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Hello again and welcome to the video number two
on the teaching and learning of literacy skills.
This video concerns chapter five of Casbergue and Strickland
and then Tarone's article about interlanguage.
Starting with Casbergue and Strickland, I'm going to be talking about the stage that usually
appears between two, maybe two and a half years of age until when the children are five.
Now, this is not universal. Not every child will go through the same process, but there
are specific milestones which, if not universal, are at least very, very frequent.
I'll try to describe those. When a child starts producing drawings that may be
interpreted as writing, there is no difference between trying and writing for them.
He doesn't, he or she doesn't know how to write. Therefore, the
perception is probably that writing is just a specific type of drawing.
If you've seen children drawing, you may have noticed that very
often they don't have a purpose, but they fix it afterwards.
That is, they start drawing, they produce a scribble and
then interpret it and say, "This is a house. This is a car."
It's very rare that from the outset they
intend to produce a car or a house or a flower.
But there comes a point when usually a child produces something that
he or she perceives as interesting and he or she wants to repeat it.
At this point, drawing becomes much less experimental and becomes
more deliberate because the child is now aiming for a specific result.
Usually at this time is when he or she starts trying
to draw something that looks more or less like writing.
Before this attempt to produce deliberate
scribbles, it's pointless to consider writing.
But after that, that's the process when
the acquisition of writing may start.
Crucially, marks appear that are clearly intended to emulate writing.
But what kind of writing?
Usually, that's lines rather than anything else.
To a child who is pre-literate, who doesn't know how to read and
write yet, what makes writing look like writing are the lines.
He or she is not aware of individual words, much less individual letters.
It's the lines that he or she will try to emulate.
And at the beginning, those are going to be pretty uniform.
But gradually, there will be more variation.
And when there is variation, there will usually be mock letters.
Mock letters are what we call things that children produce which
to them look like letters, but which are not really letters.
They're not letters that we recognize in the alphabet.
But to them, they're exactly the same as the ones that adults use.
So even when they realize what the real
letters are, they may still use mock letters.
Because at the beginning, they are not aware that
actually the repertoire of letters is actually very limited.
They are likely to think it's infinite.
Whereas, as we know, it's actually very limited.
And once they realize that, they grow acquainted
with actual letters, with real letters.
But even then, they may get them wrong.
You've all seen this probably, and you've
all done this when you were this age.
S and N are very likely to get reversed.
And there's a very frequent confusion between W and M.
To a child who is preliterate, an M
looks exactly like a W, only upside down.
So, to recap what we have said so far, children
do several things in this process, in this stage.
They realize that the marks that adults use to
write are not the same as the lines used for drawing.
They realize, in other words, the specificity of letters.
And then later, they realize that what they
perceived as a unit, a line, is actually not a unit.
But a composition of individual symbols with straight and curved lines.
And the way you combine straight and curved
may give you B or D or P, for instance.
So they realize that.
And then they discover, essentially,
that there's a very limited repertoire.
It's not infinite, as they would have thought.
And that's when they begin identifying actual
letters, the actual letters in the alphabet.
Children move on then to be able to understand
the importance of letter choice and letter order.
Because they realize the repertoire is very limited, they
realize that the letter they use is crucial to writing.
And obviously they don't know this at the beginning.
It's a realization, and it's a revelation.
Basically, the first way that this is going to appear, once they
grasp the actual alphabet, are going to be what we call mock words.
Mock words being imaginary words, which are sequences of letters.
And the letters may be real, but the mock words
don't spell out any actually existent word.
They're just an approximation.
For a pre-literate child, there is no distinction,
of course, between a mock word and an actual word.
But there's a second revelation, which is probably more
important for the child's process of acquisition of literacy,
which is the fact that they realize that there's
a relationship between oral language and writing.
It's very difficult for us as adults to realize the importance of this, because we know
perfectly well that the printed language, writing, is a graphic representation of oral language.
But for a child, this is revolutionary,
because they didn't know at the time.
And we can foster this process of realization
by having children look at environmental print.
Environmental print, as the name suggests,
is basically print which is around.
Print which is anywhere.
Logos in the packaging of products, or
calendars, or shopping lists, or anything really.
Anything that's lying around.
And we can foster several realizations,
and each of those is extremely important.
For instance, a child will realize that
a word contains more than one letter.
It's very rare in a language to have a word made up of a single letter.
There are cases, of course, but it's very rare.
So they will create words which are
typically three to seven letters long.
They will also realize, just by looking at environmental print,
that words don't usually consist of a single repeated letter.
So they won't produce mock words which
consist of a single repeated letter.
They will combine them in different ways.
And they will also realize that reordering the
letters in a word may yield different words.
That is, they will learn about the importance of letter order.
I'll return to this in a few minutes.
Very often, in this stage of the process, what the child
will do is simply borrow words from environmental print.
And they won't be able to know what they mean.
They will simply use them as a model, and they will transcribe
them, they will copy them into their own production.
So, in a way, they're writing real words,
but they don't know what the real words say.
They're real, but not to them.
Or, to put it better, to them there is no difference
between the mock word and the actual, really existent word.
At this point, the child is ready to start grasping
the tremendously complex issue of phonemic spelling.
In other words, the fact that what we call writing is
supposed to represent what we produce when we speak.
And at that point, the child will be able to establish distinctions.
First of all, the child will be able to come to understand the
notion of word and the notion of space, which is associated to it.
He or she will realize that a space is a boundary between words.
And he or she will realize that the word is something between spaces.
In this example, I have blackboard.
And later on, he or she will realize that
there are actual syllables within words.
So, that will be black, for instance.
And a bit later, he or she will start
distinguishing between onsets and rhymes.
For clarification, the onset is everything before
the vowel in a syllable, so "bl" in our example,
whereas the rhyme is the vowel and everything else until
the end of the word, of the syllable, "ack", in our case.
And this is quite difficult, because, you see, the child is able to
distinguish syllables before being able to distinguish actual sounds.
So, let me put it this way.
It's easier for a child to distinguish syllables than it is
for him or her to distinguish phonemes, individual phonemes.
We can help them foster the recognition of phonemes, actually.
But the problem is, at this stage,
it's quite difficult for them to do it.
Because this requires that they distinguish between letter shapes.
This requires that they know the names of all the letters.
And this requires that they know what sounds letters represent.
So it's fairly complex.
Once children recognize that, let me put it this way, writing
stands for oral language, a change will come across their writing.
They usually start by representing the initial sounds in words.
So, if we have "bird", they very often write
"B", and that's supposed to mean "bird".
But once they understand that writing is actually
the representation of oral language, this changes.
And they will try to represent all of the sounds
they hear in a word, or most of the sounds.
Or they will try to represent those
they recognize and leave out the others.
Now, usually, this is as far as children can get in preschool.
Everything else is quite complex.
So, this is usually the point at which they arrive
when they leave preschool, more often than not.
Again, as in the case of Units...
oh, sorry, Chapters 2 and 4 in Casbergue and Strickland's book,
there has to be communication between the classroom and the home.
And there are many ways in which this can be done.
One which I really like, parents should be
encouraged to let children see them writing.
As simple as that.
The child should see their parents writing at home.
So, anything, really. A shopping list.
Anything that can be trivial, or a diary, if they keep one,
or a letter, but they don't really write letters anymore.
Anything. But that's a very good idea.
And also, allowing the child to write
his or her own name on his or her things.
Again, you see the importance of a child's name.
It's very, very useful for our topic.
Let me move on, for the final part of this video, to something
which may seem different, but it's actually quite related,
which is interlanguage.
Interlanguage is a notion that's been hugely influential.
Which was introduced by American linguist
Larry Selinker quite a few decades ago.
You can see the definition here.
But if you think about the very word,
interlanguage, and try to guess what it means,
you may guess a fairly clear example, a very clear definition.
Interlanguage is basically a separate linguistic entity.
So, for the purposes of this example, let's say that we are talking about
native speakers of Spanish who are studying English as a foreign language.
Interlanguage is not English.
English is the actual language, as native speakers speak it, without
mistakes, or without poor choices of vocabulary, for instance.
And interlanguage is not Spanish either, because
Spanish is simply the native language of the students.
The interlanguage is a separate linguistic entity, which is different
from the native language and different from the target language,
but which exists between the two, and hence the name interlanguage.
The learner relates the interlanguage to both
the native language and the target language.
Just a very quick example.
The way that Spanish learners will copy structures from Spanish,
literally, onto English, when they're not correct in English,
is a very clear example of an interlanguage at work.
But what's important about the interlanguage, and the reason
why it's been so relevant, is that it's supposed to fossilize.
In other words, there's a point in
which interlanguage stops developing.
If the progress of learning the foreign language was complete, eventually,
the learner would reach complete identification with the target language.
In other words, he or she would speak it perfectly.
But this doesn't usually happen.
Normally, the learning stops at some point, which is
not easily predicted, and the progress is interrupted.
There is no agreement on whether fossilization
happens with all language skills at the same time,
so you actually stop learning English, and that's it:
you don't get any better anymore;
or whether you can have fossilization in one
area, and keep on learning on the others.
For instance, some scholars suggest that your pronunciation is not going to get
any better, but you might be able to keep on learning grammar and vocabulary.
But as I say, there is no agreement,
and a lot has been written about this.
And presumably, lots more will be written about this.
Now, I've been mentioning learners.
Learners are, in the theory of interlanguage, usually adults.
Let me be very clear about this.
The theory was originally postulated to account
for the way that adults learn foreign languages.
But what about children?
Basically, there are two views that you can see here.
The original one, or the traditional one, is that children avoid
fossilization, because they don't really use an interlanguage as such.
Hence, if they avoid fossilization, their progress is never interrupted.
And you've heard this before.
This idea is behind the assumption, usually put in a very simplistic way, that it's best
for a child to start learning a foreign language as soon as possible, as young as possible.
Because that way, he or she will learn the foreign language
in the same way as he or she has learned the native language.
This is not exactly like that.
But that's a very simple way of putting this hypothesis:
the hypothesis that because they don't have their interlanguage fossilized,
they don't stop learning the language, or they acquire it much more naturally.
However, there's view number two, much less
optimistic, and backed by empirical research too,
which suggests that fossilization occurs in children too,
because they also develop their own interlanguage, and
they can have it fossilized, and stop making progress.
And the reason why this happens, and
how this happens, is never very clear.
But basically, it's thought that it's
because of insufficient or inadequate input.
Let me exemplify.
If you are a child who's studying English, even in the best of worlds,
if you have a native teacher, the input you receive is very limited.
Because it only comes from the teacher.
Because basically, you're not living in an anglophone environment.
Which means that your exchanges in communication with your classmates,
with your peers, are not going to be significant in English,
because you're not likely to use the foreign
language unless you are told to use it:
so there will be no effort, there is no stimulus
to be able to produce meaningful communication.
And that's what the theory suggests, that
children do fossilize their learning too.
Why is this so relevant?
Because the notions of interlanguage and
fossilization, as you can see, they're not...
A consensus has not been reached.
They are not agreed upon in any way.
But they are behind some very popular ideas about
the way in which a foreign language is acquired.
And behind debates which are so hotly contested as to when
is the ideal age to start introducing the foreign language.
So all of these ideas, which are, as you know,
extremely controversial in the area of education,
to a certain extent, are related to such crucial notions
as interlanguage, fossilization, comprehensible input, etc.
Hence the importance of this notion for our module.
This has been a summary of Chapter 5 in Casbergue and Strickland,
and a quick summary of Tarone's article on interlanguage.
As usual, let me just remind you that this is a
very succinct summary, and it cannot replace,
it's not intended to replace direct study and
direct engagement with the texts themselves.
And that's all from me. Thank you very much for your attention.
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