| The development of a culturally dominant language that is different from one's primary language incorporates acquiring the language in a sociocultural, linguistic, academic, and cognitive manner, in addition to acquiring its structure and pronunciation. The design for this study is qualitative in nature. This particular study sought to identify those elements considered as being influential to the successful acquisition of English as a second language through a process of interviewing participants with a primary language other than English, who have themselves attained high levels of proficiency in English. Through the use multi-vocal methodology that includes an interview and follow-up contact, information garnered from the participants was analyzed for themes of influential elements found to be in common among the participants. These themes were further assigned a designation of either primary or minor importance, based on the degree given them by the participants in the post-interview follow-up contact. Only those participants who talked about the identified themes were allowed to rank the theme's level of importance. After the response data from the second follow-up contact had been analyzed and themes of elements perceived as being influential to the second language acquisition process had been identified, these themes were organized according to whether they fell into the natural categories of affective, instructional, or environmental factors. In addition to the level of importance ranking given by the participants to each theme, the themes in each category were further defined as being of either a controllable or non-controllable factor in regard to each category in order to provide the highest level of insight as to which themes may present the field with the most usable program design elements. The label "controllable" pertained to those themes which could be manipulated by an outside agent, such as room arrangement, group settings, amount of TV time, and so on. "Non-controllable" themes were be those that offered no level of manipulation to an outside agent, such as gender, age of acquisition, and level of exposure to the primary language at home. |
