Literacy Transfer

Important concepts

•Literacy: –control of secondary uses of language; i.e., reading and writing, understanding of labels, charts, etc;–psycholinguistic process including letter recognition, encoding, decoding, word-recognition, sentence comprehension, and so on;–order to acquire literacy through instruction in the specific sub-processes, children must learn and develop automaticity in such skills as letter recognition, encoding, and decoding. Bilinguals learn such skills in both languages.

•Biliteracy: –acquisition and learning and decoding and encoding of and around print using two linguistic and cultural systems in order to convey messages in a variety of contexts;–psycholinguistic process including letter recognition, encoding, decoding, word-recognition, sentence comprehension;–order to acquire biliteracy through instruction in the specific sub-processes, children must learn and develop automaticity in such skills as letter recognition, encoding, and decoding in both languages.

•Code-switching: –alternate use of two languages in oral or written form, which is less common;

–switches can occur within the discourse, where the person starts in one language and then switches to the other, between sentences, or even within sentences when only a phrase or word is in the other language in both languages;

–code-switching is rule bound and operates in almost all bilingual children.

–When writing in L2, students may switch to their L1 to avoid interrupting the flow of what they want to say for lack of language proficiency;

Transfer

•The development of L1 and of L2 are interdependent;

•Literacy ability in L2 flourishes in environments where the use of the native language is supported;

•Literacy ability in one language supports the acquisition of literacy in another: literacy skills acquired through one language L1 transfer to the second language L2;

•Children learning an L2 use creative construction processes, just as they do in their L1;

Transfer

•Transfer of L1 syntactic patterns rarely occurs in child L2 acquisition;

•Bilingual students can often explain better in their native language the contents of a reading done in their second language; •Bilinguals do not function as two monolingual; Learning a new language like life skill learning, requires accommodation of new structures into existing ones.

Teaching Implications

•Input must be comprehensive, that is offered in the language with which student feels more comfortable;

•Readings in L2 must reflect the students’ home culture: word connotations are defined by the cultural context; students who do not know the culture miss the full meaning of words;

•Students bring to the class all the knowledge acquired through their cultural experiences; using the students’ background knowledge makes learning of new concepts more meaningful;

Teaching Implications

•When context of texts or the topics of writings are familiar and interesting to learners, they are more successful in reading and writing;

•Older children (end of elementary school) may profit from strategies of acquisition --for instance, the ability to infer or guess meaning, conceptualization which are considered right hemisphere functions;

•With experience and increased language knowledge, students can venture into writing about new and less familiar topics.