Biliteracy, Spelling, and Writing: A Case Study.
The overall purpose of this case study is to examine biliteracy and its effects on a young child's orthographic and writing growth. The analysis of the kindergartener's spelling development and compositional growth in reference to both language systems indicates that biliteracy had a positive effect on the student's acquisition of English orthography and fostered a well balanced development of composition skills in both languages. The article provides suggestions that promote biliteracy in both the classroom and home settings and encourages teachers to engage in instructional practices that value linguistic diversity. Online resources for classroom practice are also included. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Ekaterina Midgette, Ph.D is Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY. She has taught English as a Foreign and Second Language in the United States and Russia. Her research interests include students' cognitive difficulties in argumentative writing and writing development of biliterate children. She can be reached at midgette@strose.edu. Zoi A. Philippakos, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the College of Education at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include reading and writing connections, strategy instruction in writing, revision practices, professional development, and selfregulation. She coaches teachers on writing instruction and she recently published the coauthored book Developing strategic writers through genre instruction: Resources for grades 3 5 (2015) She has presented her research in national and international conferences. She can be reached at zphilipp@uncc.edu. Introduction Bilingual children comprise one of the fastest growing populations in the increasingly diverse world of public education (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2008) The number of bilingual students nearly doubled in the last 30 years and amounted to 21% of all school age children in 2009 (Planty, et al. 2009) Research suggests that learning to read may come easier to fully bilingual children due to enhanced linguistic ability (i.e. word and Biliteracy, Spelling, and Writing 14 VOLUME 26 THE LANGUAGE AND LITERACY SPECTRUM syntactic awareness) and skill transfer between languages, particularly for languages using similar writing systems (Bialystok, McBride Chang, Luk, 2005) Recently, the New York State Bilingual Common Core Initiative (2014 2015) put a renewed emphasis on the value of second language learners' linguistic knowledge and on the active use of students' home languages to meet the Common Core Language Standards. The New Language Progressions (2014 2015) provides a framework for teachers to deliver the content at five different levels of language proficiency in response to students' linguistic needs. In many cases, students are encouraged to choose between responding to the linguistic demands of the academic tasks in their home language or in the new language (i.e. English) However, many approaches suggested in the Progressions (e.g. use of cognates, phonetic similarities, responses in home language) prove to be problematic for teachers of the exponentially growing multilingual student population of New York State. Since students often come with home languages outside the Indo European language family, there may be multiple languages represented in the same classroom; therefore, students cannot be accommodated in their first language due to lack of teacher knowledge of the various languages. Nevertheless, the question of what constitutes effective instructional approaches directed toward the multi lingual student population is as topical as ever. The purpose of this article is to describe the case of a female biliterate learner who began exploring English orthography upon entering kindergarten in the United States and argue that literacy instruction should actively engage the knowledge that biliterate students bring to school, as this incoming knowledge can support students' literacy growth in their new language. Background For clarity purposes, it is important to define the terms bilingualism and biliteracy. Biliteracy or dual literacy refers to the capacity of an individual to read and write in two languages, whereas bilingualism occurs when an individual has high oral proficiency in both languages. Although the literacy development of bilingual students in their new language is well documented in research literature, a relatively small number of studies explored the biliteracy of young children in the United States (Bauer, 2000; Bauer, 2009; Hu Commeyras, 2008) Biliteracy has been associated with increased literacy achievement and greater cognitive flexibility, both of which promote English schooling achievement (Proctor, 2010) As such, students who develop strong reading comprehension strategies and are motivated to read in a heritage language demonstrate the same skills and attitudes to reading in English (Jimenez, Garcia, &Pearson, 1995; 1996) Biliterate students also have higher scores on cognitive ability tests such as concept formation tasks (Hamers Blanc, 2000) Interestingly, studies in SpanishEnglish bilingualism show that biliterate Spanish speaking students have significantly higher academic achievement than the students with only oral proficiency in Spanish or little or no skills in Spanish (Haneda, 2009) In all language groups, the academic performance of children with dual literacy in reading, writing and spelling is the same or better than that of their monolingual peers (Cummins, 2000) In the case of emergent writers, evidence suggests that students develop their spelling and writing skills without confusion between languages (Edelsky Jilbert, 1985; Gort, 2006) Moreover, a facilitative effect occurs between alphabetic languages in early writing skills, such as, letter sound knowledge, use of upper and lower case letters, adding a period at the end of a sentence and spacing between words (Gort, 2006; Jared et al, 2011) Spelling skills in one language allow cross linguistic growth of phonological awareness, morphological analysis, and Biliteracy, Spelling, and Writing 15 VOLUME 26 THE LANGUAGE AND LITERACY SPECTRUM knowledge of graphemic conventions (Francisco, et al, 2006) In the case of logographic (e.g. Korean) and alphabetic (e.g. English) biliteracy, essential writing concepts are used crosslinguistically, such as understanding that writing is different from drawing, writing carries a message to a recipient, different types of text are used for different purposes and that knowledge stemming from both the heritage language and L2 sources can be used in writing to build rich content (Shaguoury, 2009; Priven, 2010; Bauer Arazi, 2011) Unfortunately, little or no attention is given to the development and retention of biliteracy, with the exception of some successful Spanish/English bilingual programs (Serna, 2009; Lindholm Leary, 2014) In this article we describe the case of a female biliterate learner who explored English orthography upon entering kindergarten in the United States. With this examination we attempt to address the following questions: 1. How does literacy knowledge in one language support orthographic knowledge in another language? 2. How does literacy knowledge in one language support writing development in another language? Further, we discuss implications and recommendations as these relate to classroom instruction and home to school connections. Participant and Context At the time of the study, Vikka was a five year old, Russian English bilingual student who attended full time public kindergarten. She arrived in the United States a month prior to her enrollment in kindergarten after a two and a half year stay in Russia. Her father is a monolingual English speaker and her mother speaks English and Russian fluently. Vikka exhibited a native oral proficiency in both languages due to her mother's use of Russian in oral communication with Vikka and her father's use of English. Vikka, during her 2 year stay in Russia attended a pre school program where she acquired foundational literacy skills in the Russian language. Specifically, she learned letter sound relationships, letter formation, the spelling of monosyllabic words and a limited number of high frequency phonetically regular and irregular multisyllabic words. She also learned that writing served communication purposes and began to create simple texts. When she entered Kindergarten in the U.S. she enjoyed reading and discussing Russian books with her mother and communicated via writing with her Russian relatives in the absence of structured Russian literacy instruction at home or through a heritage community. Particularly, Vikka independently read kindergarten and first grade level texts in Russian several times a week. She actively participated in daily read alouds of fiction and non fiction texts. Vikka also used her knowledge of Russian written expression to exchange notes with her mother and write cards and emails to her grandparents in Russia. Overall, the student's disposition towards reading and writing was positive. Upon entering the U.S. Vikka attended a full day kindergarten program in a Title 1 school. The school did not participate in the Common Core State Standards initiative at this time. The class consisted of 26 children, 3 of them linguistically diverse, including the participating student. The classroom was staffed with a teacher and a full time special education paraprofessional. The teacher encouraged drawing, scribbling and early writing during freewriting activities and structured writing experiences with the use of prompts, sentence starters and simple organizational frames. A print rich environment that facilitated self sponsored literacy learning was present in the room: students had the English alphabet on their desks, word wall words were added daily and organized in alphabetical order, and