ESRC END OF AWARD REPORT
Award No. R000238456
SIGNS OF DIFFERENCE
How children learn to write in different script systems
Project Director: Charmian Kenner
Co-Director: Gunther Kress
Chinese Advisors: Gwen Kwok, Roy Kam, Kuan-Chun Tsai
Arabic Advisor: Hayat Al-Khatib
School of Culture, Language and Communication
Institute of Education
University of London
October 2002
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Summary of research results
Background to the study
Despite the current focus on raising literacy achievement in the early years, little attention has
been paid to the needs of children who are learning more than one writing system. The National
Literacy Strategy gives no specific guidelines on supporting biliteracy, and primary school
teachers tend to be concerned that children will be ‘confused’ when dealing with different scripts
and directionalities. These concerns seem to be part of a general misgiving about young
children’s ability to cope with different kinds of symbols in their writing, whether in first or
second language learning.
This study was undertaken to add to the limited theoretical knowledge about early bilingual
script-learning, thus providing information upon which educational practitioners can build when
teaching bilingual children. Because the project looks at how children deal with a multiplicity of
print forms, the results also have implications for the teaching of English orthography to all
pupils.
The participants were six children aged 5-6, two learning a logographic script (Chinese) at
community language school as well as English at primary school, two learning a non-Roman
script with a different directionality (Arabic), and two learning another Roman script with some
differences from the English writing system (Spanish). Observations were made of the children
writing in a range of formal and informal literacy interactions, at home, community language
school and primary school. In order to gain further insights into the children’s thinking, peer
teaching sessions were set up in which they were asked to show their primary school classmates
how to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish.
Results
1)
The children showed that they were aware of particular principles underlying their
different writing systems
For example, the children learning Chinese understood that Chinese does not have an alphabet,
but is based around symbols which stand for meanings that can usually be translated into an
English word. The children learning Arabic were aware that right-left directionality was a key
difference from the English system. The children learning Spanish recognised that sound-letter
links could differ in Spanish and English.
This metalinguistic awareness was stimulated by the children’s simultaneous encounters with
their two writing systems, and was acquired despite relatively little input in Chinese, Arabic or
Spanish compared to English.
2)
The children were developing ‘embodied knowledges’ regarding the act of writing
The children approached writing as a multimodal act, showing a detailed awareness of how
symbols are created and positioned in different writing systems. The children’s concern with
these issues demonstrates that the act of writing is not simply a mechanical skill, but involves
bodily and cognitive engagement through the visual and actional modes.
2
When producing and interpreting symbols, the children were actively involved in identifying the
salient aspects which differentiate one symbol from another, using criteria such as shape, size
and spatial orientation.
3)
These bilingual children were living in ‘simultaneous worlds’ constructed and
expressed through their uses of language and literacy
Bilingual children are often conceived of as living in and moving between ‘two worlds’ or
‘multiple worlds’. We found frequent instances in which the children in the study seemed, rather,
to experience their worlds as ‘simultaneous’. Growing up with more than one language and
literacy, the children could not only move from one world to another, but at a fundamental level
they constantly inhabited both. They were always aware of alternatives and could draw
creatively on resources from either writing system when making texts.
Whilst being aware of the boundaries which characterised difference, children often strove
towards integration and synthesis. They were alert to pointing out the different form-meaning
relationships in their writing systems, but they also sought links between the systems, and
between writing and other forms of graphic representation. They were able to treat written
symbols as ‘signifier material’, capable of holding different meanings in different systems.
4)
The children produced individual interpretations of pedagogical input from teachers
and family
The children demonstrated a complexity and variety of understanding which involved reworkings of ideas presented to them by parents, siblings and teachers. They used pedagogical
input to identify areas of significance (such as whether directionality operated from left to right
or right to left) and proceeded to clarify their thinking in these areas over time. Children’s reinterpretations of input in the light of their own ‘interest’, deriving from their location in a
particular sociocultural context, could lead to individually-constructed hypotheses on formmeaning relationships.
Implications for pedagogy
We are able to reassure teachers that not only can children cope well with early biliteracy, it
offers cognitive gains. The young children in the study actively sought to identify the features
which characterise writing systems, and their conceptual understandings were quite sophisticated.
They paid attention to multimodal aspects of orthography and to the meanings realised through
visual detail. Flexible thinking was promoted as children dealt constantly with difference and
complexity.
This biliterate context highlighted the script-learning capacities of the case-study children. Their
primary school classmates, when taught Chinese, Arabic or Spanish by the bilingual children in
peer teaching sessions, also showed their abilities to investigate graphic symbol systems.
Results suggest that the early years curriculum should provide a varied and challenging
experience of orthography learning, involving different kinds of print used in English and also
multilingually. As well as supporting biliteracy, such an approach would address both
monolingual and bilingual children’s interest in the details of script, and would build on their
propensities to work out how writing systems operate.
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Full report of research activities and results
Background
This study was conceived in a climate of concern about ethnic minority children’s achievement
(Gillborn and Gipps, 1996). With the government’s recent introduction of the Ethnic Minority
Achievement Grant (EMAG), the investigation of early biliteracy development is vital,
particularly since US findings have shown the long-term positive effects of bilingual children
being able to learn through both their languages (Collier, 1995).
Biliteracy is also a potential advantage for young people’s future work and study in a
multilingual global environment. The Nuffield Inquiry (2000) highlighted the need to build up
linguistic expertise amongst the British population, and the DfES (2002) has announced the
expansion of primary school language learning. The findings of our project are thus particularly
timely, showing how young children are likely to respond when they encounter different writing
systems.
In building theoretical knowledge about early script-learning, the study also addresses primary
school teachers’ concerns about young children’s ability to cope with different kinds of symbols
in their writing, whether in first or second language learning. The study therefore has relevance
to literacy learning for both bilingual and monolingual children, in English or in other languages
which they may encounter.
The project provides a detailed examination of young learners’ interpretations of the formmeaning relationships involved in different orthographies, through six longitudinal case studies
of bilingual children aged 5-6, two learning a logographic script system (Chinese) as well as
English, two learning a non-Roman script with a different directionality (Arabic), and two
learning another Roman script which has some differences from the English writing system
(Spanish).
The study is based within a social semiotic framework (Kress, 1997, 2000; Kenner, 2000) in
which script-learning is seen as a process whereby young children make meaning from the
information available to them in their particular sociocultural contexts. In both formal and
informal learning about writing systems, the link between signifier and signified is presented to
children and interpreted by them multimodally: through the modes of the visual, sound and
action. Using this input, young learners create understandings of how different systems operate,
and how to produce and interpret graphic symbols within them. Children’s views are developed
via their individual ‘interest’ (Kress, 1997: 11), which arises from and intersects with
sociocultural experience.
Children who are becoming biliterate will need to investigate ‘signs of difference’: how the
form-meaning relationship varies in each of their writing systems. We may also expect to find
‘signs of difference’ between the interpretations made by the children as individual learners with
particular social and cultural histories.
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Objectives
1) To add to the currently limited understanding of early bilingual script-learning
2) To contribute to the theoretical debate in the general area of early writing development
3) To consider the implications for the teaching of young biliterates in primary school
classrooms
4) To consider the implications for the teaching of English orthography to bilingual and
monolingual children
5) To bring together teachers from community language schools and primary schools to
discuss policy and practice regarding bilingual children’s literacy learning
These objectives were met (see Results for Objectives 1-4, Activities for Objective 5).
Methods
Participant children
(see Appendix 1 for details)
A girl and a boy learning each writing system were contacted via community language schools:
Selina and Ming (Chinese), Tala and Yazan (Arabic), and Sadhana and Brian (Spanish). All the
children were born in England, apart from Yazan whose family arrived in 1999 from Syria. All
apart from Sadhana had older siblings in the British educational system. Yazan and Sadhana
were relatively proficient in a London variety of English, whilst the rest of the children were
fluent. In all homes there was a strong base of interaction in the parents’ language, with a good
deal of bilingual interaction and code-switching. Most of the children were therefore
simultaneous bilinguals, rather than having a ‘first’ and a ‘second’ language.
The children were inevitably receiving more input in English literacy, given the amount of time
spent at primary school compared to community language school. However, for the project the
important requirement was that both literacies were being encountered simultaneously.
As required by the ESRC Board, the children were tested at the beginning of the project to find
out whether there were any major differences between them which could affect their
understanding of written symbols. After discussion with NFER, it was decided to use the
Foundations for Learning test, which deals with verbal comprehension and non-verbal reasoning
ability. Results (see Appendix 2) showed that all the children had a grasp of the skills being
tested, with no substantial individual differences emerging.
Observation and interviews
We used observation of formal and informal literacy interactions, ranging from tasks set by
teachers in the primary classroom or community language school, to home events in which
children were taught by parents and siblings, to spontaneous writing at home. Examples
included:
At primary school: story-writing, word-level and sentence-level work in the Literacy Hour
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At community language school: learning stroke-patterns used in Chinese characters,
deconstructing Arabic words into constituent letters, building up syllables into words in Spanish
At home: parents helping with Saturday school homework, older siblings teaching younger
children in ‘school’ roleplays, children making greeting cards
Additional data about teaching input and children’s responses to literacy activities was obtained
from interviews with teachers and parents.
See Appendices 3 and 4 for interview schedules and a summary of data collected.
Peer teaching: an innovative method
The project’s innovation was to set up peer teaching sessions in which the children demonstrated
their knowledge about bilingual writing to classmates at primary school, thus providing further
insights into their thinking. A relatively open-ended format proved successful, with the children
being asked to use community language school materials as a resource to teach classmates how
to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish. Each child led five 45-minute sessions during the year,
usually with one or two ‘pupils’ (chosen by the child concerned or their teacher) who were
unfamiliar with that particular literacy, so the bilingual child had the maximum need to explain
the issues involved. In cases where there was a classmate who did know about the same literacy,
one session was held to observe the interchange of knowledge between the children. All the
children also talked about writing in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish with their whole class, and
several taught the entire class in the final session, for periods ranging from ten minutes to an
hour and a half.
A hand-held digital video-camera was used for recording, giving maximum flexibility to capture
interactions and to focus closely on children’s production of written symbols.
This method cannot be assumed to reveal only ‘what children already know’, because it may
develop children’s understandings by requiring them to give explanations to others. However, for
the purposes of the project all data on children’s ideas about writing systems was relevant. The
sessions, along with observation in homes, produced particularly rich data because in these
settings children had more flexible opportunities to combine and explore knowledge gained from
their pedagogically-controlled primary school and community school environments.
Analysis
Qualitative analysis was conducted on fieldnotes, children’s texts and videodata to look for interrelations and common themes, whilst remaining alert to individual differences between children.
Analysis focused on features characterising each child’s production of symbols in their two
writing systems, and ideas expressed by the child (whether through the verbal, visual or actional
modes) about form-meaning relationships. Rather than using a separate classification scheme for
forms of emergent writing in each script, we used classificatory criteria derived from the data
itself, based on features which children were identifying as important. These features could be
applied to any kind of orthography, and included the following:
• shape, size, and angle (of individual strokes making up a symbol, or of whole symbols)
• spatial organisation on the page
• directionality (at the macro-level of the book, or at the micro-level of page or line)
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We also established how teachers, parents and siblings presented information about writing
systems. By linking this data with children’s own comments and actions, we were able to
discover how each child was interpreting the particular pedagogical input available to them.
Results
Our research questions were as follows:
1) How do the children think writing operates as a system of representation in the languages
they are learning?
2) What comparisons do the children make between their two writing systems and what
conclusions do they draw?
3) Do the children go through sequential stages in their ideas about writing, each characterised
by a particular hypothesis about the symbol-meaning relationship, or do they hold a variety
of hypotheses at any one time?
Links to each question are made in the discussion of findings below. In order to illustrate each
point in depth, representative examples have been chosen from our substantial body of casestudy data.
1)
The children showed that they were aware of particular principles underlying their
different writing systems.
Our findings concerning children’s understandings about representational principles relate to
Question 1. The way in which awareness was stimulated through comparisons between writing
systems relates to Question 2. The complexity and variety of children’s understandings relates to
Question 3.
Understandings of principles
Each writing system has different ways of encoding meanings, and the children in the study were
dealing with these semiotic principles from an early age. For example, the key characteristic
which differentiates Chinese writing from English is that the former is a mainly logographic
system, whilst the latter is alphabetic. When Ming was asked directly in a peer teaching session
‘Does Chinese have an alphabet?’, he thought for a moment and then shook his head. He later
pointed out the difference between his name as written in Chinese (three characters, standing for
‘Lai Sei Ming’) and in English (‘Ming’), remarking ‘That one’s got three words and the English
one’s got four’. By ‘four’ for English, it turned out that Ming was referring to the number of
letters involved. He further explained about the English version: ‘I got some different
ones….Ming is four, seven if it’s together [referring to his full name in English, ‘Ming Lai’]’.
Thus he had noticed that in Chinese whole characters were used to represent words, whereas in
English words were built up from a number of letters.
Although Arabic, like English, is an alphabetic system, learners have to additionally understand
that each letter has four different forms: its form as used in the alphabet, and initial, medial and
final forms depending on the letter’s position within a word. In Tala and Yazan’s Saturday
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school, beginner pupils were introduced to all the forms and shown how to join them to create
words, since this knowledge is vital for learning to read and write. Tala was able to explain to her
peers at primary school which letters she used from the Arabic alphabet to construct her name,
and how they looked different ‘because I joined them up’. Pointing to the first letter of her name
on the alphabet chart, she stated ‘and now I change it, because Arabic is magic’, showing its new
form at the beginning of ‘Tala’.
Spanish, unlike English, is a phonetically regular system in which vowels are taught first, then
linked with consonants to form syllables which can be built into words. Brian had often heard his
teacher explaining (always in Spanish) how to join ‘m’ and ‘a’ to make ‘ma’. He then told his
primary school class (in English) “The M on her own doesn’t say anything – just ‘mmm’ – you
have to put it together”. He pointed to the syllable ‘ma’ and said “That’s formed with the ‘a’ –
with ‘a’ it makes ‘ma’”. Brian’s ability to translate his teacher’s explanation into English
demonstrated an understanding of the principle behind syllable formation.
Awareness through comparisons between systems
Children’s understandings often seemed to arise from their contact with more than one system,
even though they received relatively little input in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish compared to
English. At the time when Ming made the above statements about his name, he was only
confident about the meaning of a few Chinese characters, yet had come to the conclusion that ‘I
got some different ones’ in English as compared to Chinese.
Key differences between writing systems were often highlighted by Saturday school teachers and
children’s families, who recognised that in a biliterate context these ‘points of contact’ required
clarification. For example, Tala and Yazan’s Saturday school teachers constantly emphasised
‘Arabic from right to left – English from left to right’. When showing his Arabic textbook in a
peer teaching session, Yazan demonstrated his awareness of the two different directionalities.
Pointing to the front cover, he stated ‘Not the end’. He then showed the back cover, emphasising
‘This is the end’. Sadhana and Brian were reminded to take special care when dealing with the
Spanish ‘i’, which sounds like the English letter-name ‘E’, by giving the ‘i’ distinctive
descriptions such as ‘the ‘i’ with the little stick and the little ball’. When a primary school
classmate asked Brian why he had pointed to ‘i’ and said ‘E’, Brian explained ‘Because it’s
Spanish – it’s different!’
A number of the peer teaching ‘pupils’ began to look for principles in the new systems they were
encountering. For example, Amina realised that Chinese words were differentiated by visual
shape, and experimented with using a square, a triangle, a half-moon and so on. Jack quickly
understood that ‘i’ was pronounced differently in Spanish, and was able to read out the word
‘mi’ correctly. Such examples suggest that multiliterate experience could further develop
children’s propensity to identify form-meaning relationships.
Complexity and variety of understandings
Some of the knowledge demonstrated by these young children was relatively sophisticated. Tala
pointed out the difference between male and female verb endings in Arabic, writing ‘for mail [i.e.
male] is this later [i.e. letter]’ alongside the male verb ending in Arabic and ‘for femail is this
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later’ alongside the female affix. Selina learned from her mother that many Chinese characters
contain an element signifying meaning (a ‘semantic radical’), such as the ‘fire’ radical which
appears in related characters such as ‘light bulb’, and proceeded to search for these symbols in
other characters. Sadhana recognised that there were different approaches to teaching the
alphabet at her English and Spanish schools, with the latter prioritising vowels; when requested
to put a set of cardboard letters in order she asked ‘ABCD or ‘a,e,i,o,u’?’, saying ‘ABCD’ as
English letter-names and giving the vowels their Spanish pronunciation.
Thus the children were capable of understanding a range of different features of writing systems
at the ages of 5-6. This individual variety would not necessarily be predicted by a ‘fixed-stage’
theory of writing development, in which understandings are expected to be more uniform and
limited by certain levels of cognitive development.
2)
The children were developing ‘embodied knowledges’ regarding the act of writing
As well as trying to work out the transcription principles underlying each of their writing
systems, the children proved to be deeply concerned with the act of creating and positioning
symbols. We use the term ‘embodied knowledges’ to refer to children’s understandings about
ways in which the act of writing can be performed and interpreted. This act holds meaning for
children as an integral aspect of representation, so findings in this area relate particularly to
Question 1. The flexibility of visual and actional dispositions shown by the children when
working with different orthographic systems relates to Question 2.
Directionality and spatiality
Directionality is both a principle of transcription and a physical action undertaken when
producing symbols. When Tala’s ‘pupils’ made their first attempt at writing in Arabic, their
symbols were a fair copy of Tala’s, but the children began writing from the left hand side of the
page. Tala immediately responded ‘No that’s wrong…we don’t start from there, we start from
here!’ (i.e. the right hand side of the page). For Tala, directionality was the issue of primary
salience in Arabic writing, taking precedence in this instance over the actual letter forms. When
asked the most important thing to remember about Arabic, she said ‘Start the other way’.
At Chinese school, children were encouraged to visualise the space in which the character
appears on the page as centred rather than linear. Exercise book pages were divided into a
squared grid, and each character had to be balanced harmoniously within one square. Ming
usually drew a grid for his classmates in peer teaching sessions, but on one occasion he did not.
When asked why he had also written the character much smaller than usual, he explained that it
was because of the ‘boxes’. A closer examination revealed a matrix of tiny squares underneath
the surface of the whiteboard material, invisible to most onlookers but visible to Ming because,
to him, squares had become an expected part of the affordance of the page.
Criteria of salience
The children were engaged in identifying key aspects which differentiated one symbol from
another in each orthography. At Chinese school, as pupils practised the particular sequence of
strokes required to build up each character, teachers would write subtly different stroke patterns
on the board and ask children to differentiate between these and the correct ones. This involved
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discussing length, angle and curvature of each stroke, and its relative size and orientation with
regard to others. Selina showed that, for her, such criteria were an essential part of the meaning
of writing; she would rub out her peer pupil’s efforts if these failed to reach her own standards,
and demonstrate the example again.
A salient feature of Arabic orthography is the ‘dot’: one, two or three dots can distinguish
otherwise similar-looking letters from each other. Peer-taught pupils often forgot the dots when
copying Arabic writing, probably because this feature is not usually significant in English. Tala
and Yazan would remind them, as when Yazan pointed out ‘You forgot something – dot’ (and
when the ‘pupil’ added it) ‘That’s much better’. Yazan’s early practising of Arabic alphabet
letters included huge dots, out of proportion to the rest of the symbol but indicating the
significance held by this item for the young writer.
The ‘dot’ on the Spanish ‘i’ also became significant for Sadhana, since it had been highlighted as
a key part of the letter in descriptions such as ‘the stick with the little ball’. A peer-taught pupil
considered the ‘stick’ sufficient to represent the ‘i’ when they were arranging cardboard alphabet
letters together, but Sadhana insisted that he add the dot above.
A range of multimodal resources
Through contact with different writing systems, the children were developing awareness of
visual detail and building up a variety of representational resources. Their flexibility at this early
age was underlined by examples such as the exercise books used by Yazan with his sister at
home. These operated in both directions, Arabic starting from the right hand end and English
from the left. Yazan was also observed to experiment with writing his sister’s name in English:
first name from right to left, immediately followed by surname from left to right.
Familiarity with different directionalities and spatial arrangements, and alertness to visual detail,
are advantageous in an era when multimodal texts use the varied affordances of page and screen.
The responses of peer pupils – such as Ruby, who soon realised that precise details of each
stroke in Chinese were crucial, and that each character should occupy one square – indicate that
young children are able to pay attention to criteria of salience and have the potential to expand
their repertoire of ‘embodied knowledges’.
3)
These bilingual children were living in ‘simultaneous worlds’ constructed and
expressed through their uses of language and literacy
Rather than moving between ‘two worlds’ or ‘multiple worlds’, children seemed at a
fundamental level to experience their worlds as ‘simultaneous’, looking for links as well as
differences between systems of representation. These findings relate particularly to Question 2.
Our data suggests that ‘simultaneity’ of experience should not be equated with ‘confusion’. The
children’s comments and actions showed that they were aware of the existence of two systems.
When making a text, they had an expanded range of semiotic resources from which to choose.
The reasons for some of their choices are discussed below.
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Seeking connections between graphic symbol systems
Whilst being aware of the boundaries which characterised difference, children often strove
towards integration and synthesis. For example, Tala tried to map the English and Arabic
alphabets onto each other, by first writing the English alphabet, and then writing the Arabic
alphabet sequence above it. Both alphabets do indeed start with letters which represent nearequivalent sounds (/a/, /b/…) but after that the elements only match occasionally.
The children were able to treat written symbols as ‘signifier material’, capable of holding
different meanings in different systems. Yazan commented on various parts of an Arabic word as
he wrote, saying ‘this look like a zero and this look like a U and this look like a one’, all of
which were possible comparisons. Yazan’s use of ‘look like’ (rather than ‘is’) showed that, for
him, both meanings of the symbols could co-exist simultaneously across alphabetic systems or
across letter-number systems.
Simultaneity within written worlds, and transition points
Children’s experience of simultaneity could operate to such a degree that both written languages
appeared within a single word. Sadhana was using alphabet letters at home to form English and
Spanish words alongside each other. When working on ‘girl’ in English (‘niña’ in Spanish), she
had reached the point of ‘ger’ (transcribing her perception of the London dialect version, ‘gerl’).
She then said ‘niña, we’re missing A’ and added an ‘a’ – making ‘gera’ – but rapidly followed
this with ‘No, girl! I’m doing a girl, girl!’ and started looking for the letter which would
complete the English word. It seemed that Sadhana was thinking simultaneously of ‘niña’, which
also has four letters – and her experience was so simultaneous that the final letter ‘a’ of ‘niña’
appeared instead of the English letter ‘l’. She then recognised that she was currently writing an
English word rather than a Spanish one, and so made the choice to return to ‘girl’.
At times when children had been working in one of their writing systems and then transferred to
the other, transition points could be observed. Tala, as discussed in Section 2, knew that English
and Arabic had different directionalities. Once, when writing her name in English just after
demonstrating it in Arabic, she began from right to left but immediately self-corrected, crossing
this out and writing ‘Tala’ from left to right.
Children bringing systems together in their writing
Several texts made by children indicated their propensity or desire to use both their writing
systems simultaneously in order to represent ideas.
When writing a caption for his picture of a flying bear, ‘un oso que vuele’ (‘a bear which flies’),
Brian drew on resources from both Spanish and English to write ‘1osokwle’. The number ‘1’
represented the concept of ‘un’, whilst ‘oso’ was a complete word already familiar to Brian. The
letters ‘k’ and ‘w’ represented their English sounds here, but these were also good
representations of the similar Spanish sounds required. The final ‘le’ is the more usual Spanish
version of the end of ‘vuele’. As a 6-year-old faced with the challenge of writing the words ‘que’
and ‘vuele’, which he had not yet been taught to spell in Spanish, Brian rose to the occasion by
creative use of both systems available to him to make meaning.
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Selina looked keenly for examples of Chinese writing occurring in English society. Discovering
that one member of the Spice Girls pop group had a Chinese tattoo representing the group’s
slogan of ‘Girl Power’, she asked her mother how to write these characters in Chinese, and then
placed the Chinese characters above a drawing of her sister Susannah, with ‘I love my sister’ in
English underneath. In this text, Selina brought together her experiences as a child who lived
with more than one writing system and more than one culture – a child growing up as both
Chinese and English.
4) The children produced individual interpretations of pedagogical input from teachers and
family
As shown in the discussions above, the children were continually re-working ideas encountered
in their particular learning environments. The following findings relate to children’s
developmental hypotheses, and thus to Question 3.
Developing understandings of symbol-meaning relationships
We did not observe radical changes in children’s hypotheses during the time-span of the project.
Rather, they used pedagogical input to identify areas of significance and proceeded to clarify
their thinking in these areas. For example, Yazan was aware that directionality was ‘at issue’
between Arabic and English. When doing a task in English at primary school, he asked ‘Which
side shall we start? I think this side’ (pointing to the right hand side of the page). Although his
conclusion was not correct on this occasion, he was working on the principle involved. In his
final peer teaching session, he stated clearly ‘The Arabic starts from here’, pointing to the top
right hand corner of the page.
Children’s own hypotheses
A child could also work from their own ‘interest’, as an individual located in a particular
sociocultural context, to adapt a principle which they had been taught. Sadhana focused more
strongly than Brian on Spanish pronunciation, refusing to accept Anglicised versions when her
peer pupils tried out Spanish words, and noticing subtle differences between her Ecuadorian
accent and other Latin American Spanish dialects in London (she imitated a telephone
conversation, stating ‘I speak in Colombia – the Colombia speak like this’). When writing in
Spanish, Sadhana used the alphabetic principle to distinguish the subtleties of English and
Spanish pronunciation. Picking up on the unaspirated pronunciation of the Spanish /p/ as
compared to the English /p/, Sadhana represented the Spanish sound using the letter ‘b’.
Similarly, she represented the unaspirated Spanish /c/ with the letter ‘g’. For example, when
writing the word ‘pelícano’ (pelican), she began with ‘b’, and ‘foca’ (seal) was begun with the
letters ‘fog’. Sadhana’s method was unusual but consistent, and was an understandable attempt
to create a form-meaning relationship which accurately represented key differences between the
two spoken languages.
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Meeting Objectives 1-4
These results add to our understanding of bilingual script-learning (Objective 1) by
demonstrating that children can gain awareness of the principles underlying different writing
systems and build up a range of multimodal resources through biliteracy.
The findings contribute to the theoretical debate on early writing development (Objective 2) by
suggesting that young children are able to deal with detailed and complex aspects of graphic
symbols. Their hypotheses, whilst based on pedagogical input, may progress in quite individual
ways.
The research has a number of implications for the teaching of young biliterates, and for the
teaching of English orthography to all children (Objectives 3 and 4). Rather than seeing
multilingual experience as causing ‘confusion’, teachers need to recognise the richness of these
children’s learning, and the flexibility of thinking to which it leads. By understanding the
simultaneity of children’s biliteracy experiences, educators will be able to support (rather than
ignore or suppress) children’s desire to integrate their learning pathways. The cognitive and
cultural advantages of dealing with more than one writing system could be extended to
monolingual peers, by offering opportunities to encounter different orthographies in the early
years of schooling. Finally, if pedagogies avoid a view of script-learning as a mechanical
exercise involving linear progression, and are instead designed to build on children’s active
curiosity and individual ‘interest’ in the meanings attached to graphic symbols, this is likely to
produce benefits for both monolingual and bilingual orthography teaching.
Activities
With users:
Meeting Objective 5 : To bring together teachers from community language schools and
primary schools to discuss bilingual literacy learning, we organised a one-day seminar for all the
teachers involved in the project to contribute ideas about the data. The success of this event – in
which the primary teachers gained a deeper understanding of the capabilities of their bilingual
pupils and the importance of supporting biliteracy - demonstrates the value of building links
between the two sectors.
All six children and their families attended a celebration at the Institute of Education
emphasising the academic world’s gratitude for their contribution.
Participating schools, teachers and families have been kept fully informed of the project’s results.
Findings have been shared more widely through in-service training for educators in London,
Leeds and Glasgow.
With the academic community
A group of researchers on community language issues was established in autumn 2001 to discuss
project data, and now meets termly as a network for those working in this marginalized area,
many of them doctoral students.
13
A dissemination seminar was held for 35 academics from around the country, to present findings
and obtain critical feedback. Those attending appreciated the rare opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion amongst colleagues with backgrounds in bilingualism, child development
and social semiotics.
Seminars and conference papers include:
Research seminars at Surrey University (Roehampton), University of Wales (Aberystwyth),
Manchester Metropolitan University.
Seminars at Universidad Católica, Santiago and the British Institute, Concepción, Chile to
discuss results with colleagues working on writing development in Spanish.
Papers at British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Annual Meetings 2001 and 2002,
and Sociolinguistics Symposium 14, 2002, Gent, Belgium
Outputs
Kenner, C. (2002) Helping pupils to write in more than one language. Five to Seven (a national
magazine for Key Stage 1 teachers), Vol.2, May, 16-18
Kenner, C. (2002) Early biliteracy: worlds of possibility. NALDIC News (National Association
for Language Development in the Curriculum), 27, June, 6-8
Kenner, C. (forthcoming) Embodied knowledges: young children’s engagement with the act of
writing. In Kress, G. and Jewitt, C. Moving beyond language: explorations of learning in a
multimodal environment. New York: Peter Lang
Material from the project is included in Kenner, C. and Gregory, E. (forthcoming) Becoming
biliterate. In Hall, N., Larson, J. and Marsh, J. Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy Research
London: Sage
Kenner, C., Kress, G., Al-Khatib, H., Kam, R. and Tsai, K.-C. Finding the keys to biliteracy:
how young children interpret different writing systems. Submitted to Language and Education.
A book for teachers and teacher educators has been commissioned by Trentham Books
Impacts
Policymakers are being contacted through preparation of a briefing for Baroness Ashton,
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Early Years and School Standards, and for the DfES
National Advisory Centre on Early Language Learning, containing our findings and outcomes of
studies by the community language researchers’ network established via the project.
Interest in the project has resulted in a Times Educational Supplement article by Helen Ward:
Six-year-olds recognise different scripts, 28/6/02, p.10.
Data and insights from the project are used in a forthcoming textbook for A level students and
undergraduates, The Language of Children by Julia Gillen (Routledge).
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Future research priorities
Two additional areas of theoretical interest were encountered during the project, both deserving
further investigation:
Parents and siblings were found to be using various strategies to help young children become
biliterate, and opportunities were taken to video such literacy interactions. Early analysis
indicates that ‘literacy eco-systems’ may be constructed within families, in which members play
different roles according to biliteracy knowledge, gender and age. Papers have been accepted for
BAAL 2002 and (with Eve Gregory and Vicky Obied who are also researching bilingual siblings
as teachers) for the International Symposium on Bilingualism in Vigo, Spain, 2002.
The videodata on peer teaching shows adaptive ways in which ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’ respond to
each other’s contributions. This material will be analysed to contribute to sociocultural theories
of learning.
Other potential topics include:
•
•
Ways of integrating work on multilingual orthographies into early years pedagogy and
the National Literacy Strategy
How learning is taking place in bilingual nurseries attended by both monolingual and
bilingual children in London (to inform the Government’s new initiatives on early
language learning)
References
Collier, V. (1995) Promoting Academic Success for ESL Students. New Jersey: New Jersey
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages – Bilingual Educators.
DfES (2002) 14-19: Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards (Annexe on ‘Language
Learning’). London: HMSO.
Gillborn, D. and Gipps, C. (1996) Recent Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Minority
Pupils. London: HMSO.
Kenner, C. (2000) Symbols make text: a social semiotic analysis of writing in a multilingual
nursery. Written Language and Literacy, 3 (2), 235-266.
Kress, G. (1997) Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. (2000) Early Spelling: Between Convention and Creativity. London: Routledge.
Nuffield Inquiry Committee (2000) Languages: The Next Generation. London: Nuffield
Foundation.
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Appendix 1: Children participating in ‘Signs of Difference’ project
Child’s name
Selina
Date of birth
20/6/94
Languages
English, Cantonese,
Mandarin
English, Hakka,
Cantonese
Ming
1/9/94
Tala
20/12/94
English, Arabic
Yazan
Sadhana
Brian
5/12/94
2/8/94
8/10/94
English, Arabic
English, Spanish
English, Spanish
Siblings
Sister (10)
Brother (14)
3 brothers
2 sisters
Ranging from
brother (12) to
oldest brother (25)
Brother (8)
Sister (11)
Sister (10)
None
Brother (8)
Note: Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka are varieties of spoken Chinese; all spoken forms of
Chinese are represented by the same written form. In Selina and Ming’s community language
school, written Chinese was taught through the spoken medium of Cantonese.
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Appendix 2: Foundations for Learning test results
The Foundations for Learning test (Windsor: NFER-NELSON, 1998, authors N.Hagues,
S.Davidson, and L.Caspall) deals with verbal comprehension and non-verbal reasoning ability
via four different sections: Verbal Comprehension, Series, Picture Match and Sequences.
This test was chosen on the advice of NFER. It was designed for the nearest appropriate age (up
to 5 ½ years: no suitable test was available for the age group of 5-6 years old). Test items were
presented in the form of pictures, and the instructions explicitly stated that for bilingual children
test items could be administered in both languages, thus ensuring that any error was not due to
linguistic difficulty. As a short paper-and-pencil test, it was suitable for conducting during home
visits and children responded enthusiastically, seeing the booklets as a kind of game.
There were 24 test items in total, with an additional practice item preceding each section:
Verbal Comprehension
(children choose the picture which answers a verbal comprehension question)
5 questions
Series
(children choose the correct picture to continue a pattern)
7 questions
Picture Match
(children identify the part of the main picture that matches a given piece)
6 questions
Sequences
(children choose the correct picture to continue a diminishing sequence)
6 questions
The test was administered to each child with all questions translated into both their languages,
in Chinese/English and Arabic/English with the help of the project’s advisors, and in
Spanish/English by Dr. Kenner.
Child
Selina
Ming
Tala
Yazan
Sadhana
Brian
Age at time
of test
6.05
6.03
5.11
5.11
6.03
6.02
Verbal
comprehension
4
5
5
5
3
5
Series
6
6
7
6
7
7
Picture
match
6
6
5
5
6
5
Sequences
Total
5
5
5
6
6
5
21
22
22
22
22
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Results showed that all the children had a solid grasp of the skills being tested, with only slight
variations between individuals. The only child to have more than one error in a particular
category was Sadhana, in Verbal Comprehension. Sadhana was learning English mainly at
primary school; she was the only child in the project who did not have older siblings from whom
she could learn English at home. Of the two items which she got wrong, one was the most
difficult (involving a passive construction) and the other involved distinguishing between the
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prepositions ‘on’ and ‘in’ in English. Sadhana was given the question in both Spanish and
English, but focused on the English version and seems to have not yet acquired a definite
linguistic distinction between the two prepositions. However, she made no other errors in the test.
The highest expected score for the Foundations for Learning test is 22 out of 24 possible items,
for the upper age limit which is given as 5.6 years. In theory, these children (who were all above
this limit when tested) could have achieved scores of 23 or 24. In practice, in the relaxed
atmosphere of home, children saw the test as a ‘game’ and went through the items quite rapidly;
they may not have been paying quite as much attention as in the more formal atmosphere of a
classroom. The test booklet recognises this difference when it states that ‘if you wish to use a
more informal approach you may gain some diagnostic information but you will not be able to
obtain standardised scores’ (Foundations for Learning: Teacher’s Guide, p.10). However, the
informal approach was considered to be most suitable for gaining children’s and parents’
confidence at this early stage in the project, and the main purpose of administering the test (to
match the children on some basic cognitive and linguistic variables, as required by the ESRC
Board) could be achieved, since all the children took the test under similar conditions. The
children’s overall scores were all either 21 or 22, and no substantial individual differences
emerged.
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Appendix 3: Interview schedules
a) Questions asked in parent interviews
With acknowledgement to Kath Hirst (Hirst, K., 1998, Pre-school literacy experiences of
children in Punjabi, Urdu and Gujerati speaking families in England, British Educational
Research Journal 24 (4), 415-429), on whose interview schedule many of these questions are
based.
Bilingualism
Which languages do children speak at home? (to parents, siblings)
Do they use each language at different times / for different purposes? Do they switch between
languages?
Do they seem to know more Cantonese (Arabic/Spanish) or more English? Or the same amount?
When did you decide to send your child to Saturday school and what were your reasons?
Writing at home in both languages
Does your child see you (or other adults/ friends/ siblings) writing anything at home in Chinese
(Arabic/Spanish)/ English? (e.g. letters to family, shopping lists, catalogue forms)
Does s/he like to join in?
What kind of marks/ letters/ strings of letters does s/he write then? What kind of comments does
s/he make?
Does your child ask you (or others) for help with writing? (e.g. homework from community
language school or English school, play activities etc.)
Do you (or others) offer to teach her/him?
What kind of marks/letters/strings of letters does s/he write then? What kind of comments does
s/he make?
How do you explain about writing (e.g. do you teach your child about individual letters, whole
words, how to make a birthday card etc.?)
Reading at home in both languages
Does your child see you (or other adults/friends/siblings) reading anything at home in Chinese
(Arabic/Spanish) /English? (e.g. family letters, magazines, newspapers, TV schedule, books)
Does s/he like to join in?
What letters/words does s/he recognise? What kind of comments does s/he make?
Does your child ask you (or others) for help with reading? (e.g. homework from community
language school or English school, comics, cereal packets, storybooks…)
Do you (or others) offer to teach her/him?
What letters/words does s/he recognise? What kind of comments does s/he make?
How do you explain about reading (e.g. do you teach your child how to read individual letters,
whole words, how to follow the whole story etc.?)
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TV/Computer
What are your child’s favourite programmes? (including satellite/cable TV?) Which languages
are used in these?
Does s/he use the computer? (for games? for writing?)
Do the TV and the computer help your child to learn about reading/writing?
Knowledge about writing
(any examples of things your child has written/made recently?)
What do you think your child knows at the moment about writing in each language?
e.g. about alphabetic or logographic writing (letters & sounds or characters), directionality,
writing her/his name, any other words? About writing birthday cards, letters, shopping lists, etc.?
Have you noticed any changes in her/his writing recently?
General information
Child’s full name
Date of birth
Address/telephone no.
Siblings (ages)
Would you prefer a pseudonym to be used for the research study?
All the above questions were asked at the first interview. Questions were re-visited as
appropriate in subsequent interviews.
b) Questions asked in teacher interviews (at community language schools and primary
schools)
Which elements of the writing system are you aiming to teach at this point? (letters or characters,
and the combination of strokes used to create them; words; punctuation; sentences; whole texts)
What ideas do you intend the children to grasp, and how can your teaching help them to do this?
(e.g. what characters or letters stand for, how punctuation symbols operate, uses of capital/lower
case, issues of directionality – depending on the writing system being discussed)
How do you go about teaching handwriting and what aspects are you teaching at present?
What does Selina / Ming / Tala / Yazan / Sadhana / Brian understand about each of the above
ideas at this point, and what does s/he produce in her/his own writing?
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Appendix 4: Data collected
The children were visited at regular intervals over a period of one year in three different settings:
home, community language school and primary school. The following table shows methods used
and data collected in each setting:
Site
Home
No. of visits per child
4 (each 2-4 hours)*
Community
language school
4 (each 1-2 hours)**
Primary school:
a) class
b) peer teaching
3 (each 1 hour)
5 (each 45 min -1 hour)
***
Methods
Observation of parentchild interaction and
sibling interaction
around literacy
Type of data
Fieldnotes
Video-recording of
family teaching events
Children’s texts
Parent interviews
Observation of
literacy learning
Fieldnotes
Fieldnotes
Children’s texts
Textbooks
Teacher interviews
Fieldnotes
Observation of
literacy learning
Fieldnotes
Children’s texts
Teacher interviews
Fieldnotes
Observation of
sessions
Video-recording
* Homes proved to be a particularly rich source of data: visits were much longer than
anticipated – typically 2-4 hours rather than the hour originally planned – and opportunities
were taken to video children being taught by siblings and parents if families felt comfortable
with being recorded.
* *2 visits for Sadhana, who stopped attending Saturday school part-way through the project
because of practical difficulties – supplemented by extra observation of parental teaching during
home visits, using materials supplied at home or brought from Saturday school by the
researcher.
***Originally 4 peer teaching sessions per term were planned, but when practicalities were
discussed with class teachers this was changed to one session in the first term and two sessions
in each of the other terms. An ample amount of rich data was collected during these sessions,
and was complemented by the extra data obtained from homes.
Selina and Ming attended the same Chinese school, Tala and Yazan the same Arabic school, and
Sadhana and Brian the same Spanish school.
Selina and Ming attended the same primary school. Tala, Yazan, Sadhana and Brian attended
different primary schools.
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