As Vygotsky (1986) concludes in his seminal work Thought and Language, “A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness” (p. 246). Even without an in-depth understanding of science and only the most popular appreciation of the police procedural be it Sherlock Holmes or CSI, it is easy to see how a single cell can relate to the whole organism. But how can a word be a microcosm of human consciousness? The purpose of this study was to explore exactly that: premise, whether words reflect the lived experience of not only a person, but of a group of people, by documenting the lived experience of children in the phenomena of foreign language immersion in school (FLIIS). Using corpus linguistic techniques to analyze the nature of these children’s lexical development as well as the relationship of the perceptions of their fluency on their second language (L2) production, this study found that in order to understand the essence of what it means for a child to express him/herself fluently in his/her L2, one must understand how language functions as a transparent medium for these children and shift one’s thinking from an additive idea of language (L1, L2, L3) to the idea of interlingual consciousness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-3593 |
| Date | 18 May 2018 |
| Creators | Adelman-Cannon, Laura E. |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UNO |
| Source Sets | University of New Orleans |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ |
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