Middle School Emergent Bilingual Migrant Students and the Encoding of Spanish-English Cognates

Abstract

The assessment data in La Frontera School District suggests a need for improving instructional practices for middle school emergent bilingual migrant students’ language and reading development. One possible solution to the language and literacy issues maybe introducing cognates. Cognates are words with identical or similar orthography and meaning and come from the Latin, Greek, French etymology. My study focuses on the encoding of cognates. Words may be encoded in many different ways (e.g., word frequency, semantically, and grammatically). Wickens (1970) studied the ways people encode words in their short-term memory. No studies since then have been conducted on encoding Spanish-English cognates. The purpose was to measure middle school emergent bilingual migrant students’ ability to encode Spanish and English cognates in comparison to noncognates. The study used a matched-treatment by match-subjects design using experimental and control groups with 40 middle school emergent bilingual students. The study had two phases: the concept learning trial and the recall trials. In the concept learning trials, I presented the participants with 2 words, a cognate, and a non-cognate. The answer was the cognate. In phase 2, the recall trials, I presented the participants with the same words from the concept-learning trials, but the words were presented in different orders. The first research question was “Will emergent bilingual migrant students encode between the Spanish-English cognates and their respective Spanish and English noncognate words during the concept learning trials?” The results showed the mean number of words correctly answered for the cognate words was 21.25 compared to the mean of 14.65 words for the noncognate words. The results were statistically significant by a two-way sign test and a two-way ANOVA. The second question was the same for the recall trials?” The mean for the participants in the Spanish cognate experimental group was 26.7 and a mean of 23.1 for the noncognate control group. The results were all statistically significant. The results of the study suggest that emergent bilingual students use their home language, Spanish, to encode unfamiliar words in English. These results suggests that teachers need to include instruction about cognates consistently across the curriculum to assist emergent bilinguals in developing their two languages.