Hello all,

Firstly, please let me know whether issues with how my text  renders persist. I apologize for the perceptual challenges I have created (might they, however, have some unintended pedagogic value?).

As for biliteracy: I am concerned about the impact of subractive bilingual practices. Native Spanish speakers' L1, for example, could be allowed to atrophy only to be  learned later as an L2.  Go figure...

I believe that immigrants who have little or no literacy should initially become literate in their L1 if instructional resources permit and perhaps especially if their L1 uses the Latin alphabet. 

Please let me know if you have experienced accelerated literacy development teaching literacy in two languages rather than one, keeping in mind that you would need to be able to make informed comparisons with similar student populations having used both approaches.

As I've mentioned before, there are two issues that L1 literacy learners do not need to prominently contend with: developing aural phonemic discrimination and ENcoding, in addition to DEcoding  many words known to them  in their L1 but not  L2.

Since L1 proficiency is, also in my own experience, such a key predictor of likely attainable L2 proficiency, shouldn't we focus on L1 literacy first and foremost and later allow it to transfer to L2 literacy?

I'm interested in your experiences. Thank you!

Michael
www.mauilanguage.com

Sent via Blackberry by Turkcell 
 


Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 09:02:33 -0700
From: glyndalin at yahoo.com
To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4551] Re: Sharing anecdotal information

By "biliteracy" I mean that I will be teaching ESL (including reading/writing) alongside L1 literacy, much like they do in k-5 here in Texas. 
 
Life skills are issues like time mangement, budgeting, parenting and other family skills.  They are usually integrated into our program.
 
The parenting specialist would handle the life skills (in Spanish) and I would focus primarily (but no exclusively) on language use.  



Grace and Peace!
Glenda Lynn Rose, PhD

ESL Instructor
Austin Learning Academy
841-4777
 

--- On Sat, 7/4/09, Michael Gyori <michael_gyori at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Michael Gyori <michael_gyori at yahoo.com>
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4548] Sharing anecdotal information
To: "englishlanguage at nifl.gov" <englishlanguage at nifl.gov>
Date: Saturday, July 4, 2009, 6:48 AM



Glenda, you wrote (please see my embedded questions):

My concerns for the class in the fall, the biliteracy class +++ What do you mean by biliteracy and are you targeting nonreaders? +++ is how to accommodate these individual needs in a class setting.  However, I'm beginning to think that coordinating with the parenting specialist (I work on an elementary school site) may be one way to do so.  If I teach the general L1/L2 class and let her handle life skills,+++ what do you mean by life skills: R-W literacy or something else in addition? +++ it may work well.  I'm having trouble visualizing how that might work, though.+++ Could you clarify your vision for this arrangement? I  can't form an image of it as stated. +++

Michael
www.mauilanguage.com

Sent via Blackberry by Turkcell


      
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