Literacy and Bilingualism

A Handbook for ALL Teachers

Maria Brisk, Margaret M. Harrington, Maria Estela Brisk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135601942
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This handbook applies proven techniques, derived from bilingual/bicultural classrooms, to teaching literacy in the twenty-first century. Its goal is to help teachers increase their understanding of bilingual learners in order to maximize instruction. Teachers can use this handbook to expand their understanding of literacy and bilingualism; implement literacy approaches and assess students' development; and learn through reflection.

Practical, flexible format and content. Complete and straightforward instructions, illustrated by case studies, allow teachers to use the strategies in this handbook on their own or in teacher-led study groups. They can select from the variety of approaches the ones which best match their students' needs and their own teaching style.

Student-centered focus. All of the approaches share characteristics that help motivate students of varying language abilities to develop literacy.

Field-tested approaches. The approaches have been modified and tested with bilingual students of different ages and language backgrounds in bilingual, ESL, mainstream, special education, and deaf education classes ranging from preschool through high school.

New in the Second Edition:
*five new approaches with their corresponding classroom implementation;
*additional information in each introduction addressing its theme;
*new material on issues of language, culture, and literacy development of students completely new to the English language; and
*annotated bibliographies with sample books to support literacy within language and content area classes.

Literacy and Bilingualism is intended for a broad audience of teachers in any type of classroom where bilingualism plays a role, and is an excellent text for preservice and inservice courses that prepare teachers to work with English language learners.

1
Literacy and Bilingualism

Teaching literacy to bilingual students requires an understanding of such individuals and the many variables that will affect their performance. Bilinguals function with two or more languages and negotiate more than one culture. Regardless of the language they are using at any time and how well they know it, bilinguals are still influenced by the knowledge of other language(s) as well as by their cross-cultural experience. Bilingual students perfectly fluent in English are different from native speakers of English who do not know another language or have not experienced another culture. The additional and different knowledge they bring to schools must be considered in the teachers’ perspective of the students, teaching strategies, and curricular considerations.

The circumstances of literacy acquisition for bilingual students are, in many ways, uniquely individual. Some students are already bilingual when they first encounter the written word and others are literate in their mother tongue when they first learn a second language. The age of the onset of literacy may also vary. Some children start at home before attending school, others develop literacy in kindergarten or first grade, yet others may not start literacy until later due to interruptions in their education.

Becoming biliterate involves learning the linguistic and cultural characteristics of literacy in each language and it requires coping with language and cultural differences. Additionally numerous personal, family, and situational factors affect the performance of bilingual learners. Awareness of what students must learn and the factors affecting them assists teachers working with bilinguals regardless of the curricular content and the language of instruction in their particular classroom.

To prepare themselves to work effectively with bilingual learners teachers must understand the following:

• Literacy development.
• Significance of being bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural.
• Interaction between languages in a bilingual learner.
• Knowledge needed to read and write.
• Factors affecting literacy development.

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

Literacy has been defined from different viewpoints, all of which contribute to understanding literacy development among bilinguals. Literacy has been defined in relation to context and process. “Literacy is control of secondary uses of language (i.e., uses of language in secondary discourses).”¹ Primary discourses serve for communication among intimates who share a great deal of knowledge such as family, friends, and neighbors. Secondary discourses are those used in institutions such as schools, stores, workplaces, government offices, churches, and businesses. Literacy’s functions differ according to institutional contexts. Schools require academic papers, logical discussion of issues, and comprehension of academic texts of various disciplines. In stores, literacy serves mainly for labeling and pricing. Interpreting memoranda and regulations is required in many government offices.

For some bilingual learners, these two discourses are also distinguished by language. The native language often is used only in primary discourses, and secondary discourses occur mostly in the second language. Consequently, bilingual students may not be exposed to the full range of literacy experiences in either language nor have the benefits of smooth transition from familiar to school literacy given that the discourses as well as the languages may be different.

Literacy is also defined as a psycholinguistic process including letter recognition, encoding, decoding, word recognition, sentence comprehension, and so on. Students developing literacy in two languages can learn the psycholinguistic process through one language, but must learn the specific symbol system, words, grammar, and text structure of each language.

Others believe literacy is a social practice that “assumes participation in a community that uses literacy communicatively.”² The function of literacy may be culturally defined. Differences in schools’ uses of literacy may be disconcerting to students who come from a different country. In many schools in the United States, students are expected to participate in discussions of topics incorporating their own ideas, whereas in many Latin American schools, students are expected to recite what they memorized from texts.

Bilingual learners becoming literate must learn how to use literacy in different contexts and for different purposes and how to encode and decode language. They must master these skills for each language and each cultural context.

Literacy is developmental (i.e., children get better at it with time and experience). The language for secondary discourse may start developing at home through conscious efforts of parents or family members. Literacy development at school is then a continuation and enhancement of efforts started at home. Sometimes parents inculcate their children to literacy practices familiar to them from when they went to school, which may no longer be advocated by the school.³ Mutual adjustment and understanding between home and school practices greatly enhances and facilitates literacy acquisition.⁴

Learners acquire literacy from exposure to authentic text in authentic situations. Home and public places contain much written language that becomes familiar to children. However, for some children, words they see in the environment may not be in the language they know and therefore, this written language does not assist in the natural process of literacy acquisition. An English-speaking parent can seize opportunities to teach reading while pouring juice from a bottle with the label apple juice, while crossing streets attending to the walk/don’t walk signs, or while reading with the child the name of the animals listed on the cages at the zoo. Parents who speak other languages usually lack such literacy support for their languages in their natural environment.

Students also acquire literacy through instruction in the specific psycholinguistic subprocesses. To be able to read or write, students must lern and develop automaticity in such skills as letter and wordrecognition, encoding, and decoding. Bilinguals may learn such skills in both languages. Although they may be able to apply the process and strategies learned in one language to their new language, a process called transfer, they still need to learn specific characteristics in each language.

BILINGUAL, BILITERATE, BICULTURAL

There are many reasons why students become bilingual. Many children are raised speaking a language different from the one used in school. Immigrant children need to learn the new country’s language. Deaf children learn English as a second language when they start to read and write. English-speakers learn other languages in school or as sojourners⁵ in foreign countries. Some children are raised speaking more than one language. Thus, bilingual students are defined by their experience with more than one language and culture and not by attendance in a bilingual education program.⁶

“Bilinguals know more than one language to different degrees and use these languages for a variety of purposes.”⁷ They may understand, speak, read, and write their languages very well, or they might be in the process of developing any of the language skills in either of the languages. The use of each language can vary from casual daily conversation to academic uses. Proficiency and use are closely interrelated because proficiency facilitates use and use promotes proficiency. Levels of proficiency and amount of use change for each language throughout the life of a bilingual. Intensive exposure to a second language, as in the case of immigrant children or sojourners (children who live temporarily in another country), disrupts development of the native language, which may become their weaker language. Some students study this language when they reach high school, regaining fluency.

Biliteracy is “the acquisition and learning of the decoding and encoding of and around print using two linguistic and cultural systems in order to convey messages in a variety of contexts.”⁸ Bilinguals can have different degrees of biliteracy. When evaluating literacy of bilingual students it is important to distinguish between literacy (i.e., being able to function as a literate person in either language), and specific proficiency to read and write in a particular language. A group of firstgraders are at grade level in literacy, as well as in proficiency, in both languages if they read at grade level in both languages. On the other hand, if eighth graders can only read first-grade level books in English, while they can read eighthgrade content-area books in Chinese, they have an eighth-grade level of literacy, but only a beginner level reading proficiency in English.

Literacy skills are acquired only once through one language and then applied to the new language. Thus, literacy ability in one language supports the acquisition of literacy in another.⁹ Learners who recognize the benefits of knowing one language in acquiring literacy skills in the other become more proficient in literacy skills in the second language.¹⁰

Because languages are not alike, learners need to acquire the idiosyncrasies of the new language. Literate students have the concept of decoding, know that different genres require different text structures, and so on. They do not have to learn everything, just the subtleties that distinguish the languages. Different languages have different rules. Although business letters written in Spanish and in English will have a heading, body, and salutation, the organization of the body greatly differs. A letter written by a Latin American will start with something personal to establish a relationship before going to the business matter. When composing a letter, an American will go straight to the purpose of the letter.

Students acquiring literacy in two languages simultaneously may learn literacy skills through either and then apply them to the opposite language. For example, Arabic students in Israel learning to write in both Arabic and Hebrew learned the process approach to writing in their Hebrew as a second language class and then applied these skills to writing in Arabic.

Bilinguals’ knowledge of the cultures and ability to function in the cultural contexts of these languages greatly vary. Contact with a new culture challenges once firmly held beliefs and behaviors. Some bilinguals flow naturally between the cultures, whereas others may reject one of the cultures.

Culture influences literacy uses and values, prior knowledge, text organization, and connotation of words. Students learn the uses and values of literacy from their experiences in their culture. When confronted with another culture, they need to learn and understand new values andsolve possible conflicts.¹¹ For example, Christina, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, was always amazed at her Vietnamese students’ concern for their penmanship. Penmanship is a highly valued component of literacy within the Vietnamese education.

Bilingual students bring to the class all the knowledge acquired through their cultural experiences. These relate both to the parents’ ancestral culture and the students’ own life experiences. When the content of texts or the topics of writings are familiar and interesting to learners, they are more successful in reading and writing. When students are working in their second language, choosing familiar topics can have a dramatic effect on their performance. For example, a group of sixth-grade immigrant students who had been characterized by their mainstream teacher as timid and with limited English proficiency, surprised their teacher and English-speaking colleagues when they read and discussed the book Guests and wrote about their own experiences as immigrants. With experience and increased language knowledge, students can then venture into writing about new and less familiar topics.

Culture dictates the organization of text.¹² When asked to provide a written description of their students, a Mexican teacher wrote an essay containing factual information as well as her feelings toward the children; a Korean teacher provided a succinct, numbered list of characteristics; and an American teacher wrote a factual description. Biliterate writers need to understand the cultural context of their audience to determine the text structure they need to use. Biliterate readers need to understand the cultural context of the writer to set their expectations for text organization.

Word connotations are defined by the cultural context. Students who do not know the culture miss the full meaning of words. When asked to give associations to the word creature, a group of Japanese students gave the word being. In the reading, the author’s intended meaning was of a monster. The Japanese students lost the sense of the sentence by not knowing this added meaning often used in the American culture.

Being bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural is a balancing act that needs support from teachers and families. Often students feel that one language is competing with the other rather than assisting it. Obtaining fluency and accuracy in two languages is hard work, but it can be highly beneficial in a world of increasing multilingual encounters. For students who live a bilingual reality it is best to nurture both languages and cultures.

INTERACTION BETWEEN THE LANGUAGES

Language choice, codeswitching, and the use of both languages when performing literacy activities, regardless of the language of the text, are natural phenomena among bilinguals. The fact that bilinguals use both languages is not evidence of confusion, but just...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1. LITERACY AND BILINGUALISM
• 2. WORKING EFFECTIVELY WITH BILINGUAL STUDENTS
• 3. APPROACHES WITH FOCUS ON WRITING
• 4. APPROACHES WITH FOCUS ON READING
• 5. APPROACHES WITH FOCUS ON ORAL DISCOURSE
• 6. APPROACHES WITH FOCUS ON LANGUAGE
• 7. LITERACY IN THE CONTENT AREAS
• 8. INDIVIDUALIZED AND SMALL GROUP INSTRUCTION WITH SUPPORT OF TUTORS
• 9. LEARNING FROM STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE
• APPENDIX A: PROTOCOL TO GATHER INFORMATION ABOUT LEARNERS
• APPENDIX B: BOOKS WITH MULTICULTURAL THEMES
• APPENDIX C: POPULAR BOOKS TAUGHT IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSES
• APPENDIX D: BOOKS TO SUPPLEMENT CONTENT AREA INSTRUCTION FOR ELL STUDENTS
• APPENDIX E: ASSESSMENT PRACTICES
• REFERENCES
• STUDENTS’ BOOK REFERENCES
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS