A book I strongly recommend to all parents of students in bilingual programmes

Talofa lava,

I have recently been rereading “A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism” by Colin Baker. This is a book I strongly recommend to all parents of students in bilingual programmes. Over the next weeks I intend to comment on some the major issues that he deals with in the book. Perhaps if readers have queries about bilingualism we could deal with those also, so if you have questions please e-mail them to me.

Today the question is about the influence of bilingualism on progress in reading. Baker makes the point that in almost all cases where bilingual children are slow in learning to read their bilingualism is not the reason.

To tease this out and look at some of the underlying principles we might ask why this should be so? Baker states that a child’s readiness to read is the critical issue and an encouraging atmosphere towards language learning and reading at home and at school is a most important element in this.

When learning to read there are a number of interacting processes going on. For the beginning reader there is the primary challenge of decoding the text, in other words linking the letter combinations to make recognisable words. Although spelling systems may be different in different languages this task remains the same.

Readers come to understand that text is intended to convey meaning and so their task is to work out what the text is saying to them. The reader brings to this task strategies such as:
making connections to their own knowledge and experience, forming and testing ideas about the meaning by using clues such as key words, word order and illustrations, and drawing inferences about the writer’s intent.

Bilinguals, because they typically exercise these strategies when moving from one language to another, have a good basis for getting meaning from their reading provided they are shown how to use those strategies.
Manuia lou aso, Chris

Reference: Baker, C. (2000) A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism, 2nd Edition. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, USA.