– in order of presentation -
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Phonological awareness and first time (late) L1 readers
Astrid Geudens
University of Antwerp, Center for Psycholinguistics
Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders
Research of more than two decades has documented that the beginning reader’s crucial insight into the connection between print and speech is intimately related with his or her ability to pay attention to and manipulate the phonological structure of words, a capacity that has come to be called phonological awareness (PA). Various tasks with a variety of stimuli have been developed to assess PA. They differ in terms of the required operation (e.g., blending or isolating sounds), the size and nature of the phonological units on which the operations are performed (e.g., rimes or phonemes), the complexity of the stimuli (e.g., VC or CCVCC), their phonemic make-up (e.g., obstruent or sonorant consonants) etc. This strong diversity makes it difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of the construct PA and its effect on L1 reading and spelling.
In this talk, I will address some of the problems and questions that arise in the research on PA and literacy acquisition. One controversial issue relates to the developmental sequence of PA, being from large to small units or vice versa; another is the debate about the phonological units that are most salient and important for reading development. A final intriguing question is whether beginning readers use the same kind of phonological knowledge as skilled readers and whether late readers use different reading strategies than normal developing readers. An overview of our own research findings will draw attention to developmental differences in early phoneme isolation skills in relationship with early reading. This research emphasizes the importance of informal print-related experiences, phonetic factors such as perception and articulation, and instruction-based experiences. I will end with a summary of the main insights of the talk for the study of PA in relation with learning to read.
Is there critical period for learning to read?
Martha Young-Scholten
University of Newcastle
Children develop literacy only after they’ve acquired much of their first language, but non-literate adults face the challenge of learning to read in a second language with little proficiency in that language and no familiarity with literacy. Can adults without any native language schooling learn to read for the first time in a second language? With the collaboration of Nancy Strom (ProLiteracy USA), a small-scale study of 17 Vietnamese- and Somali-speaking adults learning English as a second language was carried out in the USA. The study proceeded on the premise that awareness of various linguistic units - from word to phoneme - is connected to learning to read for the first time (e.g. for children Goswami & Bryant 1990 and for adults in their native language Morais et al. 1979).
The 7 Vietnamese- and 10 Somali-speakers took a battery of 17 tests and filled out a questionnaire on their linguistic and literacy background with the help of an interpreter. Data reveal that 2-4 years of native-language schooling using the Roman alphabet (for Somali and Vietnamese) gives low proficiency learners a foundation for reading in English. Any reading problems these learners had appear to be connected with overall linguistic development. However, despite ample exposure to written English in their ESL classes, all but one of the completely unschooled adults in the study exhibited the ability to handle more than a very limited sight word repertoire or to write their name and address. The correlation of weak reading skills scores with low meta-phonemic awareness scores provides further evidence for these learners’ failure to grasp the alphabetic principle and to progress beyond sight-word-based reading. Yet these unschooled adults did indeed display the ability to isolate words and to recognize rhyme and alliteration in both their native language as well as in English. This parallels findings for pre-school children, suggesting that the readiness to read does not diminish for adults.
Knowledge on language of adult illiterates
Jeanne Kurvers
Babylon, Centre for Studies of the Multicultural Society
Tilburg University
This presentation will shortly summarize a previous study on the development of basic reading skills of adult migrants learning to read and write in Dutch as a second language. The main focus will be on a subsequent study aimed at investigating the awareness of print and language of unschooled illiterate adults, compared with pre-reading children and low-educated reading adults.
The participants were 24 young pre-schoolers, 25 illiterate adults without any schooling, and 23 literate adults with about four years of primary schooling, all participants having a similar ethnic and social background (mainly Berber-speaking Moroccans, Somali and Turks). All groups were offered the same set of tests on print awareness (Fe environmental reading, symbols, grapheme knowledge) and another set of tests on language awareness for both the phonological and the lexical/semantic levels (Fe rhyme production, sentence segmentation, syllogistic reasoning). Depending on the participant’s dominant language, either the participant’s mother tongue or Dutch as a second language was used.
In the presentation especially the linguistic outcomes will be discussed. Analyses of variance and post-hoc analyses revealed a few significant differences between young children and illiterate adults but several significant differences between the non-readers (both children and adults) and low-educated literates; the impact of literacy seems to be of crucial importance when it comes to explicit knowledge of structural features of language.
Cognitive factors: working memory and lexical development
Alan Juffs
University of Pittsburgh
This paper addresses two issues in adult second language learning. First, I will provide an overview of work that examines the role of working memory and aptitude in explaining individual differences in second language learning success. I will focus on the various measures that are used to measure working memory and on the contradictory results from published research in this arena. Based on the current literature, I conclude that it is difficult to have confidence in a simple measure of working memory or aptitude that will predict success in L2 development. In the second part of the talk, I will concentrate on some issues of lexical development, in particular on the role of verb meaning in predicting clausal syntax. The results of this research suggest that the first language plays a very important role in the developing grammars of adult learners, although an early stage exists at which basic patterns in the L2 appear without reference to the L1 or L2 argument structure. The third section of the talk will address research that links working memory research with lexical development, pointing out different predictions that various approaches make to the acquisition of verb meaning and clause structure. Finally, I will consider how this research might inform the educational development of low-educated learners, who are the focus of the conference.
Instructional Practices: Effect of language and literacy on L2 proficiency
Larry Condelli
Managing Director for Adult Education and Literacy,
American Institutes for Research, USA
This presentation will describe two large studies of the effects of instructional practices on L2 (English) proficiency of adults with low-literacy skills. The first study, recently completed, included 495 adult literacy students attending 38 ESOL classes in 13 schools and seven states in the U.S. Students were assessed at intake, three months and nine months after enrolling, with reading, writing and speaking tests and a literacy practices interview. Instructional measures, collected from classroom observations, included emphasis on literacy and language development activities and general instructional strategies. Using correlational growth modeling, the study found that instructional strategies that connected what is taught to real life, used a variety of modalities and activities to keep students engaged and used student’s native language to clarify and explain concepts were significantly related to literacy students’ development of reading and oral communication skills. The second study, recently underway, will use a randomized design to compare explicit literacy instruction with typical ESOL instruction on low-literate adult ESOL learners. Teachers in the study will use employ curriculum and materials specially designed for the study that will employ explicit literacy strategies to teach reading, writing and oral English communication skills. The study will include 40 adult ESOL classes and 1,800 students in the U.S. Findings and approaches of both studies will be tied to the research on the relationship of L1 literacy language and skills of adults to L2 development.
Getting the Research to the Classroom: Preparing Teachers to Help Low-Literacy Adult ESOL Learners
Nancy Faux
Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center
Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA
Many adult ESOL teachers in the United States are untrained in working with the low-literate adult population and thus unaware of the research, little as it is, that has been done either on L2 acquisition or on effective classroom practices for this group of learners. They are unable to differentiate between literacy instruction for native speakers and that for non-native speakers. This presentation will explore some the issues and needs of professional development along with one solution to provide learning opportunities for teachers to adopt effective research-based methodologies.
“There are many flowers in flowery cloth”. Collaborative form focused discourse and language awareness
Ingrid Skeppstedt
Stockholm, National Centre for Swedish as L2
In this paper I will present results from two different studies on form focused discourse and language awareness (Lindberg & Skeppstedt 2000, Skeppstedt 2002). Both studies are based on data from adult learners with varying educational backgrounds learning Swedish as a second language in a formal setting.
Second language classroom research during the last 15-20 years has shown that interaction between learners in different kind of small group activities may offer excellent opportunities not only for communicative language use and negotiation of meaning but also for scaffolded language development and increased language awareness.
The theoretical framework for the present studies emphasizes the importance of social interaction for the provision of cognitive, linguistic, social and affective support in second language acquisition and learning. Other aspects of SLA research of theoretical importance for the present studies include the role of declarative and procedural knowledge, comprehensible output, noticing and focus on form.
The results that will be presented here are partly from a study of collaborative text reconstruction and partly from a connected study focusing on methodological issues such as the use of acceptability judgments for the assessment of grammar awareness among second language learners.
Both studies are based on data from learners representing two different educational levels; one corresponding to a previous education of zero to six years and the other corresponding to a previous education of seven or more years. The oral language proficiency level of the learners varied from lower intermediate to intermediate. Along with their Swedish language training the low literacy learners in the study had participated in basic literacy and numeracy education.
Images for and of literacy learners
- a teacher perspective -
Qarin Franker
Göteborg University - Department of Swedish Language
Institute of Swedish as a Second Language
This paper will discuss multimodality in language education with focus on how images, inter textuality and language use in society in a broader perspective can influence language education.
When literacy instruction is provided in a second language for adult learners, teachers meet learners with limited oral proficiency in the language of instruction and very little experience of written material. All the same, these learners must be offered opportunities to achieve communicative skills in the majority language to be able to master their daily life and prepare themselves for further education in their new country. Under these circumstances images can often be an important mediating tool. Consequently, teaching materials based on images is frequently used in these educational contexts. Still, we know very little about these learners’ understanding of such materials. We also lack knowledge of how teachers’ perceive these learners’ possibilities to interpret different types of images.
The aim of the present study is threefold:
- Problematize the use of image-based materials in second-language literacy training
- Specify what kind of image-based materials that is used in literacy classes
- Find out about the teachers’ underlying assumptions for choosing images more or less suitable for their literacy classes
To find out what kind of materials teachers use and reveal assumptions underlying teachers’ choices of images, a questionnaire was disseminated to around fifty experienced teachers mainly from Sweden, but also from Denmark and Norway. The teachers were asked to report on their choices of images used in their own teaching practice. In order to interpret, analyze and classify possible reasons for the teachers’ choices of images a modified model originally presented by Breen (1991) was used. In addition, an exploratory critical discourse analysis of the teachers’ answers was conducted.
The results show a varied but diversified usage of images in the classrooms. The teachers’ choices of images can be explained with relation to their view upon their learners’ cognitive, perceptual and emotional capacities and socio-cultural background but also on their different assumptions concerning the importance of various characteristics of the images.
From a critical perspective the data can be regarded as part of a discursive practice in which teachers’ unknowingly and unintentionally contribute to the discoursal construction of an identity of deficiency of second language literacy learners by way of ‘othering’ their students with respect to their cognitive, cultural and other capacities.
