by Anne Burns
Lin, from China, has lived in Australia for six years. During this time she has attended several AMEP classes, and is now up to intermediate level. In a conversation with Judy Perkins, an AMEP teacher from South Australia, she highlighted one of the things that had helped her most to 'get going' in reading:
...she had to read a short, simple book and give an oral presentation about it...when she told her teacher she could not read it, the teacher spent some time with Lin individually after class...At first the teacher read aloud and Lin listened, frequently asking about vocabulary...then Lin started to read aloud, very hesitantly at first, but within one session her speed increased and she stopped talking about the meanings of words so often...After three or four sessions, she was reading much more fluently...Lin went on to finish the book by herself in a few days. (Perkins, 2000: 15)
Learners' enthusiasm for reading aloud was one of the - surprising - findings from a research project on reading practices, conducted by NCELTR (1998-99) with AMEP learners from three different language groups - Arabic (from Lebanon), Chinese (from mainland China) and Spanish (from El Salvador) (1).
A major aim of the study was to investigate the cultural and social reading practices outside the classroom of adult migrants in three-generation families. We The researchers involved (Burns, de Silva Joyce, Lahoud, O'Sullivan and Perkins (2)) had considerable experience in teaching reading in ESL classrooms, but we felt we had limited knowledge of the daily reading practices of AMEP students. By trying to understand more about their interests and purposes for reading and the kinds of texts they and their family members read, we would extend our knowledge about how to teach reading more effectively.
Our approach was to follow recent trends in the field of 'new literacy' studies (e.g. Prinsloo and Breier, 1996; Barton and Hamilton, 1998) that use ethnographic accounts (Hammersley, 1990) of the literacy practices of different community groups to understand how reading is related to people's cultural and social lives. We wanted to look at i) how students from these different cultural backgrounds integrate reading into their daily lives and how the learners' reading practices interact with those of immediate family members; ii) what were the experiences of learners currently in AMEP classrooms, especially in relation to learning to read; iii) what could this tell us about teaching reading in adult migrant classrooms.
We collected our data through three sources:
* interviews with a family from each of the three language backgrounds conducted in their own homes. We selected families in which the learner was one of three generations in order to give a broader picture of reading practices beyond the individual learner.
* records of the material read in first and second language over a period of one week, through a daily reading 'diary' kept by the family members
* follow-up interviews with other students from the same cultural and language backgrounds to gain broader perspectives on the areas raised in the first interviews and a greater sense of how individual or general the experiences were
The study was conducted over six months, with regular meetings of the project team interspersed with periods of data collection and analysis.
An example of reading practices: Lin's family
Lin's family consisted of her daughter Susie, aged six, her mother, Jin Li, and her father, Dong. The family lived in an area with few Chinese so Lin often acted as interpreter. Originally Lin, a chemical engineer, had come to Australia to join her husband. Sickness during her pregnancy prevented her from attending English classes and when her marriage failed after two years, she moved to another city. She felt more settled and started to learn English. Her parents had come to Australia to give her support but were not yet residents. The family had experienced a rich reading life in China. Dong, an officer in a large city council water planning department, had read a wide range of work-related materials, and especially enjoyed reading newspapers and famous Chinese classical novels. Jin Li, a former kindergarten principal, enjoyed newspapers and magazines, classical and other novels, biographies and Chinese editions of The Readers' Digest. Apart from workplace documents, Lin herself often read novels and magazines about health, beauty and fashion.
In Australia, their reading life had become drastically altered. Reading materials in Chinese were difficult to obtain apart from the weekly Chinese newspaper which they reread avidly. The few books they had in the house were those they had managed to carry with them from China - three favourite classical novels, a recipe book, books on food and health, and child health and development. Jin Li had also brought Chinese picture books and cards containing Chinese characters for Susie and spent considerable time reading to her. Their reading in English was limited: Jin Li could now read the alphabet in English and Dong had learned to negotiate the TV Guide. The family's move to Australia seemed to have resulted in two significant 'reading losses': the loss of the reader self, where reading has previously pervaded one's life; and the loss of contact with the world, where knowledge of events and connectedness to the local community are curtailed.
Lin's account of the place of reading in her learning of English highlighted three major issues. Firstly, she had wanted to read more, but she had no idea what to read Reading aloud had helped her finish a book and she had felt a great sense of achievement. She wanted her teachers to discuss with her what reading material might be available to her. None of her teachers had done this. Secondly, she wanted her teachers to focus more on vocabulary learning strategies. She had found knowing about prefixes, suffixes, root words and so on very helpful and wanted more explicit vocabulary teaching in order to meet what she saw as one of her biggest challenges as a reader. Thirdly, now that she was at a more advanced level, she wanted to develop better research skills to help her locate information through different sources such as the library, the internet. She had begun to do this in her new class and it was beginning to open up new possibilities and give her more confidence.
Implications for teaching
Building up a picture of learners' reading practices and learning experiences enabled us to reassess some teaching practices which have perhaps been overlooked. Learners wanted teachers to be, much more explicitly, their reading guides and mentors, deliberately introducing them to materials through which to replicate their first language reading practices and to extend their reading skills. Mentoring reading also included indicating clearly to learners when an activity focused on reading. Several of the learners stated that they were not sure whether the teacher had been teaching reading or not. Certainly, learners placed great store by reading aloud as a way of familiarising themselves with the written code and conceptualising sound/letter correspondences, but also as a means of enhancing pronunciation and intonation skills. Especially in early learning, they requested texts that were written for ESL learners, indicating that they enjoyed some of the beginner readers that controlled the amount of new vocabulary and grammar. This challenges teachers to think carefully about the kinds of authentic texts they use in reading activities and whether some may need to be modified or reduced.
The research also reminded us of the significance of reading in people's lives outside the classroom. Learners do not come as 'blank slates' to the process of learning to read in a second language and their reading experiences are not fixed. As teachers we can gain a great deal by taking time to learn about the 'literacy histories' (Barton, 1994) of the learners in our classrooms and their families.
Notes
1. A full account of this study and of the follow-up classroom-based action research projects that emerged from it can be found in Burns and de Silva Joyce, 2000.
2. In writing this article, I wish to acknowledge the work of whole research team.
References
Barton. D. 1994. Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barton, D. and M. Hamilton 1998. Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge.
Burns, A. and H. de Silva Joyce (eds). 2000. Teachers' Voices 5: A new look at reading practices. Sydney: NCELTR.
Hammersley, M 1990. Reading ethnographic research: A critical guide. London: Longman.
Perkins, J. 2000. Reading practices of Chinese-speaking students. In A. Burns, A. and H. de Silva Joyce (eds). 2000. Teachers' Voices 5: A new look at reading practices. Sydney: NCELTR.
Prinsloo, M. and M. Breier 1996. The social uses of literacy: Theory and practice in contemporary South Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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