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Gate Fellow Project Summary (Spring 2011)
Dr. Min Wang
Department of Human Development
My major goal of the GATE Fellow project is to transform the curriculum in the
undergraduate course that I have been teaching at the College. My primary undergraduate
teaching commitment is the course on Language Development and Reading Acquisition (EDHD
425), which is a required core course for all education majors within the College. This course is
aimed to introduce pre-service teachers to the basic concepts and principles in the language and
reading development of young children from K-grade 3. For example, the concepts of phonemes,
graphemes, and morphemes are fundamental for understanding how children develop their
language and reading skills and further guide pre-service teachers in their teaching of language
and reading in the classroom.
For my Gate Fellow project, I paid special attention to international perspectives on
language and reading in the course. For example, the students have been introduced to the
similarities and differences across different languages and writing systems when we discuss
phonological, semantic and morpho-syntactic development in general. There are three major
categories of writing systems in the word: Logographic, syllabic and alphabetic systems.
Different writing systems select different units of spoken language for mapping. An alphabetic
system selects phonemes, a syllabary system selects syllables, and a logographic system,
traditionally considered, selects morphemes or words to represent spoken language. The effect of
these systemic differences on the cognitive processes of learning to read has been discussed in
the class. For example, Chinese, usually considered a logographic writing system, maps a
printed character to a corresponding monosyllabic morpheme. Its contrast with an alphabetic
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system is sharp. The Chinese writing system does not possess the segmental structure that is
basic to alphabetic writing systems. The principle of phonological assembly that, in alphabetic
systems, allows larger (syllable and word) units to be assembled from letter–phoneme mappings,
e.g. /k/-/æ/-/t/ is assembled to make /kæt/, cannot apply in Chinese reading.
In addition to enriching students’ international perspectives and knowledge about
language and reading development, I have also designed a case study project on second language
and bilingual/biliteracy education that offered students’ the first-hand experience to work with
children with a variety of first language backgrounds, including both Indo-European languages
(e.g., French, Germany, Dutch, and Italian, etc) and Asian languages (e.g, Chinese, Korean,
Japanese and Thai, etc.). In this project, students were asked to select a second language or
bilingual child that they would like to better understand, and choose one language or reading
aspect (e.g., phonological awareness, spelling skills, vocabulary knowledge, morphological
awareness, or pragmatic skills) on which the students would like to discuss him or her. The child
can be a child of a friend, in the neighborhood, a niece/nephew, or from their internship
placement, etc. The students were asked to collect data on the language or reading aspect of the
child. The focus was the comparison of the child’s ability to hear and speak the two languages
and any interaction between the two languages, for example, is there any interference from the
child’s first language on second language? Methods for collecting data can be observation,
interview, experiment, or survey. It was a three-week long project. The first week involved
project proposal writing and group discussion, the second week involved the data collection
week and the third week was the presentation week when the students gave a power point
presentation to the whole class with video clip demonstration of the child’s language skills.
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I have also transformed a graduate course that I have been teaching regularly on
Bilingualism and Biliteracy Acquisition (EDHD 779Q). I have included more international
perspectives in reading materials and course assignments. One change made was to add one
week of readings and discussion on different bilingual and biliteracy educational programs
across different countries. The students were also encouraged to work on their course papers
related to this topic.
In summary, I am very pleased with the opportunities that the GATE Fellows program
offered to me. I have had some stimulating conversations with other fellows and learned from
their perspectives on increasing teachers’ global awareness. Please feel free to let me know if
you have any question or need any further information about this short summary.