person in present tense indicative verbs continued to cause minor problems.