Peer Pressure and Language Learning

Peer pressure is defined as the pressure individuals experience to adopt certain behaviors, patterns, or attitudes in order to be accepted as part of a group. Peer pressure associated with adolescence is particularly strong because during adolescence, children are seeking to fit in with their friends and differentiate themselves from their parents. This pressure to fit in may come directly from friends and schoolmates and also from the influences of music, television, and the Internet. Young people are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure because they are attempting to live up to factors they believe are favored by their peers. Eventually, this pressure exerted by others may be internalized and accepted as one's own. This search for social approval may supersede the traditional values, practices, and beliefs of the adolescents' families.

Peer pressure is not always welcome, but adolescents may elect to go along with choices made by their peers even if they may find those choices uncomfortable or distasteful. In contexts where two or more languages or language varieties are found, the choice of which language to use or learn is an area where peer pressure may play an important role.

In bilingual education settings, students come from diverse cultural backgrounds and have different needs and goals. These differences determine how certain groups may react to peer pressure. With adolescent language learners, peer pressure can be a powerful force that can (a) affect a learner's desire and ability to learn a second language, (b) determine how and when they use their ancestral language, (c) affect whether or not they engage in code switching, and (d) support or undermine goals set by parents and teachers.

For students learning English as a second language (ESL), trying to sound like a native speaker may be regarded by peers as a signal that an individual no longer wants to be a member of the native-language peer group. Bilingual education teachers need to understand second-language learners' peer pressures and be aware of the following issues: (a) What is the group's attitude toward the first and second languages involved? (b) What peer groups are influential in the school? and (c) What additional circumstances in the community environment may exert further pressures? As mentioned previously, different language groups experience peer pressures in their own way. One [Page 651]group may be very amenable to keeping and improving the home language, while another is just as likely to abandon it in the context of a subtractive bilingual education program.

Teachers and other school personnel should examine social attitudes that have the potential to cause problems in the classroom. Specific attention should be given to how the schools deal with regularities, patterns, and traditions concerning language in the community served by the school. Although it is, of course, not recommended that linguistic conventions be promoted in a heavy-handed way, the school should inform students of the importance of conventions in the languages being studied. For example, success in school requires formal styles of talking and standard varieties of English (e.g., one does not use the word ain't in a typical English class), while conversations with friends and relatives may be full of nonstandard words that are perfectly acceptable in those settings. Consequently, students whose manner of speech outside of school is valued when used in the appropriate context are more likely to be open to acquiring a second language and to continue to develop their first. Under such conditions, students are more likely to realize that any new discourse will expand their communicative repertoire rather than displace their usual method of speaking.

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