Currents in Literacy

Valuing Language Diversity and Bilingual Literacy

By Solange de Azambuja Lira, Maria de Lourdes Serpa, and William T. Stokes

Language diversity is a fact in U.S. schools. Approximately twenty percent of students speak a language other than English in the home. In all, more than a hundred languages are represented. If any of the distinctive variations (or dialects) of English are included in this count, then the percentage of students who speak another language increases significantly. The recent debates about Black English (or Ebonics) provide a glimpse into the scope of these issues.

In Massachusetts alone, there are more than 100,000 school-age students who speak another language at home. In some school districts, these students are the majority of the student population, or a large part of it, as, for instance, in Lawrence (77%), Chelsea (66%), Holyoke (57%), Lowell (45%), Greater Lawrence (36%), Fall River (33%), Boston (35%), Brookline (31%), Cambridge (31%), Springfield (29%), and Lynn (28%) (Massachusetts Department of Education, 1995). Just over half of all linguistic minority students in Massachusetts speak Spanish. Other languages include Portuguese, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Khmer, Greek, Vietnamese, Russian, and dozens more.

One of the most pressing questions for schools today concerns how schools provide literacy instruction for this diverse population. How should schools provide for literacy learning? Illiteracy is a cause for concern in the U.S. One survey found that 56% of Hispanics, 44% of blacks and 16% of whites are functionally illiterate (Vargas, 1988). The United States ranks 49th among 156 United Nations member countries in its rate of literacy. An illiterate population can neither work nor participate effectively in a democracy. How can we improve such dismal figures?

What does it mean to read and write?

Researchers and theorists have constructed models that present reading and writing as processes that gather information from different sources: meaning, structure, and visual cues. Meaning, or semantic information, is based on the student's life experiences and the language spoken with parents and caregivers. Meaning is drawn from shared cultural understandings, knowledge of the intentions of authors (e.g., story telling, information sharing, etc.) and, of course, the accumulation of ideas within a passage. Knowledge of the structures of the language also guides reading. Structure, or syntactic and morphophonemic information, refers to how words are organized and spoken. Grammars vary from language to language. Word order varies. Grammatical details, such as subject-noun agreement or the formation of negatives differ. And possible sound sequences differ. When a child has limited knowledge of the language of instruction, then these signal systems are less available, or not available at all, and errors that violate meaning and structure will increase dramatically.

Visual cues that underlie the alphabetic system of writing refer not only to the discrimination of one letter from another, but also to the appropriate assignment of sounds to letter sequences. English is a twelve vowel language while Spanish, for instance, is a five vowel language. Thus, in English, there are frequent vowel combinations, such as "ea" that have quite different sound values depending on context: bear, dear, earth, heart. Successful decoding, as it is called in phonics instruction, depends upon language specific knowledge. Given these characteristics, in which language should we provide initial reading instruction - the familiar home language or English?

How should we teach reading and writing to children who have a home language other than English?

Assuming that competent instruction is available and that children's age and prior experience are considered, there are four options for teaching:

(1) Begin with the home language, and transfer to English. This approach is a sound way of teaching literacy to young students because it builds on the language that the students use with their parents. It is consistent with the reading and writing model discussed above and it provides these students with equivalent opportunities given native English speakers -- to make use of the meanings and structures of the language, as well as the relationships between oral language and its corresponding visual cues or graphic symbols.

(2) Begin instruction in English with some support in the home language. In this approach, students are faced with many challenges. They will take longer to achieve literacy, because they are learning a second language and learning through the second language at the same time.

(3) Begin instruction in both languages simultaneously. This approach is used in many of the two-way bilingual programs where English speaking and non-English speaking students learn together to read and write simultaneously in both languages. This approach makes most sense in the long run because it makes all our children bilingual.

(4) Begin instruction in English only. This is the immersion, sink-or-swim, approach which presents the greatest challenges for linguistic minority students. The reason is obvious -- this approach cannot be supported by the definition of reading offered above. When a child must learn to read for the first time and do so in an unfamiliar language, we should not be surprised that the process will be slow and difficult.

However, there are also many linguistic minority children who speak languages for which there can be no home language instruction, because of practical limits. It is quite common that small elementary schools will include children from dozens of language backgrounds. Only a few of these schools might reasonably provide opportunities for home language instruction. Thus, it is also essential to recognize that English immersion literacy instruction will be the only option for many children, and must therefore be approached in the most culturally and linguistically sensitive manner possible. All teachers have to be trained to teach English to all children. That is, they have to know what the necessary conditions for second language acquisition and early literacy development are, which include maintaining meaningful communication, establishing a nurturing environment conducive to risk taking, and fostering positive expectations from teachers and other classmates.

What are the benefits of bilingual literacy?

Research shows us that the knowledge children get through their first language helps them read, write, and speak in English faster than if they didn't have home language support. In a sample of 42,000 language minority students from across the U.S., Thomas and Collier (1997) found that when children were schooled bilingually, they would take four to seven years to reach the 50th percentile on standardized tests in English. Moreover, the children were on or above grade level in their first language as well. However, when there was no schooling in the home language, the children would need seven to ten years to reach those levels of performance.

The theory of linguistic interdependence states that instruction in the home language promotes higher level cognitive and academic skills that are necessary for the development of literacy in both languages. Cummins (1979) explains that language proficiency is a combination of skills in two basic domains of language development: Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), which is the competence to function in everyday interpersonal contexts; and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which is the competence to engage in abstract, decontextualized, academic tasks. BICS is not directly related to academic achievement and can be attained after two years in a host country. Many children are mainstreamed into English-only classes after they reach this stage because they appear to be fluent. However, a child in first grade can appear to be fluent with a productive vocabulary of 1000 words, while a native English speaking child will have more than 6000 words. Consequently, when language minority children are placed in an English-only class and are expected to learn more demanding academic skills, they are often unprepared and fail. They don't have the vocabulary and the concepts to succeed. According to Cummins (1992), it takes five to seven years to develop the language proficiency needed to function in decontextualized, academic settings.

To have a second language is an asset in the global economy. It is not in our best economic interest to turn all potentially bilingual students into English-only monolinguals. The Massachusetts Common Core of Learning, adopted by the MA Board of Education (1996), states, "All students should read, write, and converse in at least one language in addition to English." We are fortunate to have such a large number of students who speak another language; they can help us reach this goal of teaching a second language to monolingual students. We should not accept policies that tend to eliminate the home languages of linguistic minority students, and then try to add a foreign language in middle school. We should take full advantage of the linguistic diversity present in this country.

Bibliography

Cummins, J. (1979). Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, Linguistic Interdependence, The Optimum Age Question and Some Other Matters.Working papers in bilingualism, 19, 121-129.

Cummins, J. (1992). "Bilingual Education and English Immersion: The Ramírez Report in Theoretical Perspective." The Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education, 16 (1&2), 91-104.

Massachusetts Department of Education (1996). Making Connections Through World Languages. The Massachusetts World Languages Curriculum Frameworks.

Thomas, W. and Collier, V. (1997). Language Minority Student Achievement and Program Effectiveness. Research summary of ongoing study: results of September, 1995.

Vargas, A. (1988). Literacy in the Hispanic Community. Washington, D.C.: National Council of La Raza.

Solange de Azambuja Lira, Ph.D. is Director of the Lesley University Learning Center and Associate Professor in the School of Education. Her Ph.D. is in Linguistics and her areas of expertise are sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and Portuguese syntax.

Maria de Lordes Serpa, Ed.D. is Program Director for the graduate Special Needs Teacher Education Program at Lesley University. Her expertise is in literacy, biliteracy, non-discriminatory assessment, and learning disabilities.

William T. Stokes, Ed.D. is a Professor at Lesley University, co-Director of the Literacy Institute, and the Director of the Hood Children's Literacy Project. For the past 25 years he has focused on children's language and literacy development.