Language education needs for multilingualism in Fiji primary schools

This paper looks at current practice in teaching multilingual Indo-Fijian children in eight Fiji primary schools. Indo-Fijians speak Fiji Hindi (FH) as their mother tongue, learn Shudh Hindi (SH) or Urdu, and English for formal and literacy purposes and use English and Fijian for interethnic communication. The current education policy states that children be taught in their mother tongue for the first 3 years of primary school before English becomes the medium of instruction. This practice was not apparent in the schools. In all 24 observed classrooms, English was the dominant language of instruction. There is an important need in Fiji for teacher training to address the issues around multilingual education so that teachers can confidently contribute to an educational system which maximises the use of Fiji's linguistic resources for the educational advancement of all sectors of the country's population.     

Oral reading fluency and comprehension in Kenya: reading acquisition in a multilingual environment

Reading research has shown that variable relationships exist between measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, depending on whether the language of the text is the reader's first language or an additional language. This paper explores this phenomenon, using reading assessment data for 2,000 Kenyan children in two or three languages: English, Kiswahili and one of two mother tongues, Dholuo or Gikuyu. The assessment data allowed us to compare reading and comprehension rates across languages. The data indicated that many children could read English words more easily than words in Kiswahili or their mother tongue; nevertheless, their reading comprehension was significantly lower in English than in Kiswahili, Dholuo or Gikuyu. The paper concludes that emphasising English reading fluency is an inefficient route to gaining reading comprehension skills because pupils are actually attaining minimal oral reading fluency in English and only modest comprehension skills in their own languages. The evidence also demonstrates that Kenya's national language policy of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in the early primary grades is consistently ignored in practice.     

Sustaining literacy from mother tongue instruction in complementary education into official language of instruction in government schools in Ghana

This paper presents evidence on literacy trajectories for children in Ghana who enrolled in a Complementary Basic Education programme taught in mother tongue and transitioned into government schools. At the point of transition, we find that children who enrolled in government schools where the language of instruction differed from instruction in their mother tongue did not perform as well in literacy. After a year in government schools, those taught in another local language caught up. By contrast, those who transitioned into English did not. Our evidence reinforces the benefits of mother tongue and local language instruction for progress in literacy.     

An advocacy project for multicultural education: The case of the Shiyeyi language in Botswana

Multicultural education respects cultural differences and affirms pluralism which students, their communities and teachers bring to the learning process. It is founded on the belief that a school curriculum which promotes the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity and human dignity is most likely to result in high academic achievement and quality education. In Botswana, English is the official language and medium of instruction and Setswana is the national lingua franca which is used for formal occasions in the villages and other informal settings. Any other languages spoken by unrecognised tribes are banned from use in schools or the media, including minority languages taught before independence in 1966, This paper describes the Shiyeyi Language Project, initiated by the Wayeyi tribe, which advocates for a multicultural model of education where children learn in their mother tongue and about their local culture at an early stage, then add the national language, and eventually an international language as medium of instruction. The project operates within an unfriendly political and legal context, but has achieved some results. Continued efforts, especially as supported by similar language projects, have the potential to change the situation in Botswana.     

基于儿童成长的小学阅读教学探索

好的教育应当适合儿童,为儿童所喜爱。小学阅读教学要尊重儿童生命的存在,把握儿童在各个阶段学习母语的规律,用儿童喜闻乐见的方式,打通儿童经验的通道,从儿童出发设计教学,帮助其获得成长必需的语文素养。     

Mother and I

Teaching materials are a manifestation of culture. "Teaching material culture is social culture manifested in the contents of teaching materials and in teaching activities. It represents a society's authoritative systems of knowledge, values, and concepts, and explicitly exhibits the given teaching contents selected by the society's leading class(es) for the socialization of children and young people. It is a tool for disseminating value concepts and ideology."¹ English language teaching materials are even more distinctive. In English teaching materials and teaching, one must give expression to the Chinese society's requirements and expectations with regard to the socialization of children on the one hand and, on the other, because the English language is the creation of a foreign culture, English language teaching materials and teaching manifest the Chinese people's reading and reconstruction of that foreign culture. Junior middle school English-language teaching materials are targeted at twelve- to fifteen-year-old children in their adolescence. In terms of English-language studies, they cannot reach the level of children of the same age in countries where English is the mother tongue, and so the contents of English teaching materials seem relatively simple in comparison with the intellectual and mental level of students of this period. However, it is precisely in the simplicity and directness of this language that the cultural characteristics of English-language teaching materials surface more distinctly.     

Moral Task of the Teacher According to Students,Parents and Teachers

In this longitudinal study, we examined the effects of the use of English as the language of instruction in the first 4 years of secondary education in The Netherlands on the students' language proficiency in English and Dutch, and achievement in subject matters taught through English. Compared to a control group in regular secondary education, students attending this form of bilingual education showed higher scores for their English language proficiency in terms of oral proficiency and reading comprehension. No effects have been found for receptive word knowledge and no negative effects have been found with respect to the results of their school leaving exams at the end of secondary education for Dutch and subject matters taught through English.     

The Politics of Bilingualism: A reproduction analysis of the policy of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997

After the resumption of sovereignty in 1997 mother tongue education in Hong Kong, though it began with the good intention of national reintegration, politically, socially, culturally and educationally, has escalated the tensions and contradictions of the politics of bilingualism in its implementation. The government policy of bi-literacy and trilingualism addresses, rather than resolves, the problems of hegemonic struggle among different social groups in the society, and between the indigenous elite class and national ruling elites at both the local and national level. A reproduction analysis is conducted to examine the events pertinent to the language shift of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) to Chinese as a medium of instruction (CMI), with particular emphasis on controversial issues such as parental choice, antagonism of elite classes, and group politics in the face of the internationalisation of English under globalised developments of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). English, a colonising language in the past and now a world language for changes in ICT, remains problematic for Hong Kong's language policy undergoing decolonisation and internationalisation in its early post-transitional years. Putonghua, the national language of China, challenging Cantonese, the regional dialect, as the formal and high Chinese language of the society, has added complexities to the discourse of polemical mother tongue education under the 'one country, two systems' framework practised in Hong Kong.     

Estimating the impact of language of instruction in South African primary schools: A fixed effects approach

For many children around the world, access to higher education and the labour market depends on becoming fluent in a second language. In South Africa, the majority of children do not speak English as their first language but are required to undertake their final school-leaving examinations in English. Most schools offer mother-tongue instruction in the first three grades of school and then transition to English as the language of instruction in the fourth grade. Some schools use English as the language of instruction from the first grade. In recent years a number of schools have changed their policy, thus creating within-school, cross-grade variation in the language of instruction received in the early grades. Using longitudinal data from the population of South African primary schools and a fixed-effects approach, we find that mother tongue instruction in the early grades significantly improves English acquisition, as measured in grades 4, 5 and 6.     

The Niue literacy experiment

In the mid-1970s a major change was introduced in the teaching of English as a second language at the primary level on Niue Island in the South Pacific. At that time the government's education system consisted of seven primary schools and one high school administered by a small Education Department. Prior to the change, English had been taught through a structural linguistic approach, which was almost universal in the South Pacific. Central to the change was the Shared Book Experience, a teaching method widely used in New Zealand schools. Used in conjunction with a large supply of suitable storybooks, it was seen as a promising vehicle for instruction to improve the ESL learning outcomes for Year 3 pupils. This chapter sets out a justification for using the Shared Book procedures, the strategies that were implemented, and the evaluation procedures used to test the effectiveness of the change. Results showed that Year 3 pupils taught by the new method made significant gains in reading comprehension, word recognition and oral English, when compared with similar children taught with the structural approach.     

Reading instruction affects the cognitive skills supporting early reading development

This study examined the cognitive skills associated with early reading development when children were taught by different types of instruction. Seventy-nine children (mean age at pre-test 4;10 (.22 S.D.) and post-test 5;03 (.21 S.D.)) were taught to read either by an eclectic approach which included sight-word learning, guessing from context and analytic phonics, or by a synthetic phonics approach, where children were taught solely to sound and blend letters to read unfamiliar words. The results illustrated differences in the skills supporting children's word reading based on their method of reading instruction. For the eclectic group, pre-test letter knowledge, vocabulary and rhyming skills predicted later reading ability, whereas for the synthetic phonics group, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness and memory span predicted later reading skill. The results suggest that children will draw upon different cognitive skills when reading if they are taught to use different word recognition strategies.     

Instructing First-Grade Children on Patterning Improves Reading and Mathematics

Research Findings: In each of 16 public school classrooms serving multiethnic low-income neighborhoods, 2 first graders were assigned to be taught patterning, 2 to be taught reading, 2 to be taught mathematics, and 2 to be taught social studies for 15-min sessions 3 days per week for 6 months. Assignment within each classroom was randomized. The children's mean age was 6 years, 5.19 months. Patterning instruction included instruction on symmetrical patterns, patterns with increasing numbers of elements, and patterns involving the rotation of an object through 6 or 8 positions. In May, the 120 children still available were tested on patterns, reading, and mathematics. Patterning instruction had large, fully mediated effects on both reading and mathematics. There were no significant differences on some individual scales, but on others children who received patterning instruction scored best, often by grade equivalents of 4 to 8 months. Extant explanations of the efficacy of patterning instruction are reviewed, and the potential importance and limitations of its role in early education are discussed. Practice or Policy: Patterning instruction should be extended to more complex patterns than the alternations currently used in elementary schools in order to produce important improvements in both reading and mathematics.     

Effects of Bilingual and English as a Second Language Adaptations of Success for All on the Reading Achievement of Students Acquiring English

Two adaptations of Success for All, a comprehensive reform program for elementary schools, have been used with students acquiring English. One is a Spanish bilingual version, called Exito Para Todos, in which students are taught to read in Spanish and then transitioned to English reading, usually in third or fourth grade. The other integrates English as a Second Language (ESL) strategies with English reading instruction. This paper summarizes the results of both of these adaptations for students acquiring English. The effects of Success for All on the achievement of English language learners are, in general, substantially positive. In all schools implementing Exito Para Todos, effect sizes for first graders on Spanish assessments were very positive, especially when schools were implementing most of the program's elements. Even after transitioning to English-only instruction, Exito Para Todos third graders performed better on English assessments than control students who were primarily taught in English. For students acquiring English receiving ESL instruction, effect sizes for all comparisons were also positive.     

Reading,syntactic, and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children

The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and to determine the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems in Portuguese. The study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 37 bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children, aged 9–12 years. English was their main instructional language and Portuguese was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program at school where they were taught to read and write Portuguese. The children were administered word and pseudoword reading, language, and working memory tasks in English and Portuguese. The majority of the children (67%) showed at least average proficiency in both languages. The children who had low reading scores in English also had significantly lower scores on the Portuguese tasks. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudoword reading, working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The Portuguese-Canadian children who were normally achieving readers did not differ from a comparison group of monolingual English speaking normally achieving readers except that the bilingual children had significantly lower scores on the English syntactic awareness task. The bilingual reading disabled children had similar scores to the monolingual reading disabled children on word reading and working memory but lower scores on the syntactic awareness task. However, the bilingual reading disabled children had significantlyhigher scores than the monolingual English speaking reading disabled children on the English pseudoword reading test and the English spelling task, perhaps reflecting a positive transfer from the more regular grapheme phoneme conversion rules of Portuguese. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of reading skills. In both English and Portuguese, reading difficulties appear to be strongly related to deficits in phonological processing.     

Parent question use during shared reading time: How does training affect question type and frequency?

This study was designed to examine whether participation in a shared reading workshop alters the frequency with which parents ask their children questions during book reading sessions, particularly questions designed to strengthen component reading skills that they may not have known about before training. Participants in the reading workshop series (N = 57) were taught strategies for asking questions about story content and word structure to build children's language and literacy skills. Findings suggest that parents may be somewhat familiar with traditional dialogic reading strategies focused on story content and utilize them without instruction, whereas parents may be less knowledgeable about sound or print‐focused skills and do not employ strategies focused on word structure until instructed to do so. It is also notable that parents do not use all story content prompts equally. This information can be used by school psychologists to refine the messages educators share with parents about how to best support their children's reading development.     

新疆少数民族双语教育模式探讨

教学模式是保证双语教育培养目标有效实施的方案。依据新疆双语教育培养双语双文化人目标,文章通过研究国外双语教育模式以及深入的田野调查,构建出田野点乌鲁木齐市T区双语教育模式:早期部分浸没式,即从学前开始实施双语教育,在母语文与汉语文并行作为课程开设的同时,文科课程使用母语授课,理科及英语课程使用汉语授课,同时进行课程整合,大学时,班主任主要由汉语文老师担任等。同时探讨了民考汉教学模式:加授母语文课;升学考试(中考、高考)中用母语文成绩替换现有民考汉加分。     

谈小学英语课堂中激励教学的有效开展

英语作为一门外来语言,与我们的母语存在着极大差异,小学生在初次接触时,会产生消极和畏难情绪,教师在开展英语教学时,要善于利用激励教学法来激发学生的学习欲望,帮助学生建立英语学习自信,让学生在积极主动的学习状态下,对英语展开主动思考和探索,促进自身英语素养和英语思维能力的发展.     

The benefits of metacognitive reading strategy awareness instruction for young learners of English as a second language

This paper presents a small‐scale study examining the effects of metacognitive reading strategy instruction on English language learners' reading comprehension in a Hong Kong international school. Twenty‐five primary school (Grade 5) students who learn English as a second language participated in this study. Metacognitive instruction was incorporated into 10 process‐based reading lessons. Data were collected from notes learners took during reading, post‐reading reflection reports, teacher‐facilitated group discussions and two types of reading tests. Results revealed that the young learners could articulate several knowledge factors that influenced their reading. In addition, learners reported a better understanding of the nature and demands of reading, a deeper awareness of metacognitive knowledge in improving reading comprehension and increased confidence in handling reading exercises. The learners also showed enhanced reading performance compared to those in a control group without metacognitive intervention. This study highlights the potential of metacognitive instruction to enhance primary school English learners' reading literacy.     

Language Development at Home and School: Gains and losses in young bilinguals

In this paper we examine the topic of the language development of three young bilingual children at both home and school. Our aim is to consider the language issues that arise in such children, taking into account their parents' language background and experience of school systems, language practices and 'policy' in the home, and the children's experience of a year of nursery school as reported by their teachers. We try to show how different strands of the children's experience fit together; their 'mother tongue', their mothers' aspirations for them, their teachers' view of their progression, and their competence in English, all considered against the background of current curriculum guidance. We conclude with an examination of the gains and losses these children have made in the school system so far, and with an analysis of what the roles of 'mother tongue' might be for children in these and similar circumstances.