Becoming literate in the majority language Victoria A. Murphy, Department of Education, University of Oxford
Outline • Theoretical Accounts of Reading Skill – Simple View of Reading • Decoding skills in English and EAL learners • Comprehension skills English and EAL learners – The role of vocabulary – Different types of vocabulary knowledge are important • Theoretical Accounts of Writing Skill – Simple View of Writing • Lower vs. higher-order writing skills in EAL pupils • Conclusions 2
EAL learners Who are they? • Home language that is not the same as the majority language of the society/governance/education – Significant variability – Variability in how bilingual they are and support for L1 • UK has predominantly ethnic minority language learners (rather than regional ) (De Bot & Gorter, 2005) • Despite the potential for advantages to bilingualism, ethnically/linguistically diverse pupils often perform in the bottom range in international achievement studies 3
PIRLS 2006 Chart CO3.6.3 Student performance in reading scores at age 10 by immigrant background, PIRLS 2006 Both parents born in country Only one parent born in country Neither parent born in country 600 Mean PIRLS scores 550 500 450 400 350 Countries are ordered from left to right by decreasing order of the performance of children with both parents born in the country. 1) See note (1) for chart CO3.6.1. Source: PIRLS 2006. Chart CO3.6.4 shows cross-country mean differences in mathematics scores among 10-year old 4 by parents’ country of origin.
Factors which influence academic performance Sammons, Toth, Sylva, Melhuish, Siraj & Taggart, 2015 • Socio Economic Status (SES) • Mother’s level of education • Number of books in the home • Proficiency in the majority language:- – Language underpins all learning (both within and without school) – Whiteside, Gooch & Norbury (2016):- when EAL pupils are matched on English language proficiency to nonEAL … EAL as good or better than nonEAL on social-emotional development measures and academic assessments at KS2 • Weaker language proficiency, not EAL status, was a predictor of academic achievement in Whiteside et al (2016). • Associated with language proficiency is LITERACY – which underpins academic achievement. 5
Theoretical accounts of Reading Development Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read • Gough & Tumner, 1986 • R = D x C 6
Printed Word Recognition Phoneme Awareness • Phonological Awareness:- the knowledge of the sound structure of a language, and the ability to analyse and manipulate those sound units • Used in reading, writing, listening and speaking • Example: – How many sounds are in the word skip ? – Which of the following start with the same sound? ship, fat, fox – Which two words in the following end in the same sound? made, hide, fade • Children who are good at these tasks tend to have good reading skills (Carroll, Snowling, Hulme & Stevenson, 2003) • How this knowledge develops often depends on early experiences with English – not having much exposure before schooling to the phonological structure of different English words can impact on the development 7 of these skills
Printed word recognition Phonics • Phonics:- A method for teaching reading and writing of English which is aimed at developing children’s phonemic awareness. • Critical is Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Children learning to read English have to learn how to map the Phonemes (sounds) on to the Graphemes (orthography/spelling) • English is particularly challenging due to all the exceptions – research has shown that in meta studies of children learning to read across many different countries/ languages, English speaking children learn to read English slower than in other countries/languages 8
Learning to read English is challenging … An example Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse I will keep you, Suzy, busy Make your head with heat grow dizzy Tear in eye, your dress will tear, So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain, (Mind the latter, how it’s written) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low … .. And it goes on and on and on! 9
Phonics Evidence? • Stuart (1999) – Longitudinal study comparing two educational interventions for inner- city five year olds in the UK, 86% were EAL – Each programme offered daily for 12 weeks by classroom teacher • Jolly Phonics vs. Big Books – Jolly Phonics did better than Big Books on all measures of phonological awareness, and on four standardised measures of reading, on a self-concept scale and on an author recognition survey – Jolly Phonics children had higher reading and spelling age than children in holistic Big Books intervention – Stuart, 2004:- JP group still outperforming Big Books group 30 months later. – This study shows that explicit and systematic phonics instruction can have a greater impact than implicit shared-reading on the development of phonemic awareness – BUT, while phonics is necessary, it isn’t sufficient (Duff, Mengoni, Bailey & Snowling, 2015) 10
EAL learners tend not to have difficulties with reading accuracy • Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel & Shanahan, 2008 – Large-scale meta-analysis of reading research across countries (The Netherlands, Canada, UK, USA) • Comparable word reading and phonological skills between non EAL and EAL • Hutchinson, Whiteley, Smith & Connors, 2003 – 2 year longitudinal study in UK comparing EAL and nonEAL matched on age, nonverbal IQ and sex • Comparable word reading skills • Similar results in: Burgoyne, Kelly, Whiteley & Spooner 2009; Burgoyne, Whiteley & Hutchinson, 2011 • Summary:- large body of evidence showing decoding (single word reading accuracy) is an area of strength for EAL pupils. 11
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Language Comprehension Vocabulary • We know vocabulary is a strong predictor of reading comprehension (e.g., Nation & Snowling, 2004; Cain et al., 2004; Roth et al., 2002) • We know children with EAL have less vocabulary knowledge (small vocabulary sizes) than NS children (e.g., Cameron, 2002; Mahon & Crutchely, 2006; Bialystok et al., 2010) • Children from ethnically/linguistically diverse backgrounds tend to underperform on vocabulary measures, and in turn have lower scores on reading comprehension . August & Shanahan, 2008; Burgoyne et al., 2009; Burgoyne et al., 2011; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders & Christian, 2006; Hutchinson et al., 2003; Lesaux et al., 2010; Melby-Lervåg & Lervåg, 2014; Verhoeven, 1990; Verhoeven & Vermeer, 2006 13
EAL Learners and Vocabulary (as well as L1 students) • EAL children score significantly below their age-matched EL1 peers on measures of Expressive vocabulary breadth and Receptive vocabulary breadth Tester: (points to four pictures, one of Tester: (points to picture of a which shows a lighthouse) “Which of lighthouse) “What is this?” these shows a lighthouse” Child: “Lighthouse” Child: points to the picture of a lighthouse • The relationships between vocabulary breadth and comprehension are stronger for EAL than for EL1 children • The relationship between expressive vocabulary breadth and reading comprehension is particularly strong for EAL children ( Beech & Keys, 1997; Burgoyne et al., 2009, 2011a, 2011b; Cameron, 2002; Hutchinson et al., 2003; 14 Stuart, 2004).
Vocabulary depth is also important in reading comprehension • In our research, we have seen that multiword vocabulary phrases, idioms, collocations and metaphors are all important contributors to students’ reading comprehension skills ( Martinez & Murphy, 2011; Smith & Murphy, 2015; Kan & Murphy, in progress; Hessel & Murphy, in progress ) • These findings suggest there is a place for focused, explicit vocabulary instruction, particularly as students may be unaware of some of these items 15
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NO PROBLEMS/IMPAIRMENT DYSLEXIA MIXED DEFICIT SPECIFIC COMPREHENSION DEFICIT 17
Summary of Reading research • Reading development:- – Is multi-componential with the two key elements being decoding , and language comprehension • And where language proficiency, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills all make up the overall construct of ‘Reading Ability’ – Children who struggle with reading can have different profiles of strengths/weaknesses and it is therefore critically important to be able to target precisely where the student is struggling – Children who are good decoders, but weak comprehenders can often hide in classrooms/schools – Educational interventions either targeted at word analysis (phonics) and/or vocabulary (semantic knowledge) can have a positive impact on children’s overall reading skills 18
Simple View of Writing Berninger & Amtmann, 2003 Writing is the product of low-level transcription skills x high-level language processing x mental control processes W = T x LP x MCP Reading and Writing are mutually supportive (Graham & Herbert, 2011) And also for EAL learners (Goodrich, Farrington & Lonigan, 19 2016)
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