For this assignment you are required to find and annotate at least 3 articles on one side of your issue and 3 articles that take a contrary position. Each annotation should be at least a half page in length for a total of 3 pages (double-spaced) minimum. We suggest that you use this assignment to balance your issue and to formulate how you will approach the topic in your paper. Below is an example of an annotation.

CUMMINS, JIM. 1983. Language proficiency and academic achievement. In Issues in language teaching research. ed. by John Oller. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House.

        Cummins (1983:108-129) posited a distinction between Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). The distinction was intended to draw attention to the very different time periods typically required by immigrant children to acquire conversational fluency in their second language as compared to grade-appropriate academic proficiency in that language. Conversational fluency is often acquired to a functional level within about two years of initial exposure to the second language whereas at least five years is usually required to catch up to native speakers in academic aspects of the second language (Collier 1987; Klesmer 1994; Cummins 1981). Failure to take account of the BICS/CALP (conversational/academic) distinction has resulted in discriminatory psychological assessment of bilingual students and premature exit from language support programs (e.g. bilingual education in the United States) into mainstream classes (Cummins 1984).

MORTIMER, JENNIFER. 2000. The Role of Explicit Memory in Supporting the Bilingual Lexicon. In LACUS Forum XXVI: The Lexicon. ed. by Alan K. Melby & Arle R. Lommel. Fullerton, California: LACUS.

        According to Jennifer Mortimer (2000), it is possible, and even suggested, that L1 and L2 acquisition rely on the same neurological structures for semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological processing. The degree to which these structures are used, however, seems to vary between the L1 and the L2 according to predictable patterns. Acquisition of the L1 seems to utilize declarative memory for semantic processing, and implicit memory for morphological and syntactic processing. L2 acquisition also utilizes explicit and implicit memory in a similar fashion, but tends to rely to a greater degree on explicit memory for morpho-syntactic processing. In a study of French/English bilinguals, “several subjects showed activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus during the second language condition, but not during the first language condition. The anterior cingulate is thought to be involved in conscious, controlled processing” (Mortimer 2000:165). The increased activation of explicit memory resources is probably from the inability to use implicit (procedural) processing as much in acquiring a second language, as the second language is generally much less automatic (Dehaene et al. 1997).