raymonde sneddon university of east london / birkbeck [email protected] reading and writing with...
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Raymonde SneddonUniversity of East London / Birkbeck
Reading and Writing with Dual Language Books
Bilingual Books – Biliterate Children• Albanian - Magda and Albana aged 6: negotiating meaning
with mother, checking with English text, using illustrations.
• Turkish - Lek and Durkan aged 7: collaborative reading, Using the whole context, both languages and all environmental clues, comparing language structure
• Urdu – Myadda aged 7: cracking the code with
grandmother’s primer, learning to love reading
• French – Sarah aged 9:Balanced bilingual – taught herself to read in French – similes, metaphors and the deeper meaning of stories
• Gujarati – Mohamed aged 7: developing high level oral skills before tackling the Gujarati script
• Children working at the cutting edge of their ability, highly motivated and proud of their skills
• Children using the home language more, developing their vocabulary and ‘book language’
• All children transferred skills from reading in English to reading in the family language in varying degree depending on the script
• Children have developed a stronger interest in reading and improved their reading in English
Children learning to read - 1
Children learning to read - 2• The children are exploring and beginning to
understand the differences between the morphology and syntax of their languages and getting an insight into the translation process.
• Interest and pride in their two languages and cultures and developing confident identities.
• Role of teachers and the school in creating a language friendly environment with resources that value children’s cultural heritage and encourage exploring and sharing of personal identities.
Children as bilingual authorsat home and at school
• Starting points: telling / reading / retelling stories In two languages
• Making personal bilingual books at home and in school
• making a personal version of a favourite family story • Children exploring who they are and what matters in
their lives: books about personal experience with drawings or photographs
• writing about a significant personal or family event, writing about holidays.
• Writing a text in the strongest language and translating
Magda and Albana’s Albanian diaries
Madda’s book: My Holiday in Albania
Young Authorswww.uel.ac.uk/education/research/duallanguagebooks/young_authors.htm
Two voices• Albana: I feel happy now, because nearly everyone in my
school knows that I’m Albanian and all my … especially Ms P. and also Ms J., they used to help, they used to always be proud and used to tell all the other teachers how good we were in Albanian and English. I always feel proud to think that I have been good in my language and I’ve made a book and everything.
• Magda: Well I think I’m confident about my future seeing as I’m really confident and been in loads of shows and made two books and I think when I grow up and I can be able to be even more things and, since I’ve been able to do this and I’ve made a book when I was probably six or seven…… I think my future will still carry on good.
