Fourth Grade Analysis Essay

Grade analysis results show that school success in Croatian and English is very good, but through years of schooling that success slowly decreases. This is especially emphasized in the fourth grade, where the fall in success is the most obvious. Teachers attribute that to the development phase that children are in. Moreover, they say it is due to more difficult curriculum in the fourth grade.
The survey shows that students are highly motivated for different activities in the class. There is the slight difference in English and Croatian. Students rank reading very high, both in English and Croatian. Listening and speaking are in the middle position. Conversation is better ranked in the English than in the Croatian class. The main difference is that students like to write more in the Croatian class than in the English class.
Students say that Croatian helps them to better understand the foreign language and they find it useful when the English teacher speaks sometimes in the mother tongue. Bates and Whiney [11] in their competition model also advocate that the mother tongue have a significant influence in learning the foreign language because students often try to find language equivalents in their mother tongue and confide in the language rules of the mother tongue. So, before learning the foreign language they have the language awareness developed that helps them draw parallels between languages and see the differences.
Most of hypotheses of the research are confirmed: Croatian and English parallel learning does not decrease language acquiring, but enhances it and encourages language development processes because the brain receives more information in bilinguals and makes a complex network of information that support one another. This is visible in the grade analysis which confirms very good success in both