[EnglishLanguage 3623] Re: Working withlearners with limitedliteracy - posted for Martha BigelowMartha Bigelow mbigelow at umn.eduTue Jan 27 12:42:44 EST 2009
This is a message from Martha Bonney. I hope someone in the discussion has some resources or suggestions for her. We know that literacy is best acquired in a language a person is fluent in and Ruth Colvin's life's work has honored this wisdom. How lucky for Martha to work in the organization Ruth Colvin founded! My only suggestion, which follows some of the posts today, is to make books in Mzgua as a class. You can make class big books, folded books as well as picture books made with digital photos of students in the class or recognizable places, activities, etc. I'm almost certain that the solution to lack of materials lies within the class, a literate helper and a few basic tools such as a bilingual dictionary. One question: Do the Somali Bantus you are working with speak Somali? If so there are probably more materials in Somali than Mzgua. According to this website, between 30 and 50% of Somali Bantus speak Somali: http://www.ethnomed.org/cultures/somali/somali_bantu.html I'm having trouble finding any info on the internet about those who speak Mzgua. Perhaps this is a minority group within a minority group. ____________ I'm looking for some resources for teaching mzgua literacy to Somali Bantus who settled in Syracuse, New York, in the last five or six years. I'm a volunteer with Literacy Volunteers of greater Syracuse. Ruth Colvin, founder of Literacy Volunteers, has prepared an af Maay-based program to teach first language literacy to these refugees, and I'm one of the four trained tutors in this pilot project. We're just getting started and were surprised to learn that about one-third of the refugees who signed up for our classes don't speak af Maay. Instead, they speak mzgua. And they don't want to be taught to read af Maay-it would be yet another language that's not English. The format of the af Maay-based course is two or three vocabulary words, breaking the words into syllables, learning the basic vowel sounds, then learning two or three consonant-vowel combinations out of the vocabulary. So, for example, the first lesson begins with Bariida, mamaa and builds on those consonant-vowel combinations. In that manner, all the consonants will be covered over a period of several lessons. There will also be language experience sections-I like corn, I like beans, I like milk..in af Maay. It took Mrs. Colvin three years to develop the af Maay teaching materials, and we don't have that kind of time to develop mzgua materials. We invited them to learn NOW, and we need to keep our word. Are there dictionaries, phrase lists, grammars, etc., for mzgua speakers? I'd appreciate any help you can give me. Thank you. Martha W. Bonney Volunteer, Literacy Volunteers of Greater Syracuse 315-443-2703 (work), 315-345-3831 (cell), mwbonney at syr.edu From: englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of robinschwarz1 at aol.com Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 9:58 AM To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3608] Re: Working withlearners with limitedliteracy - posted for Martha Bigelow Steve's question about HOW learners may have learned other languages in previous environments is an excellent one on several levels. Though I have no statistics on this, I contend that the majority of non-literate learners are, in fact, multilingual already. Either they learned languages in their home environment or in other places they have lived-- other countries, refugee camps etc. I have interviewed virtually hundreds of learners about what their REAL first language was and after digging, found that there WAS a home/village language different from the official one (Which means also that the often-asked intake question, "Can you read or write in your first language?" can be wrongly answered.), or that they speak several languages already. Nonetheless, the simple question of HOW other languages have been learned seems rarely if ever to be asked about so many of our learners. Instead they are approached as if they were mono-lingual Americans...! From the point of view of the brain, the fact of being bi-or multilingual is already a huge advantage. Neuroscience tells us clearly that the ability of the brain to process language sounds decreases rapidly as one ages-- precipitously, in fact--but a brain that has been exposed to many different language sounds remains more able to process new sounds than a mono-lingual brain (Kuhl--U of WA). Still, with the decrease in processing comes a decrease in the brain's ability to translate sound into speech gestures (pronunciation)--hence accents. This, then is one reason--not the only-- why adult learners need to hear things over and over to be able to understand--and then produce them. It would seem to be a good argument, too, for a llowing more time for input before requiring output, though as many here have argued, many of our learners don't have that luxury, needing English on their jobs and other critical places. Another thought on this and relevant to a few other comments here about one's view of oneself as a competent learner. There was an interesting qualitative study done in Canada on adult ESOL learners with little literacy. This researcher found that outside of the classroom, the learners navigated quite successfully with BICS needed for everyday communication, but in the classroom they viewed themselves as arch-beginners who knew nothing and who measured their progress--or lack thereof--by failure to master the grammar concepts presented in the ESOL class. The researcher proposed that their class/teacher's failure to acknowledge these learners' already considerable survival English skills contributed to their view of themselves as poor/unsuccessful learners. I saw this for myself in a class I observed over several weeks. The teacher had very little idea at all of how much English the students actually knew and in fact confessed so publicly when faced with evidence of their vast store of English, Instead she treated them as arch beginners, when in fact they were not. Thus exploring what other languages adults know, how they have learned them and how they learn survival English outside of the classroom would be helpful to our instruction. I know for myself that when I learned a non-written, non-Romance language, I still approched the process the way I had learned Romance languages, and then had to resort of contrastive analysis--only orally! VERY difficult! There is a whole field of third or multiple language learning which we could tap more deeply to understand what is happening with many of our learners, I feel. Robin Lovrien Schwarz -----Original Message----- From: Steve Kaufmann <steve at thelinguist.com> To: kramerjill at sbcglobal.net; The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List <englishlanguage at nifl.gov> Sent: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:05 pm Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3599] Re: Working withlearners with limitedliteracy - posted for Martha Bigelow There is no doubt that illiterate or low literate learners cannot use reading as a tool for learning another language. Grammar concepts will probably be particularly difficult to get across. I have a question about these Somalis and Ethiopians. There are apparently 84 living languages in Ethiopia and 13 in Somalia. Do these learners speak more than one language from their home land? If so, how did they learn these languages? Steve Kaufmann www.lingq.com On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Jill Kramer <kramerjill at sbcglobal.net> wrote: Here is Columbus Ohio, we have a large population of Somalis and also Ethiopians and others with little or no literacy in their first language nor in English. Ideally, preliterate learners should be in a separate class with an experienced teacher. However this doesn't always happen and they are often put in the same level one class with literate (and sometimes highly literate) students. >From a practical teaching stance, I have found that the textbooks for low literacy students move far too quickly. When I taught pre and low literate students, I used my own materials - lots of visuals, colorful flashcards, movement, chants and so on. I planned lessons with lots of repetition and recycled concepts over and over in subsequent lessons. Since the students couldn't write notes to help them remember new vocab, they needed to review the material over and over. Each lesson covered just a few concepts - a couple of letters (names and sounds), a couple of sight words, a few vocab words around a theme (body parts, days of the week, community places etc), and some useful phrases. The students I worked with developed oral skills more quickly as they had an oral tradition. I used a combo of whole word and phonics. Students could remember whole words with sufficient exposure. But they need phonics too. I focused on things like filling out forms, and reading signs. It was a slow process but there were many successes. Students got jobs. Some became citizens. Some dropped out but came back a year or more later and continued their studies. It was rewarding and fun to teach this level. Jill Kramer Columbus Literacy Council --- On Mon, 1/26/09, Elaine Tarone <etarone at umn.edu> wrote: From: Elaine Tarone <etarone at umn.edu> Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3590] Re: Working withlearners with limitedliteracy - posted for Martha Bigelow To: "The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List" <englishlanguage at nifl.gov> Date: Monday, January 26, 2009, 7:59 PM Learning a first language as a child is a very different process from learning a second language as an adult. An obvious difference is the influence of the native language on the adult's second language, something that doesn't occur in first language acquisition. And, children acquiring a first language have at least 4 years to listen to and speak their first language before they have to start reading and writing it. Immigrant adults with major funding deadlines do not have that luxury; they have to learn to read and write at the same time they are learning the oral second language. And *if* they don't already know how to read their native language using an alphabetic script, then their learning process has to be very very different from that of literate adults acquiring a second language. Most ESL teachers probably learned to represent the phonemes of their native language with visual symbols ('letters') so long ago that they no longer remember how they perceived oral language before, whether they noticed phonemes, etc. It's easy for them to assume that their students notice the same aspects of oral language that they do. But, there is now evidence that having a visual sign to represent, for example, the 's' at the end of a word helps us to notice that ending in oral input. There's also evidence that alphabetic literacy helps us to notice changes in word order that don't affect meaning. R. Schmidt presents evidence that if we don't notice something in the second language input, we don't acquire it. There are several research studies in cognitive psych (with monolingual adults) showing that if they do not have alphabetic literacy -- that is, if they do not represent sound segments with visual symbols -- they don't do as well as literate counterparts in their native language on certain oral tasks requiring awareness of linguistic units. (By the way, illiterate adults do just as well on rhyming tasks and oral word meaning tasks. And there's a great study done by Read at Madison showing that well educated Chinese adults who are logographically literate but not alphabetically literate in Chinese don't do well on phonological awareness tasks. That's important, because they are not only schooled but well educated, middle class, successful professionals who clearly process oral Chinese just fine -- but they don't have alphabetic literacy, and they don't seem to need phonological awareness. They process oral Chinese some other way. ) It seems clear that given these findings, teaching an illiterate or low literate adult an oral second language has to be different from teaching an oral L2 to someone who has alphabetic literacy. We need to learn what works with low literate and illiterate adults, from the ground up ... what makes things stick in their memory when they hear oral second language input? what gets noticed? word order? content words? function words? what helps these words get retained? does rhyme and rhythm help? Does whole body movement help? And that's just about learning to process *oral*l second language -- what about learning to *read* a second language? Is it better to learn to read the native language first? does reading instruction start out better as a whole word approach with this population? how then does one transition to acquiring sound-symbol correspondence? does rhyme help? This is where we need perceptive teachers to tell us what they see going on. On Jan 26, 2009, at 4:06 PM, Lorz, Angela wrote: My question for S Krashen is then, when a student has no clue about how-language-works in his native tongue, how can that student be best introduced to a language rich environment. I have tried the post-it note method with the target language on top & the native language on the back, so that at least the object is identifiable with some squiggly lines on a paper indicating the word. I have used pictures in class when the objects are not available. Anything else? especially for getting the 'sound' of the new word in the learner's brain? We have a series that can be used with a DVD player, but it's less natural than targeting the "object (or phrase) of interest". ---------------------------------------------------- National Institute for Literacy Adult English Language Learners mailing list EnglishLanguage at nifl.gov To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/englishlanguage Email delivered to kramerjill at sbcglobal.net ---------------------------------------------------- National Institute for Literacy Adult English Language Learners mailing list EnglishLanguage at nifl.gov To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/englishlanguage Email delivered to steve at thelinguist.com ---------------------------------------------------- National Institute for Literacy Adult English Language Learners mailing list EnglishLanguage at nifl.gov To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/englishlanguage Email delivered to robinschwarz1 at aol.com _____ Get instant access to the latest & most popular FREE games while you browse with the Games Toolbar - Download <http://toolbar.aol.com/games/download.html?ncid=emlweusdown00000026> Now! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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