Dr Charmian Kenner c.kenner@gold.ac.uk
This study investigated how six bilingual children (Chinese/English, Arabic/English and Spanish/English) learned to write in very different scripts. The six children studied were learning Chinese, Arabic or Spanish at community language school and English at primary school. The children were observed over one year during literacy activities at their two schools and at home. Peer teaching sessions were set up in which they showed primary school classmates how to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish.
The detailed case studies of the 6 year olds growing up in London showed that they understood the ways in which different writing systems operate. The children learning Chinese understood that Chinese does not have an alphabet, but uses characters which are equivalent to an English word. The children learning Arabic were able to teach their primary school classmates that Arabic is written from right to left, whereas English is written from left to right. The children learning Spanish realised that letter-sound links could differ in Spanish and English: for example, the letter ‘i’ is pronounced differently.
The children were also aware of the visual characteristics of each script, and were learning how to write different kinds of symbol accurately. In Chinese, children learned to write complex patterns for each character. In Arabic, children had to remember the placing of dots to differentiate between letters. In Spanish, children learned about the use of accents.
Dr. Charmian Kenner, director of the project, commented: ‘These results support the Government’s aim of introducing more language learning into primary schools. Young children are very capable of learning different writing systems and this is an excellent age at which to find out how language works. Many bilingual children are already learning another literacy and schools need to bring this knowledge into the primary classroom.’
The findings of this research project can be used in ITE, especially with trainees specialising in Early Years and KS1 who may be concerned that biliteracy in more than one script will confuse children. The study demonstrates how comfortably children move from one language and script to the other and how they can use their knowledge of both creatively: “we are able to reassure teachers that not only can children cope well with early biliteracy, it offers cognitive gains” (ESRC summary p.2).
An article based on the findings was published in Naldic News 27 and is is available online at www.naldic.org.uk/docs/NN274.doc and the final ESRC report on www.regard.ac.uk/research_findings/R000238456/report.pdf .
Elements of the study are reported in Living in simultaneous worlds: difference and integration in bilingual script-learning, in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism v.7, pt 1, p.43-61, available from www.catchword.co.uk