developing and extending the literacy of bilingual pupils through the secondary years

Developing and extending the literacy of bilingual pupils through the secondary years Jean Bleach and Sylvia Riley’ ILEA Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Project

Jean Bleach (a secondary English teacher) and Sylvia Riley (a specialist ESL teacher with in-school experience) together make up the ILEA project team, Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Project (10- 14). The Project has an action-research orientation exploring and promoting conditions necessary for bilingual learners to develop English in the whole school context.

Since the publication of the Swann Committee Report (DES 1985) it is no longer necessary to rehearse the arguments- anti-racist, linguistic, social, equal opportunities of access to the curriculum - for new arrivals to do their initial learning of English in mainstream (preferably mixed ability) classrooms. The Swann Report gives impetus to moves in many LEAS for ESL teachers to work largely through co-operative classroom partnerships with secondary teachers.’ Ann Burgess and Leon Gore’s piece in this issue exemplifies some of the intellectual excitement to be derived from teachers of different disciplines working together to perceive and solve problems bilingual learners have in mainstream classes.

Their piece is useful in another way. It points the direction for teams of teachers to do small-scale investigations which could uncover much about the development of bilingual learners that simply is not yet known. Some of the arguments against separate language-learning in reception centres focus on the recognition that the evolution of bilingualism is a process at least as complex and long-lasting as the language-development of monolingual, British born children.

Centralised language support inevitably focuses only on the beginning of the process. At the point where bilingual learners were until recently deemed ‘ready’ to leave reception classes/centres (usually somewhere during the 2nd stage of learning, i.e. when pupils are no longer ‘beginners’, and have begun to take on the written system of English) they disappeared into their subject classes, becoming effective learners, or failing to do so for reasons no-one understood or looked at closely.

Classroom teachers and their ESL counterparts have long informally recognised that ESL students, socially integrated and coping happily with the demands of secondary school up to the 3rd year, suddenly revealed major language difficulties on entering the 4th year. The cognitive and linguistic demands made on students preparing for exams seemed to be the problem. Jim Cummins’ work (e.g. Cummins 1980, 1981, 1983) in the

Litracy of bilingual pupils 29

Canadian bilingual context focuses on one dimension of the difficulty bilingual learners encounter. Much of the task-setting in the early secondary years, particularly for bilingual learners, is carefully contextualised, relates to direct personal experience, demands informal (expressive) modes of language use, whether oral or written: in strong contrast are the abstract, general, speculative, decontextualised learning modes demanded at more advanced stages of learning, together with language modes that bilingual learners may never before have encountered, either inside or outside of school.

Another, linked, explanation seems to us to relate to the difficulties secondary subject teachers still have in taking a strong role in developing and extending the literacy of all their students as a major part of their teaching task. If there are few opportunities for students of Science, the Humanities, Design Technoloxgy or Home Economics to develop through a range of ways of writing and recording their learning towards deliberate mastery of written forms expected from them, this is serious for many students, but disabling for newcomers to the written system of English. Even more crucial, what happens to students who are being asked to write in a language which they have little experience of reading at all?

Approximately half of all classroom reading occurs in bursts of less than fifteen seconds in any one minute. However this is interpreted it is impossible to escape the conclusion that a large amount of classroom reading is fragmented in nature.

Even in English lessons only 10 per cent of reading observed at first- year secondary level would meet a minimal criterion for being termed ‘continuous’. At fourth-year level the figure is 27 per cent. Thus, there is evidence that continuous reading in the classroom is limited largely to English lessons, and its role is limited at the beginning of secondary education. Therefore, even if some form of developing reading for learning is attempted in secondary schools it seems that pupils will have few opportunities to exercise or practise abilities related to reading for learning, unless changes in classroom procedures also take place. (Lunzer and Gardner (1979), p. 124).

It should be noted that this problem is not affected one way or the other by arrangements for ESL centres or withdrawal groups. Currently bilingual learners who do succeed in school are being left to carry the whole burden of making themselves literate in English unsupported by the school. Rather than placing average or above average learners in Remedial departments - often the schools’ helpless response to this challenge - the presence of bilingual learners needs to be seen as further impetus to implement the language and learning agenda recommended by, for example, Britton (1975); Martin et al . (1976); The Bullock Report (1975); DES (1979); Lunzer and Gardener (1979; 1984). Subject teachers have gone some way to creating oral learning situations for their pupils up to the 3rd

30 Jean Bleach and Sylvia Riley

year. English teachers need to be particularly aware of the enormous responsibility they now carry for the reading development of Second Language Learners.

Writing development

(i) Bilingual pupils writing English Over the past ten years or so our ideas of development in writing have become clearer. How clear are our views on the development of writing in English for pupils who are learning it as a second language?

Two aspects of the work of Britton and the London Institute English Department are central to language across the curriculum initiatives in secondary schools:

- the importance of children’s ‘expressive’ writing closely related to talk or understanding the world, for taking on new ideas, for exploring feelings - and, by extension, cultural differences and social and political awareness.

-the slow development of less personal kinds of writing for school purposes growing out of expressive writing and influenced by reading.

This view of the role of writing in learning emphasises the child’s own language, and its use in the learning process, so that pupils are at the centre of their learning. Mainstream teachers are understandably unsure where early stage bilinguals fit into this process.

The pupil’s own language should mean two things- the Mother Tongue and whatever English the child is developing. The close connection of talk and writing is even more important for bilingual pupils than for monolinguals and so is expressive writing. When pupils arrive in this country at secondary school age this development is often not provided for at all. When ESL was taught as a separate operation, expressive writing was problematic: should they be ‘allowed to do it or not? For quite a while the decision was ‘not yet’; if we didn’t know that pupils wanted to say how could we first teach them the language they needed? In addition, such things were likely to be just too complex for our simple step-by-step approach to building up language. In the rush to back up the requirements of the curriculum as a whole, we taught largely transactional writing. This decision was bolstered by the comforting notion that in any case these pupils had their first language for self expression - they were only going to need English for transactional purposes anyway.

Moves towards the integration of bilingual pupils into ‘normal’ classes for most, or all, of their time and therefore to the integration of learning and language-learning have changed our perspective.

If classrooms are truly open to interaction and negotiation, bilingual pupils are free to negotiate meanings both in their first language (if there are others who share it) and in English with the majority of their peers. They are surrounded by ‘models’ of speech and writing from other students. The

poetic transactional I

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reading (L l ) I ” \ i *+

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influence of re ad i n g

+ I expressive

poetic transactional . : / \ * i.e. the influence of reading

permeates at various points

The column relating to L2 should perhaps be a ‘slide-rule’ placed in cordance with what is known of a pupil’s knowledge of L1.

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To learn more about the learning process of individual bilingual pupils we need sometimes to consider carefully their competence as symbolized by the spaces between items on the diagram (i.e. the two gaps). Too often pieces of writing produced by bilingual students are seen in isolation from


their language competence as teachers race through a pile of marking! I will not dwell on the gap between hearing and speaking- though pupils do need time to assimilate language-i.e., a range of opportunities for listening to and joining in spoken interaction.

I want to concentrate on the move from speaking to writing. We have observed that there is still too little time and space for this process, in all curriculum areas. Where pupils are expected to process the written word and immediately produce pages of their own writing, they are tempted to look for short-cuts. Strategies for survival include copying without understanding chunks from books, or from their friends, ‘losing’ books, drawing, opting out, or more usefully enlisting the help of brothers and sisters at home. Where bilingual pupils are encouraged to engage with the topic or task through discussion they begin to understand, and eventually internalise and use the language. The teacher in the role of learning consultant is enabled to observe learners in action. In responding to students’ writing we need to know how it has arisen-is it related to the language they normally use? If so, what needs to be done to develop i t ? If not, is i t being ‘borrowed’ in such a way as to promote understanding and eventual acquisition?

There are no short cuts for bilingual pupils. They need to follow the same process from speaking to expressive writing and onwards as monolingual English speakers. Given the opportunity stories are the first kind of writing they do in English (except, perhaps, for those who enter our schools at mid to late secondary stage) and ‘personal’ writing of other kinds (journals, autobiography) enables them similarly to explore their experiences and emotions. Expressive writing is for them too a necessary way of learning. To expect them to write transactional language which they have not internalised (i.e., which is not yet ‘speakable’ for them) is to cut out a vital stage in their learning process-and in the process by which they become writers.

(ii) One bilingual learner and her writing development

Looking carefully at a bilingual pupil over time highlights some of her salient learning strategies and also some of the factors which put her at risk in school:

L is a Cantonese-speaking girl from Hong Kong. She spent two years in primary schools in England. She can read and write Chinese. Her 4th Year Junior class was a cultural mix. New children with little or no English were arriving throughout the year and others left after a few months. However, there was a nucleus who had been in the school a longer time. The atmosphere was informal and the learning experiential - with much practical work, and going out to study the environment and further afield. The children helped each other and the teacher worked in a non- authoritarian style. Children wrote in drafts first and after consultation with the teacher made good copies. L loves stories. She would sometimes tell me a

Literacy of bilingual pupils 33

story (in English) which her father had told her in Cantonese. She is an avid reader and writer of stories in English. There were no other Cantonese speakers in her class- her closest friend was R , a Bengali speaker.

An example of her story-writing in primary school shows fluency and control of form. It also shows how she is influenced by both Chinese and English stories. She had written the story in rough draft, and this is what she read aloud:

The Prince and the Golden Tree There was once a King with a beautiful daughter called Princess Beauty. All the princes wanted to marry her and all the princes asked her for his wife. And the Princess Beauty said no. But one day the King said my dear you must marry, but the Princess Beauty said O.K. I will. I have heard about a golden tree in China, I want that golden tree. If a prince can find the golden tree he will marry me.

Now in Scotland there lived a very rich Prince called Prince Jack and Prince Jack had heard about i t . Prince Jack wanted to marry Princess Beauty. . . . He went off to find the golden tree. When he ride not long away he saw a very big bird. The bird said please can I have some bread. After, the big bird had finished the bread the big bird said “Thank you”. I am looking for the golden tree; can you come with me? said Prince Jack. “Alright,” said the big bird, and Prince Jack was riding his horse and the bird was flying . . .

When they were over the river they came to a mountain. And what a surprise when they saw the golden tree!

And they took the golden tree. When they came to the river, Prince Jack jumped in the big bird’s back. When they had finished crossing the river, Prince Jack saw the horse, and the big bird said “Goodbye”. But Prince Jack said “Here is some bread you may take”. And the big bird took the bread and said “Thank you”. And Prince Jack said “Goodbye” and the bird was gone. And the Prince went to Princess Beauty’s palace and married Princess Beauty and they lived happily ever after. But Prince Jack never forgot his friend the big bird.

It is interesting to note the degree to which her control of written language is catching up with her oral language. Some of the past tense forms, for example are, not unusually, inaccurate in the written form but less so in the spoken. She is beginning to mark punctuation.

In the first year of secondary school L still enjoys writing stories, but now that she has several different teachers for short periods of time and is rather quiet in class (things are more formally organised and more teacher- dominated), teachers do not know much about her spoken English, and her written work comes to teachers in more of a vacuum.

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Clearly, hearing L read her own work would help the teacher to better understand her intentions: for example as to whether a new sentence was intended to start at ‘his name is Tom’.


Once again L shows inconsistency in usage of past-tense forms. One hopes that teachers notice the correct forms as much as the incorrect ones! It would also help them to get a sense of her progress if they know how much more often she gets them right in speaking. Indeed she could be encouraged to read her work aloud and make some corrections herself.

However, what is equally vital is for her teachers to provide the opportunity for L to tell stories and to continue to write them as often as she did in primary school, for then they would be more aware of her strengths and learning potential. She would have the chance to continue the practice of writing so necessary to full competence.

For the most part L’s teachers of most subjects do not respond to the content in marking her work, but only to the spelling, and she is beginning to feel under pressure. There is not much encouragement in the school to draft and redraft written work-although it is usually allowed if a pupil asks. Writing is usually composed straight into books, and yet there is considerable emphasis on getting it right. Preparation for written tasks in some lessons takes the form of predicting required spellings and reminders about layout and content, rather than discussion of the content among pupils. One day in the second term I went into L’s classroom to observe a Maths lesson. L came to me looking worried. The following is an entry from my diary:

L asked if she could have ‘special English’ like R (her friend from the same Primary School). She’s worried about her spelling. Also about the words she can read but not understand. She says her mum wants her English to be very good and says that she should do English rather than Social Studies. ‘She doesn’t think Social Studies is that useful.’ Further conversation elicited that L finds Social Studies and History difficult.

An important question is whether she and her teachers are going to be able to continue to use L’s considerable enjoyment of and use of narrative to launch further development in learning and language. How will she learn transactional writing? To that extent her situation is similar to that of many English-Mother-Tongue speakers at that age. But an ESL learner like L is further at risk in several ways-

(1) if teachers of various subjects make too many assumptions about background knowledge and vocabulary:

L and R worked together on an experiment ‘How Pure is Water?’ They had to evaporate four samples. However, they only had time to do three of them, and wrote ‘stained’ in the appropriate columns for tap, sea and rainwater. (The fourth one was distilled.) They were not familiar with the word ‘stained’ and as they did not finish the experiment it is doubtful if they saw the point.

There will necessarily be a long gap between a fragmentary experience like this and its becoming part of their knowledge. (2) if no help is given with conscious language learning when the need arises.

36 Jean Bleach and Syluia Riley

(3) if all errors are treated as spelling mistakes. (4) if the pupil is expected to teach herself to spell without teacher guidance at all, and without plenty of reading experience to gain exposure to the written language.

To sum up: we speak of development, and this implies continuity and extension. Yet all too often school experiences for many children are disrupted and fragmentary. This may be particularly so for bilingual pupils. They, like all pupils, need to build on the qualities, experiences and enthusiasms they already have. It is therefore important for teachers to observe what strategies a pupil is using when she speaks, writes or reads and what sense is being made of the connections between them. More research needs to be done into these processes for bilingual children, not least by classroom teachers.

Reading f o r meaning and reading f o r understanding

In 1983 I was working in a third year Biology class in a boys’ school in North London. There were four of five bilingual learners, but I was giving most attention to a Yugoslavian boy who spoke Serbo-Croat and was fresh from language centre support. He was struggling linguistically; his previous experience of schooling in rural Yugoslavia gave him little understanding of or sympathy with the social or cognitive concerns of his classmates. The learning context was a series of four sessions with the class revising and extending previous work on the senses, to lead to work on the nervous system and brain function. The lesson followed the same pattern in these four sessions: a series of ‘tests’ carried out in groups from an instruction sheet with spaces to record findings, then ‘writing time’ at the end for boys to speculate on their discoveries.

Lesson 1 - Seeing. Amir and I looked into the distance, bringing out- stretched hands together to see the ‘sausage’ where our index fingers met. Amir casually joined other groups and, like them, was unable to drop a penny into a jar with one eye covered. He discovered his field of vision when someone brought chalk in an arc from behind his head.

Language and experience fitted readily together for Amir, and he was soon using the same terms as the others, with the same referents. Recording was swiftly copying from someone - anyone - else’s sheet. Writing time left Amir unable to use writing for his own purposes, and uneasy to use me as an interlocutor or amanuensis. Lesson 2- Hearing. Amir had found a partner, a delicate business

requiring teacher distance, but there was a new boy in the class. Anh had arrived from three years of schooling in Vietnam, and some English lessons in Hong Kong. He spent that first lesson entranced by the mysteries of oscilloscopes and tuning forks. At


writing up time, Anh had been adopted by a group letting him copy their work.

Between the activity part of the lesson, rich with all sorts of meanings and the beginnings of ways to express them, and the writing the other boys dived into, yawned a chasm that left Anh and Amir stranded. They could both read-some in their home languages, a little in English, Amir more than Anh. For the next lesson I brought books: Seeing, Hearing, Touching, Tasting and Smellzng, by Nigel Snell(l983) for five and six year olds, and a range of other books on the senses (see Reference Section). Some of these are better than others, none ideal. Information book publishing for younger readers has lagged behind fiction on multi-cultural awareness, it seems.

Nevertheless, when Anh had spent the following lesson identifying as sweet, salty or sour liquids dropped on his tongue, he and Amir read the Snell account of what they’d just learnt, in a preparation room off the lab. The immediate relationship of meaning and oral language to the written form supported their reading; even this very elementary text confirmed and extended their understanding. Then Amir read a more complex account, while Anh used the book for reference in writing some statements.

This is elementary good practice. It exemplifies a kind of ‘withdrawal’ of ESL learners that is immediately related to the curriculum and can sometimes be justified. It also raises obvious questions. If Anh and Amir’s understanding is extended, their writing supported by reading texts they can engage with, wouldn’t other pupils in a mixed ability class gain support for their writing by reading first? Or, if writing is an accessible means of learning and speculating for them, should not books be used to check their ideas and extend their learning?

In the Project we have met only a very few departments where class libraries are in regular use to support learning. Teachers often seem convinced that there are no good information books that are both accessible and reliable. To some extent this is because they are still using criteria derived from text book selection. It’s initially often difficult for them to see how to develop a reading culture in the classroom where pupils compare and evaluate books themselves.

The information books publishers are vying with one another to produce for school and library use have one great advantage over teacher-made learning materials and text books- full colour illustrations. Even where text and picture-matching is not good, these offer opportunities for discussion and visual support for bilingual learners’ understanding. We have also seen departments, usually the same ones, using materials which encourage the social co-operation of pupils to unlock understanding of texts- or extracts. We see this as a parallel strategy, not as an alternative.

Books in English and the Humanities offer initially greater challenges to readers who do not yet have a developed oral language to draw on. These pupils experience most English, and History and, say, Social Studies lessons as bewildering. The meanings shared in the class are mediated almost


exclusively through language. Books, with pictures, can be a lifeline- reducing uncertainty about topic, setting (place, time, cultural reference) and, over time, allowing readers some idea of how History, Geography, Social or Religious Studies is to be written.

Quite obviously, topic-related books in bilingual pupils’ Mother Tongues offer enormous potential help especially at early stages of learning English. Local and school libraries and those bilingual teachers who aye in the system are making selections of such books more available, but the class teachers’ closest resource for advice on book selection and their promotion is bilingual students themselves.

The range of possible topics and texts in English is boundless. There 25 a lot to be gained by bilingual learners hearing teachers read aloud: they get the tunes of English into their heads (Levine 1981). But listening without comprehension to whole novels is not a sufficient diet. Reading and writing autobiography (e.g., ILEA English Centre 1979) is well-adapted to the needs of people who have stories to write (Bleach 1984)-and what stories some of these are!

But the simplest resource for getting bilingual learners to hear and exchange, to read and write stories is one we’ve denied ourselves in secondary schools, to the impoverishment of all our pupils. This is developing a story culture in multilingual secondary classrooms where oral telling and retelling, translating and comparing versions of stories from different cultures are natural activities (Rosen 1984).

An Islington English teacher and I decided to make reading, writing and telling stories central to an Animals theme he was doing with his second years. Later in pairs and threes they will visit local primary schools to read and tell their stories. Bilingual pupils will have an important role here. In the course of this preparation, the second years have made explicit some of the things they know about stories (‘if you’re changing the prince into the one who marries the frog you need to change the ending otherwise the kids will . . . um . . . expect it’). They have had their critical awareness sharpened by a sense of audience. (‘Couldn’t your story be racist?’ a girl asked of a writer whose Pink Cat went to Africa, to Asia, to America, and then came home to Britain, ‘where everyone likes cats, especially pink ones’.)

Two children in this class are at early stages of learning English. They’ve shared in group story telling (with the others listening intently and supportively) and have read and written stories in English. Monolingual pupils in the class have understood for the first time that A reads Chinese, and K reads Vietnamese. (Linguistic diversity is truly invisible in lots of secondary schools.) K , a first stage learner, has impressed the boys he sits with. He reads stories in Vietnamese and (with their help) in English. He recognises many stories in English and Chinese books from earlier reading in Vietnamese. ‘I think K’s going to be a high flyer’ one of the group confides. A contributes ‘The Tiger and the Fox’ a story she knows from her Chinese story book at home. It’s new to the rest of the class, and they enjoy it.


A start has been made here (as it was in L’s primary school) to make a connection between the heritage of stories these children possess and the stories and literature they’re meeting in English lessons. English teachers need to maintain the connection, for example by using reference copies of classic poets and writers in the languages in use in their schools, to ensure that literary forms and genre and poetic techniques can be related back to those bilingual readers know in their other literary culture.

We have indicated discontinuities that can put bilingual students at risk of serious underachievement at later stages of their learning. The gaps, cultural and linguistic, between what children can do and what school allows them to show they can do may be wider but are not essentially different from those that already affect many of our pupils. Most emphatically, reading needs to be exploited as a tool for learning throughout the secondary years. Once we accept that language development in a second language parallels that in a first language, the presence of bilingual learners in our classrooms requires us to re-affirm our most sensitive practice.

Notes

(1) The section on writing is by Sylvia Riley. (2) The support of teachers, bilingual in the language of the learners and English, which many community groups would like to see, is not recommended by Swann. The committee sees bilingual teaching as practically difficult and politically inflammatory. We reject this finding, in the interests of the education of bilingual students, and the learning of monolingual teachers.

References

Jean Bleach, ‘English’ in A. Craft and G . Bardell (eds): Curriculum Opportunities in a Multicultural Society, Harper and Row 1984. James Britton, Language and Learning, Allen Lane/Penguin 1970. James Britton et al., The Development of Writing Abilities, Macmillan Education 1975. J . Cummins, ‘Psychological Assessment of Immigrant Children, Logic or Intuition’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 1 (1980). J . Cummins, ‘Age on Arrival and Immigrant Second Language Learning in Canada: a Reassessment’, Applied Linguistics 2 (1981). J . Cummins, ‘Tests, Assessment and Bilingual Students’, Focus, no. 9, National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. DES, A Language f o r Lzfe (Report of the Bullock Committee of Inquiry), HMSO 1975. DES, Aspects of Secondary Education in England: a Survey by H M Inspectors of Schools, HMSO 1979.


DES, Education f o r A l l (Report of the Swann Committee of Inquiry) HMSO 1985. ILEA English Centre, Our Lives, 1979. Josie Levine, ‘Developing Pedagogies for Multi-lingual Classes’, English in Education, vol. 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1981). Eric Lunzer and Keith Gardner, The Effective Use of Reading, Heinemann Educational Books for the Schools Council 1979. Nancy Martin et al., Writing and Learning across the Curriculum, Ward Lock Educational 1976. Betty Rosen, ‘Story-time, and Beyond in M. Meek and J . Miller (eds): Changing English: Essays for Harold Rosen , Heinemann Educational Books for the Institute of Education, London University 1984.

In formation books on the senses

Allington, Richard and Krull, Kathleen, Beginning to Learn about Smelling, Raintree 1980. Baldwin, Dorothy and Lister, Claire, You and Your Body: Your Senses, Wayland 1983. Hindley, Judy and Rawson, Christopher, How your body works, Usborne 1975. Snell, Nigel, Seeing: Hearing; Touching: Tasting and Smelling, Hamish Hamilton 1983. Ward, Brian R, The Eye and Seeing, Franklin Watts 1981.

developing and extending the literacy of bilingual pupils through the secondary years

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