Are internal or external factors more important to young English language learners’ (YELLs’) English oral and written skills? Our study corroborated findings indicating that internal factors are more important than external factors to YELLs’ oral skills, and showed additionally that the same applies to YELLs’ written English skills.
Are internal or external factors more important to young English language learners' (YELLs') learning of English as a foreign language? According to previous studies internal factors are more important than external ones for YELLs' oral English skills (Paradis, 2011; Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro & de Bot, 2016). As part of the Dutch ORal and Written English Language Learning (ORWELL) project we investigated whether this also applies to the written skills of YELLs living in a country where English is a dominant foreign language (Booij, 2001). We measured the YELLs' (N = 250) English oral (receptive aural vocabulary size, oral completion of sentences) and written skills (decoding of written words and spelling of aurally presented words) at the end of grade 6 (age 12). The internal factors were age, gender, abstract reasoning, English phonological awareness, English phonological short-term and verbal working memory, baseline Dutch and English vocabulary, grammar, decoding and spelling skills, motivation and linguistic self-confidence. The external factors were experience with formal English education, home language(s) and extramural English exposure. All these internal and external individual factors were measured in grade 4. Backward regressions followed by hierarchal regressions separating the internal and external factors (Paradis, 2011; Sun et al., 2016) showed that significant internal factors explained a substantial proportion of the variance of vocabulary (44%), grammar (56%), decoding (76%) and spelling (69%); baseline Dutch and English skills were the significant internal predictors for both oral and written skills, and phonological short-term memory additionally for only the oral skills. Extramural English exposure explained some of the variance (9%) of only the oral skills. These results corroborate previous findings indicating that internal factors (like baseline Dutch and English skills) are more important than external factors (like extramural English exposure) to YELLs' oral English skills, but extended these findings to YELLs' English written skills.
