ABSTRACT
Recent statistics show that despite recent economic downturn in many countries around the world, international migration is still growing. In the United States, the foreign-born population reached about 38.1 million in 2007 with legal immigration flow standing at 1,107,126 annually (Papademetriou and Terrazas, 2009). In the same period, other modern industrial countries including Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Germany, France, and Norway also continued to admit historically high number of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East (Ben-David, 2009). According to UNDP (2010), by mid-2010 there were about 200 million international migrant workers and their families who had chosen voluntarily to reside outside their country of birth for employment and education, in addition to 15 million refugees who had been forced to move across borders for fear of persecution or violence in their country of origin. Accompanying the persistent upward trends in international migration are the persistent
economic mobility and integration problems troubling the receiving countries. One of the major barriers to successful integration of the immigrants into the host country is immigrants’ language acquisition, as the ability to speak and write in the target language in the host culture is a basic step to enable them to participate in the life of the host culture, further their education, get a job, obtain health care and other social services, and apply for citizenship (Portes and Rumbaut 2006). Lack of target language proficiency has been noted to contribute to a myriad of problems for both government agencies and workplaces in providing services and creating work for them in the host countries as well as to immigrants themselves in their adaption to new life styles and cultures. Further, with historically high inflows of immigrants, the schools in a number of receiving countries are also experiencing a sudden and steep rise in the numbers of children of these immigrants. To these children, to succeed in school and beyond also depends on their proficiency in the language of instruction. Therefore, to immigrants and their children, language acquisition plays a key role in their integration into the host culture. While much research has focused on immigrants’ language acquisition in different countries
or regions, little is known on the issues and trends across international contexts. In this chapter, drawing on research studies conducted in international settings, I review findings on immigrants’ language acquisition. Given the magnitude of the field and the limited space here, I have chosen to do a conceptual review by describing how researchers frame and investigate issues
concerning immigrant language acquisition to gain new insights of the field. I have identified four diverse but interrelated theoretical perspectives that researchers used to frame their investigations: the individual perspective, the contextual perspective, the human capital perspective, and the ethnicity perspective. The individual perspective examines how individual factors and characteristics such as age at migration, length of residence, education level, and gender affect destination language acquisition and development. The contextual perspective investigates factors such as the familial context and the contexts of countries of origin and destination on immigrant language acquisition. The human capital perspective sees language acquisition as an act of personal and economic investment and examines the economic returns and earnings brought about by immigrants’ investments in learning the destination language. Finally, the ethnicity perspective associates immigrant destination language acquisition with their ethnic identity and commitment. This line of research mainly addresses how immigrant settlement patterns in relation to ethnic networks and group size affect destination language acquisition. For each perspective, exemplars of work that reflect that perspective are reviewed.
