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The Role of Prefabricated Language in Young Children's Second Language Acquisition

Abstract This study investigates how young learners of English as a second language become both capable of socializing in and linguistically creative in English, through the use of prefabricated language (PL). Four preschool Japanese children in two-way immersion programs were observed from the stages of single-word to multi-word utterances. Along with journals kept by the observer and the subjects' parents, each subject's conversations in school were tape recorded once a week. The utterances were transcribed and coded according to the definitions of PL, analyzed PL and creative language. The utterances of peers and teachers were examined to determine if interactions enhanced PL analysis. The results show that most of the novel sentences were constructed from PL or analyzed PL, but not from the free combination of words. Although the study did not find clear evidence that no internal process was necessary for the creative process, it implies that there is an important role for PL as a scaffold for linguistic creativity. The study provides pedagogical implications for the use and analysis of PL in immersion classrooms.