Will my child’s schooling be affected by being bilingual?

This is a question I regularly hear in one form or another. For a speaker of a minority language learning in majority language school the situation is different from that of a speaker of the majority language who is learning a minority language. In the first instance it might be a first language speaker of Urdu learning English in a mainstream NZ school. The second instance might be a speaker of English learning Mandarin in a Mandarin language NZ school.

For minority language speakers learning in majority language schools (eg.ESOL students) it is essential that the school recognises, builds on and uses the child’s first language skills if academic potential is to be reached. Not doing so creates potential problems where the child is having to deal with complex learning in their weaker language and failure results in more failure with the effect on morale and self confidence that ensues. These children often experience difficulty in bringing their intellectual powers to bear unless they can be shown how to transfer those first language skills to the new language situation.

International research suggests however that a majority language learner of a minority language is benefitted by the addition of a language. It appears that being a majority language speaker means their self confidence and morale is boosted, and their intellectual abilities enhanced by the learning of the second language.

The key indicator would seem to be whether the language being learned has the effect of replacing the first language, (a subtractive bilingual programme), or of adding to the first language, (an additive bilingual programme).

Chris.

Advice on raising children in two languages from birth

Kia ora ano.

In one of the recent contributions a parent expresses her intention to bring up her child in two languages from birth. Colin Baker in his book “A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingual Education” has some advice on the issue. He contends that in suitable home circumstances it is highly desirable to begin early.

The reasons I can see for this are numerous. In the first instance children are avid learners of language from a very early age. Having few if any responsibilities a lot of time can be dedicated to communication. Of course this is not a conscious act for the baby but the way they are hardwired. They result is that they don’t need lessons. Every interaction they have is an opportunity to learn, so parents need only do what parents do, no need for in-depth planning. Learning two languages like this is pain free.

Early bilingualism also brings about beneficial development of the child’s cognitive and social skills. They learn early on how to adapt their language use to the person to whom they are talking and this brings about a need within the child to find ways of transferring what they can do in one language to the other language. These transfer skills are invaluable in later learning.

Finally I see the ability of the child to interact with close relatives with one language or the other as the opportunity to build a rich literacy background. If say the child learns English from the Pākehā mother and French from the French father then that child can communicate freely with the grandparents on both sides. The language which is best able to convey the culture is inevitable the language of that culture. In this ideal situation the child grows up with a deep and rich knowledge of their cultures learned through the languages of those cultures. Identity is strongly affirmed.

Ka kite ano,
Chris Lowman.

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.

Benefits of learning another language

Kia ora tātou

I recently received an e-mail from a Samoan relative who is teaching English to Japanese students in a French speaking part of Switzerland, and it was all in Māori. This demonstrates the degree to which we are users of more than one language in the wider world. Historically New Zealanders have typically taken the view that the only language that counts is English. Their reasoning being that without it one cannot get a good job.

The concept that language only has economic value has been carried forward to the present where people express the idea that if one was to learn a second language then it should be Mandarin, Korean or Japanese as these are the languages of our major international business connections. Again the language is valued only in economic terms. We still regularly get letters to the newspaper saying that learning Māori is a waste of time because it won’t get you a job, even though that is totally incorrect. (I got mine through speaking Māori!)

Obviously there are numerous really good reasons for learning another language. After all the principal purpose of language is communication and we communicate a lot more every day than stuff that earns us money. So what other reasons can we think of?

• Being able to talk to grandma and find out what happened in her life.
• Being able to talk to relatives in our home country
• Being able to identify with our heritage be it Māori, Samoan, French, Indian or whatever.
• Being able to participate in events of cultural significance to us such as church, weddings, birthdays, funerals, meetings, fiafia days, poukai, Polyfest…
• Being able to express thinking in ways unique to our culture and language.
• Be able to do the things our ancestors did and valued.
• Being able to participate in many worlds, in many languages
• Being able to connect with people from other cultures
• Being able to send an email half way around the world in a language significant to the receiver while still speaking French and Japanese at work, talking to the wife in English, phoning Mum at home in Samoan, and, in Māori, saying thank-you for the birthday present.

Amazing isn’t it that there are so many other reasons for having another language.

Noho ora mai rā,

Chris

What vocabulary items are easy to learn and which are harder?

Bonjour,

I would like to conclude for now our discussion on vocabulary learning with the question, “ What vocabulary items are easy to learn and which are harder?”

Starting with the easy vocabulary items we can all agree that the high frequency words are the easiest. This is most likely because we encounter them often and they are essential to any spoken or written message so we fulfill two of the main requirements for being able to keep them in our long term memories. They are also usually short. High frequency words are typically members of a list of some 1000-2000 words or lexical chunks making up 80% of everyday language. So if we analysed a typical conversation or book 80% of the words would be in the high frequency list. One would think that this is going to be a very large number of words but in English in fact 25 words make up a third of all written material, 100 make up about half. (www.janbrett.com/games/high_frequency_word_list_main.htm)

Under the easy to learn category also come words that have strong associations for us as learners or which can be linked to things we already know a lot about. This fulfills the requirement of imaging that we mentioned in the fourth newsletter.
How about words that are hard to learn? For starters words which don’t get much use, or which are hard to connect to something we know about are hard to learn.

Other hard to learn words are those which are easily confused with similar words eg. source and sauce, words which are opposites such as left and right, (we know the words but we confuse the meanings!) and words which are hard to pronounce. Very long words may also be considered hard to learn.

Words which we can make little sense of, the ones where we don’t understand how they may be used or how they are made from other words are particularly hard to learn. Eg. If we were to come across a word such as juxtapose and not see a connection to position (juxtaposition, placed side by side, especially for comparison or contrast) then we have no idea of what the word is about, where it comes from or how to use it. This is a case against learning wordlists which are unconnected to real experiences, or lacking supporting schema.

Learners are thought to generally increase their vocabularies by 1000 new words a year without even thinking about how they do it, imagine if we could become really expert and increase that to 1500! How much faster could we then learn a language.

Chris

Why we forget words

Talofa lava,

To continue the topic of vocabulary learning it is probably right and proper if we ask why we forget words.

I am beginning to appreciate as I get older that forgetting is part of the human condition, and this is as true for young people as for the older person. So what do we know about the forgetting of words and chunks?

Beginning learners of another language apparently forget quite a lot at first, probably because they have limited webs of meaning to hang the new words on, but as their language webs increase forgetting new material is reduced considerably.

Estimates are that for beginners about 80% of new material is forgotten within a day. Research has shown though that when a learner stops using their second language the initial loss of language is rapid over the first 3 or 4 years but after that there is little further deterioration even up to 50 years later. (reported in Thornbury, S. 2002. p 26) My guess is that the language which remains is that which was highly usable and well connected to the learner’s web of words and meanings.

We tend to forget the words which were harder to learn and connect to our web, and also those which we tried to learn in short intense bursts without revisiting them afterwards. Hard to learn words may be those that are really different from what we already know in either language. Perversely some words may be displaced in memory by words which are almost the same.

The other factor is learning load, in other words trying to learn too many words at a time without being able to revisit and recycle them sufficiently.

It seems that the solution is to learn vocabulary in manageable amounts, spread the learning out over days and weeks, and make every opportunity to re-encounter them and use them in new contexts at different levels of depth.

Ia manuia lou aso,

Chris

Reference: How To Teach Vocabulary. Scott Thornbury,
2002, Published by Pearson Longman.

Modelling and Metacognition.

Kia ora tatou,

To continue the subject of learning vocabulary two elements of last week’s column deserve further exploration., modelling and metacognition.

How would one model the sorts of learning we have been talking about?

This is problematical because the processes take place in the brain and are not observable. The challenge is to make them observable. One way is the “think aloud” strategy. Let’s say we are presented with the task of adding cognitive depth to a chunk or word we are learning. (This where we try to use the word in new sentences, of think deeply about how that word works.)
If we were learning the word amber, the situation might look like this:
“Can I say, ‘… going to amber…’?”
“No because amber looks like a noun, it’s a thing not an action.”
“Ah but you could say it if Amber was a name!”
“But this word doesn’t have a capital A so it’s not a name.”
“ Well what about switching from green to amber and then to red like traffic lights.”
By doing it this way we can show how we are thinking about the word, its schema, and how it works.

Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking, in other words to have reflect on and be able to say how your brain works, how you approached a problem. This has been shown to be a very successful strategy for effective learning. By using metacognition learners can shortcircuit the learning process because they understand how they are learning, reflect on how successful the process is and can deliberately employ the strategy. The conversation above shows metacognition at work and models patterns of thinking for the student.

Metacognition is one of the reasons why bilinguals reach higher levels of achievement than monolinguals, because they are having to make conscious decisions about how language works on a daily basis.

We can help our students learn vocabulary more effectively by having conversations about words/chunks with them and in our conversations show by “thinking aloud” how we come to particular decisions about how that word/chunk can be used.

Noho ora mai na,

Chris