Meredith Hogan

The secondary years (middle and high school) are a period of peak development both cognitively and linguistically; one linguistic feature that develops for first-language learners at this time is subordinate clause usage. Subordinate clauses often require explicit teaching as part of students’ academic language and writing development, but what happens when students learn subordinate clauses through a second language? Do they develop this feature at the same time in both languages? Previous studies have not examined the academic language of dual-language immersion (DLI) students, but they have documented simplified verbal systems, reduced lexicons, and grammatical shortcomings from students. To promote the syntactic development of DLI middle schoolers, subordinate clause usage was examined in their written texts. Two DLI schools assigned students in 6th-8th grade a language proficiency test focused on writing. Each grade was assigned a different controversial topic to take a position on and write about it. These issues were related to topics addressed during subject matter instruction. All subordinate clauses were identified and classified according to their class type: noun, adjectival/relative, and adverbial. Change was observed across the three grade levels examined: the use of noun clauses and the temporal and comparative adverbial clauses increased, whereas the use of the object and other relative clauses and the causal, conditional, and modal adverbial clauses decreased. Like previous studies, this data suggests there is a plateau effect in L2 achievement at the secondary level. This data can be used to inform the instructional practices implemented in DLI schools with the goal of improving students’ syntactic complexity.