I think the research on Chinese speakers is interesting.  I've also heard that dyslexia is more common among women than men in China; the opposite of the situation here in the U.S., where more men are dyslexic than women.  This must obviously be connected to the writing system, but is there also a connection to language acquisition?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Elaine Tarone 
  To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List 
  Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 6:59 PM
  Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3590] Re: Working withlearners withlimitedliteracy - posted for Martha Bigelow


  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".







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