Educational psychology by Woolfolk, Anita-198-233 PDF

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5 | LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, LANGUAGE DIVERSITY AND IMMIGRANT EDUCATION TEACHERS’ CASEBOOK WHAT WOULD YOU DO? CULTURES CLASH IN THE CLASSROOM Your high school classes this year are about equally divided among three groups—African Americans, Asians, and Latinos/as. Students from each of the three groups seem to stick together, rarely making friends with students from “outside.” When you ask students to select partners for projects, the divisions are usually based on shared ethnicity or shared language. At times, insults are exchanged between the groups, and the atmosphere of the class is becoming tense. Often the Asian or Latino students communicate in their native languages—which you don’t understand—and

you assume that the joke is on you because of the looks and laughs directed your way. You realize that you are having trouble establishing positive relationships with many of the students whose language, culture, and background are very different from yours, and many other students, picking up on your discomfort, shy away from them too.

CRITICAL THINKING • What is the real problem here? • How would you help the students (and yourself) to feel more comfortable with each other? • What are your first goals in working on this problem? • How will these issues affect the grade levels you will teach?

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OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES Virtually all developed countries, and many developing ones, are becoming more diverse. Multiple languages fill many classrooms. For a range of reasons, including unrest across the globe, families are immigrating to find a better, safer life—and their children will likely be in your classrooms. In this chapter, we look at how the over 6,000 natural languages in the world developed, the role of culture, the stages in language development, and the emergence of literacy. Next we consider diversity in language development and duallanguage development. But language diversity is more than bilingualism. Because all of us speak at least one dialect, we examine what teachers need to know about dialects and genderlects—a new term for me—along with the role of schools in second- (or third-) language learning. Finally, we turn to the critical issue for you—how to become a capable and confident teacher of immigrant students and secondlanguage learners. What is the role of bilingual education and sheltered instruction? Do the emotions and concerns of these students affect their learning? How can you identify students

who are English language learners with special talents or special needs? By the time you have completed this chapter, you should be able to: Objective 5.1

Understand how language develops and know how to support emergent literacy.

Objective 5.2

Discuss what happens when children develop two languages.

Objective 5.3

Address whether dialect differences affect learning and discuss what teachers can do.

Objective 5.4

Compare and contrast immigrant, refugees and Generation 1.5 students, including thei learning characteristics and needs.

Objective 5.5

Discuss teaching for English language learners including English immersion, bilingual instruction, and sheltered instruction.

Objective 5.6

Discuss how teachers can recognize special learning needs and talents when they do no speak their students’ first language.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE OUT LINE Teachers’ Casebook––Cultures Clash in the Classroom: What Would You Do? Overview and Objectives

All children in every culture master the complicated system of their native language, unless severe deprivation or physical problems interfere. This knowledge is remarkable. To have a conversation, children must coordinate sounds, meanings, words and sequences of words, volume, voice tone, inflection, and turntaking rules. Yet, by about (Colledge et al., 2002).

The Development of Language What Develops? Language and Cultural Differences When and How Does Language Develop? Emergent Literacy Emergent Literacy and Language Diversity Diversity in Language Development Dual-Language Development Signed Languages What Is Involved in Being Bilingual? Contextualized and Academic Language Dialect Differences in the Classroom Dialects Genderlects Teaching Immigrant Students

What Develops? Language and Cultural Differences More than 6,000 natural languages are spoken worldwide (Tomasello, 2006). In general, cultures develop words for the concepts that are important to them. For example, how many different shades of green can you name? Mint, olive, emerald, teal, sea foam, chrome, turquoise, chartreuse, lime, apple . . . and visual artists can add cobalt titanate green, cinnabar green, phthalo yellow green, viridian green, and many others. English-speaking countries have more than 3,000 words for colors. In contrast, the Himba people of Namibia and a tribe of hunter-gatherer people in Papua New Guinea who speak Berinmo have five words for colors, even though they can recognize many color variations. But whether the terms for color are few or many, children gradually acquire the color categories appropriate for their culture (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2004). . The Shoshoni Native Americans have one word that means, “to make a crunching sound walking on the sand.” This word was valuable in the past to communicate about hunting, but today new words describing technical tools have been added to the Shoshoni language, as the group’s life moves away from nomadic hunting. To hear hundreds of new 21st-century tool words, listen to techies talk about computers (W. F. Price & Crapo, 2002). THE PUZZLE OF LANGUAGE. It is likely that many

To master a language, children

Immigrants and Refugees Classrooms Today

must be able to (1) e and also (2)

Generation 1.5: Students in Two Worlds Teaching Students Who Are English Language Learners Two Approaches to English Language Learning Sheltered Instruction Affective and Emotional/Social Considerations

(Tomasello, 2006). The . In this process, For example, young children seem to have a constraint specifying that a new label refers to a whole object, not just a part.

Working with Families: Using the Tools of the Culture Special Challenges: Students Who Are English Language Learners with Disabilities and Special Gifts Students Who Are English Language Learners with Disabilities Reaching Every Student: Recognizing Giftedness in Bilingual Students Summary and Key Terms Teachers’ Casebook––Cultures Clash in

(Jaswal & Markman, 2001; Markman, 1992).

(Waxman & Lidz, 2006).

When and How Does Language Develop? Table 5.1 shows the milestones of language development,

in

SOUNDS AND PRONUNCIATION. By about

. You saw

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(Friend, 2014). As children learn to hear differences in the sounds of language, they enjoy rhymes, songs, and general sound silliness. They like stories by Dr. Seuss partly because of the sounds, as evident in the book titles—All Aboard the Circus McGurkus or Wet Pet, Dry Pet, Your Pet, My Pet. The young son of a friend of mine wanted to name his new baby sister Brontosaurus “just because it’s fun to say.” VOCABULARY AND MEANING. As you can see in Table 5.1, children between

. By (Otto, 2010). Some researchers estimate that students in the (P. Bloom, 2002). In the , some children may have trouble with abstract words such as

For example, fables are understood concretely simply as stories instead of as moral lessons. Many children are in their preadolescent years before they are able to distinguish being kidded from being taunted, or before they know that a sarcastic remark is not meant to be taken literally. But by , (Owens, 2012).

TABLE 5.1 • Milestones in Early Childhood Language and Ways to Encourage Development AGE RANGE

MILESTONE

STRATEGIES TO ENCOURAGE DEVELOPMENT

Between 2 and 3

Identifies body parts; calls self “me” instead of name; combines nouns and verbs; has a 450-word vocabulary; uses short sentences; matches 3–4 colors; knows big and little; likes to hear same story repeated; forms some plurals; answers “where” questions

• Help the child listen and follow instructions by playing simple games • Repeat new words over and over • Describe what you are doing, planning, thinking • Have the child deliver simple messages for you • Show the child you understand what he or she says by answering, smiling, and nodding your head • Expand what the child says. Child: “more juice.” You say, “You want more juice?”

Between 3 and 4

Can tell a story; sentence length of 4–5 words; vocabulary about 1,000 words; knows last name, name of street, several nursery rhymes

• • • •

Talk about how objects are the same or different Help the child to tell stories using books and pictures Encourage play with other children Talk about places you’ve been or will be going

Between 4 and 5

Sentence length of 4–5 words; uses past tense; vocabulary of about 1,500 words; identifies colors, shapes; asks many questions like “why?” and “who?”

• • • • •

Help the child sort objects and things (e.g., things to eat, animals) Teach the child how to use the telephone Let the child help you plan activities Continue talking about the child’s interests Let the child tell and make up stories for you

Between 5 and 6

Sentence length of 5–6 words; average 6-yearold has vocabulary of about 10,000words; defines objects by their use; knows spatial relations (like “on top” and “far”) and opposites; knows address; understands same and different; uses all types of sentences

• Praise children when they talk about feelings, thoughts, hopes, fears • Sing songs, rhymes • Talk with them as you would an adult

At Every Age

• • • •

Listen and show your pleasure when the child talks to you Carry on conversations with the child Ask questions to get the child to think and talk Read books to the child every day, increasing in length as the child develops

Copyright © 2000 Sydney Harris. Reprinted with permission of Sydney Harris.

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Young children begin to elaborate their simple language by adding plurals; endings for verbs such as ; small words like articles ); and possessives A classic study by Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children could even apply these rules to make words that they had never encountered plural, possessive, or past tense. For example, when shown a picture of a single “wug,” the preschool children in the study could answer correctly “wugs” when the researcher said, “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ______.” In the process of figuring out the rules governing these aspects of language, children make some very interesting mistakes. GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX. For a brief time,

. Then, as they begin to learn rules, they Children who once said, begin to insist, A child who once talked about her feet may discover the -s for plurals and refer to her then learn about before she finally returns to talking about her feet (Flavell et al., 2002). Parents often wonder why their child seems to be “regressing.” . Apparently these overregularizations happen in all languages, including . Because most languages have many irregular words, accommodation is necessary in mastering language. According to Joshua Hartshore and Michael Ullman (2006), The researchers speculate that because girls may have better memory for words, they have better access to similar words ( folded, molded, scolded ) and generalize to holded. Early on, , For example, because the usual order in English is subject–verb–object, preschoolers just mastering the rules of language have trouble with sentences in any other order. If 4-year-old Justin hears a statement in the passive voice, like “The truck was bumped by the car,” he probably thinks the truck did the bumping to the car because “truck” came first in the sentence. Interestingly, however, in languages where the passive voice is more important, such as the South African language Sesotho, children use this construction much earlier, as young as 3 or 4 (Demuth, 1990). By early elementary school, many children can understand the meaning of passive sentences, but they do not use such constructions in their normal conversations, unless the passive construction is common in their culture. PRAGMATICS: USING LANGUAGE IN SOCIAL SITUATIONS.

.

(Flavell et al., 2002; M. L. Rice, 1989). So even young children seem quite able to fit their language to the situation, at least with familiar people. Rules for the appropriate use of language vary across cultures. For example, Shirley Brice Heath (1989) spent many hours observing White middle-class families and African American families who were poor. She White middle-class adults asked test-like questions with right answers, such as These questions seemed odd to African American children whose families don’t ask about what they already know. The African American child might wonder, “Why would my aunt ask me how many cars? She can see there are 3.” Instead,

CHAPT ER 5 • LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, LANGUAGE DIVERSIT Y, AND IMMIGRANT EDUCAT ION

METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS. Around the

students begin to develop

This

as we all become better able to use language.

. This process continues throughout life, , which begins with

Emergent Literacy Today, in most languages, reading is a cornerstone of learning, and the foundation for reading is built in early childhood. Because young children vary greatly in their knowledge and skills related to reading, research has expanded to study what supports these emerging literacy skills (often called emergent literacy). Look at Figure 5.1, which shows a 6-year-old’s emergent story and grocery list, to see some emerging literacy skills. What are the most important skills that help literacy emerge? Here, the answers are not certain, but research has identified two broad categories of skills that are important for later reading: ; and (Dickinson et al., 2003; Florit & Cain, 2011; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002).

FIGURE 5.1 A STORY AND A GROCERY LIST This child knows quite a bit about reading and writing—letters make words that communicate meaning, writing goes from left to right and lists go down the page, and stories look different than shopping lists. Emergent writing samples provided by Kalla Terpenning, who just turned 6.

Source: Woolfolk, A., & Nancy, N.E. (2015). Child and Adolescent Development. Reprinted by permission

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An . Is this a good indicator of reading readiness for English? Shayne Piasta and her colleagues (2012) addressed this question in a longitudinal study that followed 371 children from the end of preschool to the end of first grade. The researchers found that a better predictor of all reading outcomes was the ability to name 18 uppercase letters and 15 lowercase letters. Some educators emphasize (e.g., letter naming); others emphasize A study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Childhood Research Network (2005b) that followed more than 1,000 children from age 3 through third grade concluded, “preschool oral language skills [for example, size of vocabulary, ability to use syntax, ability to understand and tell stories] play an important role along side code skills in predicting reading in the transition to school” (p. 439).

Some evidence, however, indicates that early in the learning-to-read process in English, Using all your mental capacity to identify letters and sounds leaves very little space for making meaning. Florit & Cain, 2011). INSIDE-OUT AND OUTSIDE-IN SKILLS. One way to think about emergent literacy that

captures both code and oral language skills for emergent literacy is the notion of inside-out skills and outside-in skills and processes, described in Table 5.2.

TABLE 5.2 • Components of Emergent Literacy COMPONENT

BRIEF DEFINITION

EXAMPLE

Outside-in Processes





Language

Semantic, syntactic, and conceptual knowledge

A child reads the word “bat” and connects the meaning to knowledge of baseball or flying mammals.

Narrative

Understanding and producing narrative

A child can tell a story, understands that books have stories.

Conventions of print

Knowledge of standard print formats

The child understands that print is read from left-to-right and front-to-back in English; understands the difference between pictures and print or the cover and the inside of the book.

Emergent reading

Pretending to read

Child takes a favorite book and retells the “story,” often by using pictures as cues.

Inside-out Processes





Knowledge of graphemes

Letter-name knowledge

A child can recognize letters and name letters.

Phonological awareness

Detection of rhyme; manipulation of syllables; manipulation of individual phonemes

A child can tell you words that rhyme with “hat.” A child can clap as she says sounds in a word cat: /k/ /a˘ / /t/

Syntactic awareness

Repair grammatical errors

A child says, “No! you say I went to the zoo, not I goed to the zoo.”

Phoneme–grapheme correspondence

Letter-sound knowledge

The child can answer the question, “What sounds do these letters make?”

Emergent writing

Phonetic spelling

The child writes “eenuf,” or “hambrgr.”

Other Factors

Emergent literacy also depends on other factors such as short-term memory for sounds and sequences, the ability to recognize and name lists of letters, motivation, and interest.

CHAPT ER 5 • LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, LANGUAGE DIVERSIT Y, AND IMMIGRANT EDUCAT ION

This model, developed by Grover Whitehurst and Christopher Lonigan (1998), includes two interdependent sets of skills and processes: A reader must decode units of print into units of sound and units of sound into units of language. This is an inside-out process. However, being able to say a written word or series of written words is only a part of reading. The fluent reader must understand those auditory derivations, which involves placing them in the correct conceptual and contextual framework. This is an outside-in process. (p. 855) For example, to understand even a simple sentence in print, such as, “She ordered an eBook from Amazon?” the reader must know about letters, sounds, grammar, and punctuation. The reader also has to remember the first words as he is reading the last ones. But these inside-out skills are not enough. To understand, the reader needs to have conceptual knowledge—what is an eBook? What does it mean to order? Is this the Amazon River or Amazon online? Why the question mark? Who is asking? How does this sentence fit in the context of the story? Answering these questions takes outside-in skills and knowledge. BUILDING A FOUNDATION. What builds this foundation of emergent literacy skills? Two

related activities are critical: (1) and (2) (NICHD Early Childhood Research Network, 2005a). Especially in the early years, the children’s home experiences are central in the development of language and literacy (Lonigan, Farver, Nakamoto, & Eppe, 2013; Sénéchal & LeFev...