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EDUC 7700 Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics in English Language Teaching
Lecture 2
16 September 2013
Learning to Read and Write in English
Emergent literacy
Teale和Suzby在1988年创造的捕捉孩子们生活在一个有文化的社会是如何成为有文化的过程中打印几乎从出生在这样一个世界的环境孩子们发现什么是扬声器,读者和作者在他们所生活的社区,和已经开发了一些读者像作家譬如行为。他们开始了解如何阅读和写作是由他们的社区,文化如何影响人们的生活,它将做什么Coined by Teale and Suzby in 1988Captures how children who live in a literate community are in the process of becoming literate almost from birth in a world of environment print Children find out what it means to be speakers, readers and writers in the community in which they live, and have already developed some reader-like and writer-like behavior.
They begin to understand how reading and writing are defined by their community, how literacy affects people’s lives and what it will do for them
The Interplay of Literacy and Daily Life
In a literate community, a set of literacy-related activities would be familiar and well-rehearsed
Examples: oral reading of a family letter, discussion of the day’s events, or argument over a cereal packet offer
‘Being literate’ can mean quite different things in different communities
Most of the activities are not about reading or writing as such, but rather they concern the social organization of people’s lives
Children are not only learning about reading and writing, they are learning a lot about family life and the purposes that reading and writing serve
The Interplay of Literacy and Daily Life
Perhaps children’s early understanding of the nature of literacy activities is weak?
What literacy events you encountered today?
Effect of different cultural settings on how children learn to produce and understand texts?
Being literate can mean quite different things in different communities?
The Principles of the English Writing System
Adults think of the written word as quite distinct from other kinds of symbol systems
Adults often learn to filter out much of the print that surrounds them, often ignoring symbols from other languages that they don’t understand and unconsciously categorizing symbols into different sorts of writing
Logograms
A symbol stands for a single word
Examples: the Arabic-based numeral system, weights, measures and company logos
Pictograms
An image denotes a whole phrase or concept
Examples: road traffic signs, the crossed cutlery symbol for a place to eat, symbols for men’s and women’s toilets
For children, though, the world of written texts is not limited by the adult divisions into ‘writing’ and ‘not-writing’
A child’s orthographic experiences will also include many non-English (or, more accurately non-Roman) scripts
Children may very well be more aware of the alternatives than adults are
Numbers, letters, musical notation, non-English symbols and their own invented signs all occur side-by-side in collections of emergent writing
The children’s writing development is a process of hypothesis making, experimentation and then refinement of hypotheses
Children’s markings, while having many English language features, ranged from pictorial graphs to symbol-like strings
In summary, children face the task of sorting through the available information about writing in order to work out the principles underlying their home/ community writing system
Is literacy easier or harder to acquire in English than in other languages?
How does the child’s experience of the task of becoming literate vary from one language to another?
Two principles are usually identified as the basis of the different writing systems…
Symbols should represent meaning
Symbols should represent sound
More frequently, scripts are a combination of the two.
Different writing systems:
Logographic systems
Each character represents a morpheme or minimal unit of meaning
Syllabic systems
Symbols are used to represent syllabic units of sound
Alphabetic systems
Symbols are used to represent individual phonemes or meaningful units of sound
The Chinese concept of the logogram relates closely to the concept of a word, but is not always equivalent
Many words (both in English and in Chinese) are compounds of two or more morphemes
A largely logographic language such as Chinese will still need many more characters than an alphabetic system because; in any language, there are many more morphemes than there are speech sounds
English writing is more complex, as there are fewer symbols in its alphabet than there are sounds in the spoken language, and the standard orthography does not correspond precisely to any given accent of English
Some symbols are used to represent more than one sound
For example, the letter a represents different sounds in the words cat, play and are
Many letter combinations which may have to be memorized as though they were logographs
Knight and through
While other letter combinations may have to be memorized as though they were morpheme or syllable-based
The ending -tion
The English spelling system often contains information about the grammatical relationships between words at the cost of losing phonetic information
The past tense –ed ending
The pronunciation of wanted, laughed and called
Differences in writing among languages:
One difference is in the way the temporal order of speech relates to its spatial order
In Hebrew or Arabic, sounds are represented from right to left on the page
In Chinese, characters can be read from left to right or top to bottom of the page
In Japanese, writing can be either vertical or horizontal
Differences in writing among languages:
Another difference is in the design of the symbols
Variants on simple shapes are harder to remember than more complex ones
Learners of English might be confused with the stick-with-loop symbols p, b, and d, and with g and q
Are some writing systems easier for the young reader or writer to learn?
The logographic systems such as Chinese are easier at first for the reader to learn
A child who begins to read English by recognizing whole words by sight is effectively interpreting English as logographic
Systems with a heavy syllabic element (i.e. Japanese) appear easier to read than alphabetic systems
The advantage of alphabetic and syllabic systems is that once the initial breakthrough happens, any new word can (more or less) be worked out, while the learning of new logographs has to continue for many years
All children experience a range of forms and functions of writing, but that children acquiring literacy in bilingual or multilingual communities are faced with greater complexity
Factors such as religion, age, schooling and social roles all affect the language(s) used in both speech and writing, with many people speaking and writing more than one
Literacy events in the home and community will involve a complex interaction of different spoken languages and literacies
Views about child’s reading development are changing
Reading used to be regarded as a “skill to be acquired”, but it is now seen as a “system of meaning to be discovered by the child”
Children approach any text with the assumption that it is going to make sense and that they can work out that sense by using everything they know about spoken language when attacking written language
Literacy is part of their social world
Many young children have a continuous involvement with literacy from their earliest years
The learner of a written language has to sort out how literacy is used in a particular culture
Certain early literacy experiences have been identified as significant for later educational success, but these may impact differentially on children from different cultural backgrounds
English as a Classroom Language
The use of the English language as a medium for education in school – talk in the classroom;
Some aspects of written language.
Two related themes
The role of language in the process of teaching and learning;
The relationship between English and other languages in the classroom
But in what particular situations?
Three kinds of language-learning tasks for children in school
Pupils have to learn the special ways of using English that apply in school
Pupils may have to learn to speak and write in English if they have grown up speaking some other language, or to use Standard English if they have grown up speaking a ‘non-standard’ variety of English
Pupils have to learn the ways in which written English differs from spoken English and how written texts are constructed
Functions of spoken language in a classroom
For teachers to direct and control learners’ activities
Pupils should learn to use spoken and written language in ‘educated’ ways (apart from the purpose that pupils should acquire knowledge from the curriculum)
Able to use the language in ways defined as appropriate within relevant discourse communities – able to use appropriate registers and genres of English
Defining school teacher from this perspective
Someone who guides their pupils into active participation in education discourses
The teaching and learning depend on the creation of shared experience and joint understanding via certain education dialogues
Education dialogues
Presupposed condition – everyone involved has a good understanding of English or whatever language or languages are used in the classroom
Some less obvious aspects of language use in the classroom which are important and problematic for the process of education
Learning how the language (English) is used in school Pattern(s) of interaction between teachers and students in the classroom
Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) exchanges (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975)
Other kinds of talk involve different patterns of exchanges
More complex patterns of IRF exchanges
Language, teaching and learning
Sequence 1 (P. 121 – 122)
IRF exchanges can be thought of as the archetypal (original model) form of interaction between a teacher and a pupil
Who asks the questions?
What would you say was the main function of the question?
Can you see any recurring patterns in the ways the teacher and the pupils interact?
Teachers’ questions
Criticisms of teachers’ questions and IRF exchanges
Suppress pupils’ contributions to classroom talk
‘Closed’ questions – what are the problems?
Students have little opportunity to make coherent, independent sense of what they are being taught
Students are unlikely to be able to consolidate their understanding unless they have to recall and apply the relevant knowledge without the teacher’s elicitations to prompt them
Students have little opportunity to develop and practice their own ways of using language as a tool for thinking
Teachers’ questions
Compare sequence 1 and 2 (P. 123) of the IRFs
The content of the question-and-answer exchanges;
The context of the activities and shared experiences
Language structures vs. language functions
Language structures: utterances containing the interrogative or imperative form of the verb
Language functions: the acts of asking a question, issuing a command or passing a judgement
Teachers’ questions
The use of IRF exchanges depends on teachers and pupils being familiar with the conventions and being willing to abide by the conventions
The cultural language practices of children’s communities may affect their participation in classroom dialogue
English across the School Curriculum
Language demands made on children in school
Technical vocabulary (terms)
Technical vocabulary of science, mathematics and art etc.
An important part of a teacher’s job is to help pupils learn and understand the specialized English of the curriculum subjects
Many technical words become for children mere jargon, words which they know they are expected to use but which mean very little to them
Two principal sorts of situation…
The first occurs in countries where there is English-medium education, even though the first language of most of the children is not English
The second is where pupils whose first language is not English enter schools in a predominantly English-speaking country
Teachers have multiple task of teaching when English is an L2 at home:
The English language
The educational ground rules for using it in the classrooms
Any specific subject content
Teachers insisted that pupils reply to questions in full sentences
How about your English learning experience?
Bilingual codeswitching in the classroom
The use of the first language
Only for asides (remarks), for control purposes or to make personal comments
Translating the curriculum content being taught
Guiding pupils’ understanding of curriculum content through language
Bilingual codeswitching in the classroom
Johnson and Lee (1987)
‘key statement’ of topic in English
Expansion, clarification or explanation in Cantonese
Restatement in English (not direct translation) (Q)
Camilleri (1994)
Codeswitching was used as a teaching technique in a variety of ways
The switch from English to Maltese to amplify/ explain the point being made
Bilingual codeswitching in the classroom
Zentella (1981)
A variety of bilingual use (Table 4.1 P.136)
Teacher and student: ‘follow the leader’
Teacher: ‘follow the child’
Teacher: ‘include the child’s choice and yours’
The extent of codeswitching depends on
The degree of fluency in English
The bilingual competency of teachers
The specific teaching goals of teachers
The attitudes of both children and teachers to the other languages involved (Q)
Language policy and practice
Classroom behaviour reflects official educational policy on language use in school
Policies are also liable to change
Prohibiting the use of a mother tongue in school in the 19th century Wales and promoting a strong “English first” campaigns in USA
The choice of English, as opposed to other languages, as a classroom language
English-medium Education in Bilingual and Multilingual Settings
The choice of English as a classroom language
English has been chosen as the medium of education in many countries where it is not the sole official language of a country or not spoken by the vast majority of people
In officially bilingual countries such as Canada, choices have to be made at the level of state and city about whether French or English should be used as the main language in class Educational policy may allow parents some degree of choice Sometimes there is no real ‘choice’ because English is already the dominant language in a community
English-medium Education in Bilingual and Multilingual Settings Standard English as a classroom language
Children who speak another dialect of English outside school
Great majority – even of native speakers of English – use regional varieties of English
Which variety of English – an issue of maintaining standards of correctness of English in school
Concern about the effects of an official devaluation of the regional Englishes of local communities
From talking to writing in English: discourses and genres Discourse and genres
Certain educational ground rules or conventions for using spoken English in the classroom
Educational success also depends on pupils learning to use the conventions which are used by educated writers
Learning to use English in ‘educated’ way is that of understanding and using the distinctive register of written English
They also need to recognize and use the genres typically associated with different areas of the curriculum
English-medium Education in Bilingual and Multilingual Settings Process writing
Concentrates on the processes engaged in by students as writers in order to produce their written work
Go through distinct stages of drafting, conferencing, revising and editing before publishing to the class or a wider audience
The teacher’s role is that of a supportive adviser
Criticisms
Students often restrict themselves to a limited range of topics and social attitudes
Students do not receive clear guidance on the styles and structures expected in different areas of writing
English-medium Education in Bilingual and Multilingual Settings Genre Approach
One of the aims has been to focus the attention of teachers and students on how written texts in English are expected to vary according to their nature and function
Genres encode knowledge and relationships in particular ways through the use of different language structures
Different contexts and language purposes are associated with different registers, or genres of language – very specific ways of using language in relation to how certain things are accomplished within our culture
Learning about a particular subject discipline, therefore, involves also learning about specific ways of using language
Concluding Comments
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