Notes on Generation 1.5

• "In-migrants" from US territories such as Puerto Rico
• "Parachute" kids (kids who are "dropped off" by often wealthy parents to stay with older siblings and receive education in U.S., who may have disorganized home life with no parental supervison)
• Children of transnational families, who experience back and forth migration
• U.S. born children of immigrants in linguistic enclave communities
• Immigrants who speak other "Englishes" (i.e .English from Jamaica, East India or Singapore)

• Approximately 20% will shift to English dominance within the first 5 years of US residency;
• 40% will switch within the first 10 years, and;
• 66% will switch within the first 20 years.
• Some may never switch.

• In K-12, they move from English Learners (EL) to Limited English Proficient (LEP) to Fully English Proficient (FEP), often too early: they have BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills)--social language/oral, but not CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Skills)--academic language/text-based.
• Often attend large, under-funded inner-city schools.

1. Their English competence goes through a long "interlanguage" stage in which it may gradually approximate native-like English (experience frequent periods of backsliding, as interlanguge "reorganizes" itself)
2. Their linguistic performance may be highly uneven, with some domains highly developed and others quite weak.
3. The rate of acquisition and ultimate attainment of English proficiency will vary greatly from individual to individual: some will fossilize at an earlier stage of language development while others may attain near native-like English proficiency.

1. They acquire much of their English through informal oral/aural interaction with friends, classmates, and co-workers (very often community dialect speakers) through interaction with English-dominant siblings and members of the extended family, and of course passive input from radio and TV.
2. As oral/aural dominant they may not notice nonsalient grammatical features, and thus these features never become part of their language repertoire. (They may use incorrect verb forms, word forms, confuse count/non count nouns, plurals, articles, prepositions, etc. Example: don't see the difference between "confident" vs "confidence")
3. In their speech they rely heavily on context and other pragmatic features of discourse rather than syntactic and morphological specificity. (Use body language, intonation, facial expression etc. to make themselves understood. Communicating in writing may be frustrating because lack these cues. Proofreading is difficult--may not be able to "hear" mistakes.)
4. They become highly proficient communicators, but face difficulty when confronted with academic writing tasks that demand a high level of grammatical accuracy.
5. Oral/aural learners generally lack the "meta-language" and grammatical terminology necessary for understanding explanations of their grammar errors. (So when teachers talk about progressive verbs or gerunds, for example, student may look blank.)