Learning from Diversity

In teaching about literacy and diversity…

This morning, I finished a lesson on emergent literacy with a large group of undergraduates. I had begun the lesson two weeks earlier. In the previous lesson I started by reading two predictable books, Eric Carle’s “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth and Who Flung Dung by Ben Redlich. As I read, I invited participation, engaged prediction and then talked about print/picture match, repetitive text, one line per page, and pointed at the individual words as I read. I shared a Keynote that presented the Language Experience Approach, Reading Miscue Analysis, and Reading Recovery. Then I ran out of time.

For the follow up lesson, I read Come to the Circus by Damian Harvey and Sally Denton. This was another predictable, emergent reading book that I read in a way similar to the previous two predictable books. I reviewed the Keynote slides on LEA, and showed a 15-minute video of an ALL teacher in the writing segment. In the video, the teacher elicited a single sentence “story” and then assisted the first grade student in rendering his idea into print through shared writing. The student in the video used self monitoring and self correction on several occasions. He used serial order to generate the next word in the sentence he was trying to write. The teacher used strategy talk to reinforce the student. The teacher used Elkonian boxes to help the student hear the sounds in the words of his sentence three times. She then cut up the sentence that she had written on a sentence strip and had the student arrange the sentences parts two times. During the re-arrangement, she had two opportunities to reinforce the student’s use of self-correction behaviors. While the video played, I did a “talk over” to highlight the productive teaching points for the students.

The final activity for the lesson was small group work. Each group was assembled so that at least one group member knew a language not known by at least one other group member. The student who knew the additional language was to teach those who did not know it. The teacher in the group elicited a simple story that could be written as a predictable book. The story, dictated by the student in his/her own language, was written by the teacher in the new language. Then the teacher taught the student to read the story in the new language. Each group produced a simple, six-page stapled book, with a single line of text on each page and a picture that represented the key vocabulary on each page.

After thinking about the activity, I was reminded of the Learning to Read pamphlets written in non-alphabetic code so that parents could get an idea of how it is for kids when they are trying to learn to read. But in this case, the story was one that the dictating student valued, knew. And while each of the dictating students already knew how to read, and knew letters, the writing in a new language simulated young readers trying to figure out code in their own languages.

Reflecting on the activity, I am pleased with how well it went. Even with such a large group, everybody was engaged in their small groups.  The two instructors for the course were very complimentary that the lesson had made an impact on the students and that it had application to their studies. In fact, several students commented during the lesson that there were ways they would use the techniques they had learned. One student came up after the first lesson to compare what she was doing with her four year old and what we had covered in the Keynote. During the follow-up lesson, one undergraduate student planned to use the dictation technique (LEA) with her eighteen-year-old illiterate brother. I came to realize that the one of the factors that made the activity work was the linguistic diversity that was represented in the lives of the students. Without any systematic data collection, I was able to observe the use of Afrikaans, Xhosa, Swahili, Chinese and English. The only language used by all (as lingua franca) was English. Therefore, within the class was a real need and purpose to use emergent literacy as a way to transfer a message across languages.

It was not a complete success. Even with the modeling of several predictable books, and verbal descriptions of what made them work, some groups did not understand the need to present one line of text per page with illustrations that supported the print. Also, I did not have samples of less effective books, with too much text on a page, or with less supportive pictures. Even so, the groups took off. Several of the students brought me the books they had made to read together.

So, what I learned is that it is easier to teach about linguistic diversity when there is linguistic diversity among the students. I had an ideal set up to create a highly functioning ELL teaching context. English functioned as a transactional language that carried the functional load of teachers’ preparation. But at any point, there is the affordance of multiple languages to make a point, to practice a strategy.

My day was made later, after the class. I was working on my laptop in my office when I was interrupted by a soft knock on my doorframe. I looked up to see a smallish, well-groomed, attractive young man. His name is Malusi Ntoyapi. He was finishing his BA, and then will pursue a teaching certification in his fifth year. He came to tell me how much he enjoyed the classes. And then proceeded to inform me on the various aspects of emergent literacy in a multilingual culture. As I listened, I heard thematic reasoning on book sharing, on emergent writing, the significance of scribbling from the perspective of the child, on the fallacy of insisting on accuracy in spelling, on the advantages of being read to. I interrupted at some point, as he was on a religious roll. I told Malusi that I believed the same things about emergent literacy, and that the beliefs we shared were supported by research. Then he really took off, that I should visit the Sea Point Library to watch the multilingual book sharing, and described the interpretive literacy teaching behaviors used by the librarian there. Again, interrupted, I asked “How did you learn all this?” He told me he was involved in an early literacy training project at UCT called PRAESA. I could have fallen out of my chair.

I had come across PRAESA in the Internet searching I had done prior to leaving Florida. It is a multi-focused, early literacy project that tries to inculcate literacy practices in language and culture groups that are not used to literacy. One of the projects that I read about was creating children’s books in Xhosa. The plan was to record tales told in Xhosa communities and then try to create children’s books. The interesting part of this research was the analysis of publishing limits, run sizes, and potential markets for published books. I had never considered the economics involved in the “good will” toward publishing for children. Malusi finally dropped a name: Xolisa Guzula at PRAESA, and told me to “Google her” if I was interested. I did. She has been very active in the development of training materials and her own literature. Apparently, she has also been very effective in developing literacy acolytes.  Malusi asked me about the feasibility of careers that worked with emergent and family literacy. I mentioned our PhD program. I felt like I was recruiting, but didn’t know what else to say. When I asked what he had planned for himself, he mentioned intermediate grade teaching. This didn’t make sense with his passion for emergent literacy. Who knows.

These experiences make me wonder about what we are doing in our teacher training in the name of ESOL. Can the undergraduates understand how language diversity functions in classrooms? From a US perspective, a monolingual one, a second language is seen as a disability. Here EVERYONE speaks at least two, usually three languages. And outside of the prestige question for English and the oppression associated with Afrikaans, language diversity is an apport, appearing magically when it is needed and then fading away. Everyday uses of multiple languages is unremarkable. To me, a monolingual, THAT is remarkable. They appear to code switch with ease. Languages are a necessary tool to get what one wants, socially, professionally, intimately.  I still am not clear on the language of instruction issue. Mastin at UCT made some interesting comments in his address at RASA. I need to talk with him. I also get two more chances on Monday. At 10:00 am I talk with Prof. Caroline Kerfoot in teacher preparation at UWC, and at 3:00 I talk with Rasandra Chetty, the Dean of Research at CPUT. He is also interested in literacy research.