Growing up with English
Barbara Mayor
Chapter 3
U214B – Communicating in English
Thinking Together
• What are the key practices in spoken
English?
• What are the two key approaches to
understanding written English?
(Semiotics Approach vs. Functional
appproach/Literacy Practices)
• What is the role of English in
people’s life around the world? (Cross
Reference: U214A – Who speaks English?)
• Why Do Children cry? Coo? Babble?
Speak? What are the functions??
Introduction
• Chapters 1 & 2 discussed a variety of practices in spoken and
written English that English-speaking adults are involved in.
• Chapter 3, here, addresses how children take part in such
practices, how the make sense of the English language as a
system, and how they learn to make meaning in English, and
‘crack the code’ of written language.
• This is more and more important to study, as according to
David Crystal ‘approximately one in three in the world’s [seven
billion] population are now capable of communicating to a
useful level in English’ (Crystal, 2012, p.155) and exposure to
English has become a fact of life for many millions of children
on all six inhabited continents (Mayor 91).
• David Graddol envisages ‘a new generation of English-knowing
children’ around the world, for whom English represents a
‘basic skill’ (Graddol, 2006, pp.101, 72)
• Children use language to perform the same functions of
language that adults perform – Halliday’s ideational and
interpersonal functions.
Learning to talk in English
David Crystal outlines the knowledge that children need acquire in order to
speak English.
1) the twenty of so vowels and twenty four or so consonants of a particular
spoken dialect, and over 300 ways of combining them.
2) an active vocabulary of 50,000 words and a passive ability to understand
about half as many again
3) at least a thousand aspects of grammatical construction
4) several hundred ways of using the prosodic features of pitch, volume,
speed and rhythm to convey meaning
5) a large number of rules governing the ways in which sentences can be
combined into discourse
6) a large number of conventions governing the ways in which varieties of
English differ, and
7) an even larger number of strategies governing the ways in which all the
above rules can be bent or broken in order t achieve special effects. For
example jokes, story telling, poetry..
The various aspects of this task develop at different rates at different stages of
life, with some continuing into adulthood.
How infants communicate
Chomsky’s universalist/innate theory
Theoretical linguist Naom Chomsky was the first to argue for a socalled ‘nativist’ position that language is an innate human ability
which is biologically determined and follows a predictable
developmental path.
Chomsky acknowledged, however, that some minimal language
input is required to trigger the language learning process, and
that this needs to occur in the very early years of life, in other
words, that there is a ‘critical period’ for language acquisition
(p.92).
Chomsky emphasized the role of instinct, human infants are
programmed to process such language input, in order to generate
hypotheses about its underlying structure and develop rules of use.
More recent research findings have taken a step back in the direction of
imitation, recognizing that, although much of any language is
probably stored as a set of rules, there is also a large element of habit
formation. In other words, children learn much of their early
language in ‘chunks’ as part of interactions with those around them.
How infants communicate
Chomsky’s universalist/innate theory
Evidence has shown that children in ‘isolation’ do not
spontaneously develop language nor go on to develop
normal language competence beyond a certain stage of
maturation.
No baby is pre-programmed to speak English or any other
language, but it has been observed that as early as
being in the womb, or as an infant, (through
monitoring of movement, gaze, and natural cries
among babies) babies are primed to attend to the
particular ‘melody’ of the language that surrounds
them, for example the frequent stress on the first
syllable, and their initial babbling differentiates the
particular sounds that are meaningful in their linguistic
community from those which are not (p.92).
How infants communicate
Pragmatic alternatives to words
Anthropologist Ochs and Shcieffelin were the first to argue that
children begin by learning the meaning of speech acts and only
gradually learn the language that corresponds to these in the
community around them. Ochs identifies a range of ‘pragmatic
alternatives that are available to young children even before
single words emerge . . . Touching, pointing, and eye gaze. . .
reaching, holding up, waving . . . Pushing away, head shaking, and
the like (Ochs, 1979, p.13; qtd p. 93)
Gordon Wells has compared this to a ‘conversation without words’
between infants and their caregivers; he argues that ‘infants
come be able to have and express communicative intentions by
being treated as if they could already have them (Wells,
1985,p.24, qtd p. 93)
So it can be said that learning to speak is initially a matter of
learning the rules of social behavior and meaning making and
only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by which
these are realized in English or any other language.
How infants communicate
The role of the caregiver & CDS
The key society of the child is the caregiver [an adult of either sex who
takes regular care of a child] , for example, the child’s mother and
father.
When communicating with babies, adults in many English-speaking
cultures tend to use a simplified style of speech with exaggerated
intonation, referred to as child-directed speech (CDS) , or more
colloquially, ‘baby talk.’
Jean Berko Gleason, who carried out her studies in the USA, described
child directed speech as:
“ Briefly we can say caregivers raised the fundamental frequency of their
voices, used simple short sentences with concrete nouns, diminutives,
and terms of endearment, expanded the children’s utterances and in
general performed the linguistic operations that constitute baby-talk
style. . .One mother, for instance, spoke in a normal voice to her
husband, a high voice to her 4-year old, a slightly raised voice to her 8year old and when she talked to her baby she fairly squeaked”; In CDS,
adults tend to speak more slowly, use exaggerated intonation
patterns, as well as exaggerated stress within the sentence.
How infants communicate
The role of the caregiver & CDS (2)
The function and usefulness of CDS:
Research has observed that
 CDS may help children attune their ear to the characteristic strong
weak stress pattern of English words (like ‘function,’ ‘children,’ and
‘pattern’ and this same pattern can extend to common diminutives and
terms such as Mommy, Daddy, baby, and words like doggy and milkie.
 Second, by use of exaggerated stress at the sentence level, CDS may
serve to direct the child’s attention to the key elements (usually the
content words) in an utterance.
 Third, by means of exaggerated intonation patterns involving rising and
falling pitch, CDS may also help to facilitate turn taking in conversation,
by emphasizing question-and-answer exchanges and other adjacency
pairs.
 However, cross-cultural studies (such as Pye, 1986) have demonstrated
that CDS is not essential to language acquisition since children are able
to acquire language in cultures where CDS is not practiced. The
difference in adult input, however, may well have an effect on the kind
of language a child goes on to produce (p. 94).
Cognitive Perspectives
on learning to talk
Research in the cognitive tradition seeks to understand the mental
processes within children’s minds, focusing on the relationship
between the outward form of their utterances (especially the
grammar and vocabulary) and what these may reveal about their
developing understanding of language and the world.
A cognitive perspective usually seeks to investigate what is common
to all normally developing children, rather than what makes each
child different.
It has provided a body of evidence that the linguistic development of
monolingual English speaking children follows a predictable path,
and that the key stages in the acquisition of English are constant
even though each child’s rate of progress and actual linguistic
output will differ.
So all normally developing children will go through the same stages
of grammar, or vocabulary development, but some children will
progress from one stage to another faster than others.
Cognitive Perspectives
Grammatical development
Chomsky (1986) argues that in learning grammar, children follow some
‘universal principles’ (such as arguably the concepts of noun and verb) that
are common to all grammars of all human languages, but that ‘parameters
of variation’ (such as the word order or details of morphology e.g. nominal
and verbal sentences in Arabic vs. English, dual in Arabic vs. only plural in English)
which need to be set differently according to the language to which children
are exposed.
So, children are born with an awareness that language is composed of certain
building blocks (e.g. noun phrases and verb phrases), but they do not know
how to combine these elements into sentences until they are exposed to
some input in a particular language.
So in English children learn the SVO word order, and know which few inflections they
can and need to add to words, special endings for plural and past tense, for
example. Once they have the benefit of input to trigger the learning process,
children very rarely opt for word orders that are not permitted in the
language spoken around them. According to Stephen Pinker, children get it
right almost 95% of the time.
Cognitive Perspectives
Grammatical development
Telegraphic language is one of the most commonly reported
phenomena in English speaking children, between the ages of 18
months and 2 years. Telegraphic speech is the production of twoword ‘mini sentences’ expressing simple semantic relations such as
action, or belonging. This is a kind of emergent grammar, so to
speak.
For example, children may say: Give ball/ Want Teddy/ Shoe wet/ Doll
big/ Daddy go.
This type of ‘sentences’ as you can notice usually consists of
content words only. It seems that function words, like
articles (the, a, an), pronouns (my, I), prepositions (of), auxiliary
verbs (is, was,..) as well as morphological inflections (s, possessive
‘s , -ing) are normally acquired relatively late.
Cognitive Perspectives
Grammatical development
Once grammatical inflections, such as the ones mentioned above, start to
appear in the child’s language, it has been observed that normally developing
English-speaking children actually appear to move ‘backwards’ in their learning
and start making more mistakes. This is because they gradually replace simple
imitation (as in she held two mice) with the application of certain set of rules (as
in she holded two mouses), before settling on the unique mix of rules and special
cases/exceptions
Children’s early mistakes in generalizing rules are thus a sign of creative minds at
play, rather than the mere imitation of adult speech.
Pinker remarks that “a child who echoed back a parent’s sentences verbatim
would be called [a poor communicator] nota powerful learner’ (Piinker, 1994,
p.416, in Mayor 99).
Some examples of creative use of language are in Activity 3.4 pp. 94-96 – Suzie and
Lawrence MiamaYour ‘ami . . . You may be able to come up with many of your own
examples if you observe young children speaking English or even Arabic, where
‘overgeneralization’ of the grammatical rule is at place. Irregular plural forms of nouns in
both languages are very common – Arabic madrasat similarly to talibat, mu’alimat, or
English: childs instead of children.
These are examples of independent analysis and creative rule generation.
Cognitive Perspectives
Chomsky’s distinction
Drawing on Chomsky’s ideas on innateness and
universality and the specificity of the grammatical
system of each language (‘parameters of
variations’) , a distinction has been drawn between
the child’s active linguistic performance and their
underlying knowledge of the language system or
linguistic competence. A child may thus be
sensitive to a distinction between their own
developing language and that of a mature speaker,
even though they are unable to reproduce
precisely what they hear. (See example p. 99)
Cognitive Perspectives
Vocabulary development
Another strand of cognitive research treats language learning as closely
related to a child’s experiences and understandings of the world. Much of
such research focuses on lexical/ vocabulary development, with emphasis
on both the size of vocabulary and the types of words produced.
Inventories / lists of young learners’ comprehension and production of English
words (e.g. Bancroft, 2007, p.20) and these attempt to categorize functions
of these early words (Aitchison, 1994m p.170ff).
One main observation is that children tend to use overextentions of word
meaning/sense reference.
For example, a child may use the word daddy to refer to most men, or may
use the word ball to refer to anything round. (See other examples and
categories p.100).
Most overextended words can be classified as words describing movement
(bird: used for any moving creature), shape (moon / ball used round
objects such as cakes and the letter O), size (fly used for all small things
such as bread or cookie crumbs, specks of dirt, or black …) , sound (koko –
sound of cockerel for music of all kinds), texture and function (hat for
anything in contact with the head such as scarf, ribbon or even hairbrush. .
Bilingual children
We had so far been discussing monolingual English-speaking children. But many
infants around the world are learning English differently, quite naturally alongside
one or more other languages. These are first type bilingual children. Others are
learning it as a second language in childhood contexts outside the home. Research
with the second group lends support that there may be a natural order of
acquisition of grammatical structures within English, regardless of whether the
child is learning it monolingually or bilingually.
Mistakes non-native English speaking children make, that we automatically attribute
the fact that English is not their first language and to interference between the two
systems, may very well be simply mistakes that a native speaking child makes, as
part of the developmental stages we described earlier.
For example, we may refer to the study by Roar Ravem (1974) of his own natively
Norwegian children’s production of the sentence Where is Daddy going? as Where
Daddy go? Whereas the influence of Norwegian should have lead to use Where go
Daddy? (101)
One of the ways that bilingual children come to know what is ‘English’ and what is not
is that they first tend to distinguish the different sound systems of their languages,
followed by the vocabularies and then the grammars.
Whether the child sees the two languages as one system or two, mostly has to do
the language practices of the individual child is exposed to and whether the two
languages are kept separate or regularly used side by side.
This takes us again to the social aspect of language learning, the social, rather than the
cognitive perspective.
Social Perspectives
on learning to talk
Whereas cognitive perspectives on language learning focus on
processes internal to the child’s mind in making sense of language
as a system social perspectives focus on the role of language in
social context, with emphasis on communicative function.
According to this view, language learning is seen as part of the child’s
socialization into a community with distinctive language practices,
and language itself is seen as a resource for its users. As Michael
Halliday observed, from an early age a child ‘uses his voice to
order people about, to get them to do things for him; he uses it to
demand certain objects or services; he uses it to make contact
with people, to feel close to them (Halliday, 1975,p.11, in Mayor
p. 102).
Social perspectives , therefore emphasize the ‘pragmatics’ of
language use, focusing on how children learn to take part in
conversations with others, and how they use language to perform
particular speech acts and to express social identities.
Meaning Making
Semantic Relations expressed by Children
• Pioneer researcher Roger Brown and researchers de Villiers and
de Villiers have studied children’s early utterances and admit
that they are often open to interpretation (Mommy off), they
identified what Brown believed to be the eight most basic
semantic relations expressed by children at the two word stage,
including: Agent-Action, Action Object, Agent – Object, ….
• De Villiers and de Villiers built on Brown’s fundamental work and
said that:
English-speaking children … talk about actions, what happened
to what and who does what….are concerned, not to say
obsessed with the relationships of possession . . . location….
labeling… and nonexistence.
Children learning different languages , among them Samoan,
German, French, and Russian, seem to encode the same limited
set of meanings in their first sentences.
Formulaic language
vs. Telegraphic speech
In Formulaic Speech, much of the regular input and output is not
processed analytically but rather in socially contextualized ‘chunks’ .
A child repeats a whole phrase but may not understand its individual
words.
An example of that is Ellen’s (aged 1:9), saying ‘time for a cup of coffee’
while she actually meant {as her caregiver guessed} ‘please may I have
a biscuit?’ presumably because this expression was associated in
Ellen’s mind with the daily routine of stopping for a snack (Mayor,
pp.96-7).
Many other examples can be quoted, such as ‘Welcome Ladies and
Gentlemen’ or ‘See you later, my dear wife’ spoken by children.
ComparingTelegraphic Speech , for example, Dolly hat, Bottle juice, Shoe
wet …(p. 98) which are not completely grammatical and Formulaic
Speech which is fully grammatical, telegraphic speech shows more
independent and creative language use on the part of the child.
Children as cooperative conversationalists
• See Katherine Nelson’s ideas on ‘referential style’
and ‘expressive style’ pp. 103 -- 104
• See reference to Suzie talking to her babysitter in
Activity 3.7 . p.104.
• Even before children utter their first recognizable word,
there are many ways in which the patterns of discourse
between children and caregivers differ according to the
culture, or cultures in which they are being brought up.
It is often the social routines of language that children
learn first … such as the ‘pragmatic particles’ meh and
a in the questions by the Singaporean English speaking
girl .
Communicative Competence
• According to communicative competence
theory, generally attributed to linguist Del
Hymes:
A normal child acquires knowledge of sentences,
not only as grammatical but also as appropriate.
He or she acquires competence as to when to
speak, when not, and as to what to talk about
with whom, when, where , what manner
(Hymes, 1972, p.277, in Mayor 105,106)
Communicative Competence
Speaking as a child
There are certain social acts that children regularly get to perform as children, and this
has led to increasing interest in children’s language as an object of study…
Sensitivity to relative status in relationships is particularly apparent if we look at
children’s developing recognition and use of the different ways of performing the
speech acts of making requests and issuing commands in English.
It would appear that children take some time to develop sensitivity to the full adult
repertoire for ‘getting people to do things’
See example of 7-year old boy confusing status and defining himself as ‘big’ (p.107)
In order to choose the appropriate expression for the occasion, a child not only needs
to be aware of the range of linguistic forms available to perform the speech acts
of requesting or demanding, but also needs to have a sense of how likely the
addressee is to comply with the request. In many (but by no means all) Englishspeaking communities, the word ‘please’ serves a powerful interpersonal function.
Children are sensitive to its effect, perhaps because of explicit teaching. Children also
resort to indirect means of getting what they want, such as asking questions or
making hints.
See example from Roger Shuy’s study of the five-year-old Joanna who got herself
invited to dinner (p.107)
It is important to remember that adult-child role relationships are not reciprocal.
When adult researcher tried jokingly to use language more typical of a child, it
caused some bemusement in the young listener (p.108).
Learning to read and write in English
Emergent Literacy
Children, from the beginning of their life, grow up in communities where
literacy plays an important part, (and they) react to the written
environment around them, making sense of its functions and forms.
For children, taking part in literacy practices doesn’t depend on being able to
read and write in the adult sense. Particular genres of text, such as product
labels, restaurant sings, street banners, and so on, may be recognized long
before individual letters are known
Children attempt to write, before they can make intelligible signs (e.g. the
child writing her name on the list to get a turn in Soft play at school ,
producing ‘pretend’ shop signs, shopping lists, telephone messages,
newspapers, and so on) Children will (also) use many strategies to work out
what adults are doing with magazines, pens, computers and all the other
things associated with literacy, and will attempt to join the adult literate
world in different ways (See examples on understanding literacy p.110)
These first discoveries of reading and writing have been described by some
as emergent literacy (p.109).
Learning to read and write in English
Cognitive perspectives
on learning to read and write
A child’s eye view – what do children encounter?
What are a child’s first experiences with literacy?
The different writing systems: Systems where the symbol represents
an object, or meaning or Systems where the symbol represents
sound:
1) Systems where the symbol represents an object, or meaning:
a) Logographs: also known as ‘logograms’ (where a symbol stands
for a whole word), as in the Arabic- based numerical system,
various weights and measures such as kg, $, £, H for hospital, or the
heart shape sometimes used to represent ‘love’.
a) Pictographs: also known as ‘pictograms’ (where an image
denotes an entire phrase or concept), such as many road traffic
signs [two cars to represent no trespassing], and pictorial symbols
for male and female toilets.
Learning to read and write in English
Cognitive perspectives
on learning to read and write
2) Systems where the symbol represents sound:
a) The Alphabetic system: where the symbol/ the letter/ the
grapheme stands for a sound, more specifically the phoneme), as
in the English writing system for the most part and in languages
such as Arabic, Spanish, French….
b) The Syllabic system: where the symbol/ the character stands for
a sound, more specifically the syllable), as in Japanese.
The child’s world of written texts is not limited by the adult divisions
into ‘writing’ and ‘not-writing’, and part of the task facing them is
what to identify as ‘English’.
Mathematical and musical notation, map signs, computer graphics….
need to be worked out for their individual meaning as well as their
place as part of a system.
Learning to read and write in English
Is English literacy harder to acquire than
literacy in other languages?
 Which of the two principles does the English writing system
follow –
Symbol represents sound?
Or
Symbol represents meaning?
English worlds are written from left to right, whereas Arabic or
Hebrew for example, which are both alphabetic, words are
written from right to left. Chinese which is predominantly
logographic was from top to bottom, and Japanese which
has syllabic and logographic symbols, writing may be either
vertical or horizontal.
Learning to read and write in English
Is English literacy harder to acquire than
literacy in other languages?
Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic
system
Advantages of learning to read in the
alphabetic or syllabic system
Some inconsistencies
Reasons for lack of correspondence between
pronunciation and spelling (orthography)
Strategies to help young learners to overcome
the challenges of English orthography
Learning to read and write in English
Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in
other languages?
 Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic system:
 the orthography (or spelling system): In languages such as Spanish, Arabic,
Finnish or Welsh (phonetic languages) – there is a very close relationships
between the phonemes and their letters.
English writing is more complex, as
 there are fewer symbols in the twenty-six letter alphabet of English than
there are sounds in the spoken language 113), so there is little consistency
in the grapheme-phoneme relationships, partly as a result of frozen
spelling, reflecting earlier pronunciation, and partly because of the large
number of words imported/borrowed from other languages.
some symbols are used to represent more than one sound
e.g. C as a letter/ grapheme corresponds to either /s/ or /k/ phonemes
/f/ as a phoneme is represented in many graphemes , (f in fan, ph in phone, gh in enough)
Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages?
Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic system: Some inconsistencies:
 there are silent letters, and there are many letter combinations which may have
to be memorized as though they were logographs (e.g. knight/
fight/light/right…through)
 some combinations can be treated as morphemes or syllables (e.g. the ending –
tion station)
 the standard orthography does not correspond precisely to any particular
accent.
This lack of consistencies causes problems for the child learning English, problems
not faced by other European counterparts whose phonetic language is
transparent (Richard Hanlely, Reading A pp. 120-1).
1) When children read a word in transparent orthography that is part of their speech
vocabulary, they can reliably generate its spoken form and access its meaning
even if they have not encountered the word in written form before.
-- This strategy is not successful for many words in English, e.g. lack of linear reading
[pin – pine/ medicine, medical], words like one (not the author’s examples)
2) The existence of exceptions means that letter-sound correspondences that apply in
regular English are likely to be more difficult for children to learn. Decoding skills
may take longer to develop in opaque writing systems.
Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other
languages?
Some inconsistencies in the alphabetic system
o Two main reasons for the lack of correspondence between
pronunciation and spelling/ lack of grapheme to phoneme
correspondence in modern English are/ Why English is not
transparent in its orthography:
i.
ii.
First , although the pronunciation of many words has changed over the
centuries, their spelling remains frozen in its earlier form. For example
the now silent k in knight was sounded out at the time when its
written form was established. Another example (not the author’s) is
the word blind – which is spelled as the word used to be pronounced
before the vowel changed into a diphthong {the Great Vowel Shift}.
Second, when foreign words are imported into English, the written
form of the word was kept (the original spelling) in the language from
which it originated . For example, café (not spelled as caffay) , beautiful , or
Fajita.
Learning to read and write in English
Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other
languages?
 Strategies to help young learners to overcome the disadvantages of
English orthography:
Using the concept of onset & rime to teach children helps in configuring
common initial or final syllabic combinations, usually CV (consonant vowel
in languages other than English such as Italian or Spanish) but often
consonant clusters in English (Hanley, quoted in Mayor p.113).
Onsets and Rimes are letter combinations used respectively at the beginnings
and endings of English words, example, bl-ock, st-ock, r-ock, where –ock is
the rime, and bl, etc. are the onsets {or ch-air, ch-in, ch-eck)
Hanley, drawing on the work of Goswami, suggests that learners’ attention
may be drawn to:
- the greater orthographic consistency of English spelling at the level of
the syllable or morpheme. e.g. –plural –s, -ly , ation, -ment, er/or (for the
doer)
- the way in which words break down into onset and rime (p.114)
Learning to read and write in English
Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages?
 Advantages of learning to read in the alphabetic or syllabic system :
One of the main advantages of learning to read in an alphabetic or a
syllabic system is that, once the initial breakthrough in understanding
happens, any new word can (more or less) be worked out, while
learning of new logographs has to continue for many years.
Potential advantages to the lack of grapheme/ phoneme inconsistencies
are:
 Homophones with different etymologies (like knight and night/ no & know)
may be distinguished by spelling.
 Morphemes may retain the same surface form in different contexts, for
example, plural –s in words like rocks or rods [are pronounced differently
but spelling rods as rodz will lose the plural form inflectional morpheme –
s]; and ability to know that foxes is spelled with an ‘s’ like rocks and not as
foxiz (compare the past tense morpheme –ed, which varies in pronunciation
in words like wanted, laughed and called) (Hanley, discussed in Mayor 114).
Social perspectives
on learning to read and write
Engaging in literacy practices
Shirley Brice Heath conducted an
ethnographic study (Heath, 1982) that
revealed differences in preschool literacy
practices among three communities in the
American Piedmont Carolinas that she
called Trackton, Roadville & Maintown.
(VERY IMPORTANT see p.116, 117 for
Activity 3.12 & Comment)
Social perspectives on learning to read and write
Becoming bi-literate
All children experience a range of forms and functions of writing. However,
children acquiring literacy in bilingual or multi-lingual communities are
additionally faced with working out the particular forms and functions of a
variety of different scripts or orthographies. Mukul Saxena (1993), for
example, describes the complex choices available for spoken & written
communication among the British Panjabi community in Southall, London (See
areas of variation, languages used, literacy practices involved, which language
is used in which domains, who in the family uses which language, etc.) (Mayor
p.117).
It is clear that young children who have the opportunity to do so are able to
develop two or more literacy systems alongside each other with relative ease
(See example of Raki, writing left to right in all English, Urdu and Bengali,
Mayor p.118).
Biliterate children widen their horizons with respect to the making and placing of
marks on the page. The have to recognize what counts as important in each
script and be able to produce their own version, whether this involves writing
[in an unfamiliar orientation] or using Chinese stroke patterns are compared to
English (128).
Social perspectives on learning to read and write
Becoming bi-literate
Comments on Reading B
Refer Reading B (pp.127 -134) + Comments p. 118,119.
In Reading B, Young children learning different writing systems by Charmian Kenner, there are various points
made about special skills or attributes that the bi-literate children may be acquiring.
• Biliterate children develop a wider range of ‘visual and actional capabilities’.
Gunther Kress [1997] explains that all modes of representation offer different potentials [capabilities]
and potentials [for action]. Each writing system uses the visual and actional modes in particular ways.
(p.129)
• They learn ‘to recognize what counts as important in each script’ and to ‘identify what really matters
when distinguishing one letter or character from another’; in so doing, they build up ‘a vocabulary for
concepts of shape, angle and size.’
When children produce written symbols they have to pay attention to a number of different facets –
the type of stroke to be used, directionality, shape, size, spatial orientation, placement on the page -and these will be culturally specified in the teaching experience by the child.
Check what matters in Arabic, and how writing facets of Arabic to help in visual discrimination are
explored and taught (p.131)- a) writing words on the board, requested children themselves to write on the
board, asking children to trace
• They learn to ‘adapt to different contexts’ and in particular, to recognize that their classmates ‘might not
have the same expertise’.
• They develop interest in ‘exploring connections’ between their writing systems. See example of 6 year
old Selina’s drawing of both her mother and sister, with comments in English “I love my Mum” and “I
love my sister” below the images (p.127), and Chinese characters on top of each of the images, saying
“Love” for her mother, and the other “Girl Power” [an English concept adapted from one of her western
pop star icons, for her sister.
• They can use their different scripts to express a distinctive personal identity.
Selina’s world is lived simultaneously in both English and Chinese.