Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family
eBook - ePub

Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family

Xiao-lei Wang

Share book
  1. 200 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family

Xiao-lei Wang

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This book is a guide for parents who wish to raise children with more than one language and literacy. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, as well as the experiences of parents of multilingual children, this book walks parents through the multilingual reading and writing process from infancy to adolescence. It identifies essential literacy skills at each developmental stage and proposes effective strategies that facilitate multiliteracy, in particular, heritage-language literacy development in the home environment. This book can also be used as a reference for teachers who teach in community heritage language schools and in school heritage (or foreign) language programmes.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family by Xiao-lei Wang in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2011
ISBN
9781847694997

Chapter 1
Introduction

On a recent flight from Seoul to Shanghai, I sat near a 5-year-old Korean girl, Choon-Hee and her mother, Mrs Pak. The mother and daughter were on their way to join the girl’s father in China. They planned to settle there because of Mr Pak’s job relocation. During the nearly 2-hour plane ride, little Choon-Hee was keenly making drawings and experimenting with different ways of forming Korean Hangul1 letters and Hanja (Chinese characters). From time to time, Mrs Pak modelled the details of how to write Hangul letters and Hanja strokes. The mother and the child seemed to enjoy immensely what they were doing.
Watching the interactions between Mrs Pak and her child, I realised that I was witnessing the little girl’s multilingual2 literacy3 development in the making. I imagined that with this level of child engagement and with this level of parental support, Choon-Hee would certainly become multiliterate in the years to come.
However, as much as I was impressed with the mother-child enthusiasm and as much as I wanted to be optimistic about the girl’s future multiliterate development, I could not help but worry if the child would remain so eager down the road and if the child’s multilingual reading and writing skills would be thriving a few years from now. My seemingly pessimistic outlook for this child’s future multilingual literacy development may not be entirely baseless. You will probably understand my concern after you read an e-mail that I received from a mother.
Dear Dr. Wang,
I am delighted to read your book Growing up with Three Languages.4 I am grateful that you shared with us your experience in raising trilingual children. Like you, I am also raising a trilingual child in Italian, Dutch and English. My native language is Dutch and my husband’s is English. We live in Italy. We have tried to teach our daughter Dutch and English at home because we don’t have support in the community where we live. We didn’t have problems getting her to speak the languages. When she was little, she was eager to learn to read and write in the two home languages. Now she is in elementary school and we have tremendous difficulties to get her read and write Dutch and English. She is just not interested. Tension has grown because we often nag her about reading Dutch and English books. The other day, she told me angrily why I bothered to request her to read English and Dutch. She said that she was reading Italian in school and that was enough! I don’t know what to do. Should I insist that my daughter read and write English and Dutch? This doesn’t look like an option right now. Should I ask her to read one of the languages? I don’t know any good strategies to involve my child. I am on the verge of giving up. But, I think it would be a pity! Dr. Wang, can you offer some advice?
Sincerely,
Anna5
Anna’s frustration is not unusual. Many parents who attended my parents’ workshops or corresponded with me have substantiated Anna’s sentiment based on their experiences of raising multilingual and multiliterate children. Below are some of their challenges and concerns.

Challenges of Developing Multilingual Literacy

Time constraints

It takes a great amount of time for a child to develop reading and writing skills in one language. Needless to say, those children who grow up with more than one language require even more time to develop the skills in multiple languages. It is already difficult for busy parents to cope with the mundane routines of their everyday lives and it is even harder for them to find time to teach their children to read and write their heritage language.6 Many parents commented that even though they wanted to engage their children in heritage language literacy activities, there was simply no time.
Moreover, there is always a competition between the time needed for heritage language literacy activities and the time needed for other events, such as sports, leisure and regular school assignments. Thus, the time constraint is often the major issue that prevents children from continuing with their heritage language literacy development.

Lack of pedagogical information

Parents who are determined to help their children develop heritage language literacy skills often have two options. First, there are community-based language schools.7 When they are available and affordable, parents may choose to send their children to these schools. Alternatively, some parents opt to teach their heritage language literacy at home. The issue, however, is that most teachers who teach in the community language schools are parent volunteers8 (I call them parent teachers). Even though some may be well educated, they have never gone through any teacher preparation programmes. Some of them simply teach by drawing on their recollection of learning to read as children.9 As a result, many parent teachers may lack the skills necessary to engage their students. Even if some parent teachers had teaching experience in their heritage country, they may not be familiar with the teaching pedagogy in their current country of residence. Therefore, these parent teachers may not be quite aware that their students experience a different kind of world from that of their own.10 Many parents who teach their children at home face a similar situation.
Hence, while almost all children are ready to learn, not all parent teacher sare ready to teach. Consequently, many children grow exasperated and lose their motivation for heritage language learning. The lack of adequate heritage language teaching pedagogical skills of some parent teachers and parents may be one of the reasons why some children do not make progress or continue with their heritage language literacy development. Research has long indicated that teacher qualification is positively related to student achievements11 and teachers and their teaching methods do matter.12
I want to stress that some parent teachers’ lack of pedagogical information does not mean that all parent teachers in community language schools do not contribute to children’s heritage language learning. Many of them have greatly contributed to children’s success in their heritage language development.13

Conflicting teaching styles

The teaching styles of many teachers in community heritage language schools and parents are sometimes drastically different from the ones their children are used to. As a result, their teaching styles unintentionally conflict with their children’s learning styles and hinder the children’s heritage language literacy skill development. The following is a quote from a 10-year-old boy who attended a community Chinese language school in Montreal in Xiao-lan Curdt-Christiansen’s study:14
I don’t like the Chinese school, it’s boring and the characters are too difficult to remember. Plus, there is no action in the class. I feel like sleeping. But my mom says I have to go. I like action. But in the Chinese school, we are not allowed to do anything. We are not allowed to talk or to write except dictations. So all the Chinese I have learned, I forget it all when I come home. In my French school, we are allowed to make up stories, we can talk about our stories in front of the whole class, and the teachers are nice.
This boy’s comments pinpoint the obvious differences in teaching styles between his teachers in the community language school and his teachers in his mainstream language school. It is clear that when children are not used to the teaching styles in their community language school or at home, their motivation to learn subsides. I have recently taken my two children out of a local Chinese language school for fearing that they would lose motivation to read and write Chinese because the teaching style there is drastically different from the one in their regular school.

Teaching materials are remote from children’s lives

The literacy materials used by community language schools or parents are often textbooks imported from the heritage countries. Frequently, the contents and vocabulary in these textbooks are too remote from children’s lives. For instance, a group of teachers in a Canadian community Urdu language school researched some Urdu textbooks and discovered that the reading materials from the heritage regions were full of political undertones and religious dogma too foreign for the children who grew up in Canada to relate to.15
A Chinese mother who attended one of my parents’ workshops complained that her 12-year-old son refused to learn a poem from the Tang Dynasty.16 The boy commented that he did not see any point in learning this poem because he had no place to use it. Despite his mother’s good reasoning (she argued that it would help him appreciate the beauty of the Chinese language and culture), he remained unconvinced.17 From his standpoint, the boy may be reasonable. Indeed, why should he learn a poem written hundreds of years ago that is so seemingly unconnected to his life?18
Research has shown that it is important how children connect to what they read.19 As literacy experts Jo-Anne Reid and Barbara Comber rightly point out, children’s learning from literacy events is contingent on their being able to make sense of the genre, content and social significance of the task at hand.20 When the literacy materials are too remote from their reality, children are not motivated to read. In fact, using existing heritage language teaching materials that are not specifically intended for heritage language learners has generally been unsuccessful.21

Lack of practical advice books for parents

Despite the fact that there are many parenting advice books on how to raise multilingual children, few specifically address the reading and writing issues of multilingual children. Although some books may touch on these aspects, parents often find them too general and not practical. When parenting advice books occasionally do mention multilingual children’s reading and writing, they tend to focus on young children and not on older children. Many parents like Anna (you read her e-mail earlier in this chapter) are desperate to find help in the parenting literature.

Lack of support

Ideally, to facilitate a child’s multilingual literacy development, four elements must work together: family, school, community and society. However, children who grow up in a multilingual family rarely receive adequate support from the four milieux. The balance of power often tips heavily towards the mainstream language and literacy development. Few opportunities are offered for children to study their heritage language literacy outside their homes.22 When school, community and society support for multilingual education is lacking or absent, the responsibility to help children develop multilingual literacy skills falls mostly on parents’ shoulders.23

Purpose of the Book

The purpose of this book is to help parents explore various ways to make their children’s multiliteracy development possible. Drawn on interdisciplinary research in multilingual literacy development as well as experiences of parents who have raised their children with multilingual literacy, this book walks parents through the process of multiliteracy development from infancy to adolescence. It identifies the target skills at each developmental stage and proposes effective strategies that facilitate multiliteracy development in the home environment.
However, I want to stress that this book does not intend to diminish the role of community heritage language schools or school heritage language programmes. I would be very happy to see parents working together with these education entities to promote their children’s heritage language literacy development (see Chapter 7). Nevertheless, when many parents are currently left alone to shoulder the challenging task of teaching their children heritage language literacy without adequate school, community or societal support, this book can provide immediate help for them to bring up multilingual children.
This book can be used as a guide for home heritage language literacy teaching or as a supplement for those parents who send their children to heritage language schools. It can also be used as a reference for teachers who teach in community heritage language schools and in school heritage (or foreign) language programmes.

Targeted Child Population

This book focuses on typically developing children who are growing up in multilingual households. It excludes children wit...

Table of contents