A. INTRODUCTION
This paper aims at summarizing and reviewing an article on Bilingual which is entitled “The Development of Bilingual Children’s Early Spelling in English.” Following the introduction part the summary of the article and the review are provided. The review part contains the writer personal comments on the research methodology, the writer’s prediction or assumption after looking at the found evidence, the suggestion, and the writer’s thought on the research’s beneficial impact for academic society.
B. SUMMARY
The Develoment of Bilingual Children’s Early Spelling in English
By Susan J. Rickard Liow and Lily H.S. Lau
(Journal of Educational Psychology.2006. Vol 98. No.4. 868-878)
There are a number of research recount the importance of phonological awareness in the development of English reading and spelling skills. However, those researches always excluded bilingual children (including ESL children). This may leave us a question whether the result for English unilingual generalizes to ESL children? The other questions were what is the impact of Bilingualism when the child’s first language (L1) is different from English? ; moreover, apart from phonological awareness, do other kinds of metalinguistic knowledge influence reading and spelling in ESL children?
By using an extended version of R. Treiman M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski’s (1994) flap spelling task (wa_er is it t or d in water?), the author investigate the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different Language Backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English L1, Mandarin L2), Chinese-LB (Chinese L1, English L2) and Malay-LB (Bahasa Malaysia L1, English L2). In the article, it is described how home languages, with different orthographic, phonological, and morphological features can influence and ESL preschool child’s untutored spelling in English.
Flaps spelling paradigm
In some varieties of spoken English, medial stop consonants in certain words undergo a process known as flapping. Speakers flap when bisyllabic words contain a single medial /t/ or /d/ that is preceded by a vowel and followed by a vowel or a vowel plus /r/. For example, when flapped the /t/ in water sound like a /d/. Before they learn to spell conventionally, children who make exclusive use of phonological processing choose the letter /d/ to spell words with spoken /t/ flaps, even with a context sentence for the target word. Ehri and Wilce (1986) looked at American English speakers’ oral spelling of /t/ and /d/ flaps in first graders, second graders and fourth graders. They found a /d/ bias overall, but there were differences across the cohorts: /d/ errors on words with /t/ flaps decreased with age. This is consistent with the claim that phonological awareness declines with age.
Rickard Liow and Poon (1998) showed that Mandarin L1 children in
Treiman (1993) and Read (1975) did an observation that early spelling attempts often results in phonologically plausible errors. However, errors also seem to depend on the kind of metalinguistic knowledge available at particular developmental stages. Therefore, differences in the use of metalinguistics skills among groups of bilingual children learning English seem inevitable not just probable.
Bilingualism and Home Languages in
The spelling ability of English-LB Children in Singapore do not resemble their unilingual age peers since they are taught by using whole word strategy for reading English, so the English-LB children might rely more on visual-orthographic processes rather than on phonological awareness. Moreover, exposing children mostly with SCE -which is really different from the standard English- affect the spelling skills of children.
The Rumi script of Bahasa Malaysa has a rich, transparent morphological structure with syllable-size affixes such as per-, ber- and –
Spoken Mandarin is morphosyllabic and tonal, with very few affixes. These features contrast with English and Bahasa
Method
Participants : a total of 80 second-year pupils attending a government kindergarten in
Materials and Procedure
Language Background Questionnaire (LBQ) was used to screen the students in terms of their most frequently spoken language at home before administrating the flaps test. 21 children who reported use of other languages were excluded from the study. Vocabulary scores which have been collected 5 months earlier by using the modified British picture vocabulary scale were available to corroborated the LBQ self-report data. A one way ANOVA on raw scores revealed a main effect of English vocabulary and planned comparisons confirmed that the English-LB group’s vocabulary scores were better than those for both ESL groups
Flaps spelling test
The extended flap test(16 cells of 10 words) comprised monomorphemic and bimorphemic, low-and high-frequency, flapped /t/ and /d/ words as well as monosyllabic and bisyllabic unflapped control /t/ and /d/ words. See the following table:
Table : Design of the extended Flaps Spelling Skills
| | Control Monomorphemic/ Monosyllabic (Unflapped | Experimental Monomorphemic/ Bisyllabic (flapped) | Experimental Bimorphemic/ Bisyllabic (flapped | Control Monomorphemic/ Bysyllabic (unflapped) | ||||
| Word frequency | /t/ | /d/ | /t/ | /d/ | /t/ | /d/ | /t/ | /d/ |
| Low | Greet | Hood | Porter | Poodle | Greeted | Hooded | Pastry | Cinder |
| High | late | wide | party | garden | started | wooden | sister | powder |
The researcher manipulated flap type (/t/ or /d/) to look at phonological awareness, word frequency (high and low) to look at orthographic awareness, and the number of morphemes (moomorphemic and bimorphemic) to look at morphological awareness and then the unflapped control words (one or two syllable) is added. Small groups (5 or 6 children) were tested in two session at least 3 days apart. From 160 words, two 80-items subtests were developed.
The research made use of cassette recorder to run the test. A female native speaker of SSE’s voice was recorded. She read aloud the target words and the context sentences. The answer sheet were printed in large lowercase typeface with an underlined blank in place of missing letters (e.g. wa_ter and to the right of the target words were the letters /t/ and /d/). The children were asked to listen and then circle the letter they thought belonged in the blank. They were each rewarded for their help with a small bar of chocolate.
Result and Discussion
First, the researcher assessed proficiency by looking at the mean proportion correct for each LB groups summed across all the control words. The post hoc test confirmed there was no statistical difference in overall performance on control words between any two of the three groups
Orthographic Awareness: to test for differential use of orthographic awareness, the researchers manipulated word frequency for /t/ and /d/ control word (one morpheme and one syllable). There were no significant main effect of LB group or frequency, but the interaction between frequency and LB group was significant. For /d/ but not /t/, the English-LB children performed significantly better on high- than low-frequency control words. This was predicted because children from English-speaking homes are more likely to be exposed to printed text in English. The Chinese-LB children performed significantly better on high than low frequency /d/ control words, though the Malay-LB children did not. This advantage for high-frequency words for the Chinese-LB children is more difficult to explain in terms of print exposure, but learning to read logographic Chinese characters might enhance certain aspects visual processing, and these in turn support spelling of familiar English words after relatively limited exposure.
Phonological awareness: to test for differential use of phonological awareness, the researchers looked at low-frequency words and tested for group difference performance for /t/ versus /d/ on flapped and unflapped monomorphemic bisyllabic words. There were significant main effect of flap type, and word type, but not in the LB group. All three groups were significantly poorer on at /t/ flaps than /t/ control words, but no group showed a difference between /d/ flaps and /d/ control words. A one way ANOVA on /t/ flapped words showed a significant different between across the LB groups, simple effect test confirmed that the Malay LB children were significantly more likely than either the English-LB children or the Chinese-LB children to choose /d/ instead of /t/. The performance of the English-LB and Chinese-LB groups was equivalent. Taken together, these result suggest all three LB groups use some phonological awareness for spelling but, as predicted, the Malay children rely more on it.
Morphological Awareness: to test for differential use of morphological awareness, the researchers looked at the mean proportion of correct spellings on bisyllabic flapped monomorphemic and bimorphemic /d/ words. It was predicted that Malay-LB children might have better developed morphological awareness as a result of transfer from Bahasa
Syllable Awareness: to test for differential sensitivity to number of syllables across three bilingual children, the performance on the low frequency monomorphemic, mono- versus bisyllabic /d/ control words. It was predicted that Chinese-LB would be poorer on bisyllabic and monosyllabic, considering the Chinese character morphosyllabic (one morpheme, one syllable). The result, however show that number of syllable had no effect on the Chinese-LB children’s decision. One plausible explanation for this is that the Chinese-LB children treat the bisyllabic words as two separate single syllable. For English and Malay-LB children the result showed that they performed significantly better on bisyllabic than monosyllabic.
Conclusion
The following review of the result by language groups support the idea that the bilingual children’s skill remain variable even when they have been learning English in the same kindergarten for almost 2 years. First, English-LB children were using some syllable awareness and seemed better able to combine their orthographic awareness with phonological awareness to optimize performance. However, there was no evidence found that morphological awareness support the spelling skills of the English-LB children. Second, For Malay-LB children, it was found a strong eveidence of the use of phonological and syllable awareness rather than orthographic awareness, but, again there was no evidence of morphological awareness. Finally, for the Chinese-LB children, it was found that visual-orthographic skills would be more important than either phonological and morphological awareness. To summarize, there were predictable group differences in the use of orthographic and phonological awareness, but no evidence of the use of morphological awareness was found. The data provides new evidence that bilingual children often approach spelling with different kinds of metalinguistic awareness. Moreover, the use of metalinguistic may be strongly influenced by their home language.
C. REVIEW
It is a very popular belief that the first language strongly influences the second language acquisition. The most obvious example that supports this belief comes from the ‘foreign’ accent in the second language speech of learners. When a Balinese speak English, her English sounds Balinese. Therefore, I believe that different language backgrounds give different influences to the second language acquisition. After I have read the first few paragraphs of this article, I became very interested to read it further. Why so? because my prior knowledge about bilingual phenomena is so limited. I have several questions in my mind, one of those for example, beside the accent, what else of the first language can influence the second language acquisition. However, long before I found this article I have actually had a thought that there are probably similar characteristics between two different languages (the native and the second language) that may enhance the learning of the second language. For example, the word order in Bahasa Indonesia for active sentences generally places the subject followed by the verb and its object. Such word order for active sentences is also applied in English. This, consequently enhances the English acquisition since the similarities ease the Indonesian learners to apply that particular concept of Bahasa Indonesia in English. In addition, I also believe that some distinction between the native and the second language may hinder the acquisition of the second language. For example, a Chinese girl who is exposed with Chinese words -which are morphosyllabic (one morpheme is one syllable)- may think a bisyllabic-monomorphemic English word (e.g. flower) as two morphemes, whereas it is not so. She may become more confused when she is then exposed with a bisyllabic-bimorphemic English word (e.g. handed) and are told that it is a word that has two morphemes while for her it ‘looks’ like a conjugation of two different words.
After having a close reading on the article, I see some points to be commented. The following paragraphs are my personal comments on the research methodology described in the article and my thought about the research implication to the academic society.
The linguistic transfer from the first language into English has already been proved by this research. It was found that language background strongly influences a kind of metalinguistic used to approach English spelling. The idea of using bilingual children who attend the same kindergarten as the subject of the research is really excellent, for this may reduce error in sampling. By attending the same kindergarten, and being exposed with the same length of formal English instruction, then home language is left to be the only factor that may cause the variable ability in spelling English. I do agree with the sampling technique that is used. However, I wonder if the number children of each LB group should be the same. Would it give a more accurate result? In this research the number of children of each LB group is different. They were 30 English-LB children, 21 Chinese-LB children and 29 Malay-LB children. If I can say, this is one thing that makes me feel in doubt about this research.
According to the previous research by Ehri and Wilce (1986), it was found that the /d/ errors on words with /t/ flaps decreased with age. This rationalizes why the researchers needed to find out whether the subjects of the research were not significantly different in age before further administrating the research. This teaches me a very good lesson to always test any variable to make the research more reliable.
Moreover, obviously the researchers play safe in categorizing the subjects into a particular LB group. In addition to the LBQ (Language Background questioner) administration as the self report data, the researchers also used the scores of the vocabulary test as a back-up data which then can be used as a comparison to the self-report data. This way the researchers reduce the possibility of putting the subjects into the wrong LB group.
The researchers had manipulated several language components such as word frequency, the number of syllable, the number of morpheme, and the type of words (flapped and unflapped), to investigate a kind of metalinguistic used to approach English spelling. First, the researcher manipulated flap type (/t/ or /d/) to look at phonological awareness. I think through analyzing the decision children make on /t/ and /d/ flapped words will show their phonological competency. This assumption comes from the idea that children who are exposed with English flapped words will hear /d/ sound for /t/ sound in flapped words. Second, to look at orthographic awareness the researchers manipulated the word frequency (high and low). I understand this since it can be assumed that the more exposure of printed English material (high frequency words) the more visual-spelling opportunity the children have. Third, to look at morphological awareness the researchers manipulated the number of morphemes (monomorphemic and bimorphemic) and the unflapped control words (one or two syllable). Through this manipulation, I think, researchers eventually can conclude whether children have developed morphological awareness or not.
Following the researchers’ ideas I think the researchers had done such an excellent job that If it was a play I would stand and give applause on the research design. I have never read a research report or article about a research that so well-comprised as this research. I can imagine that the researchers worked day and night to think about the way to reveal things that may answer their questions. And since I have very limited experiences on doing linguistic research, I have to admit that this research covered a huge scope. The researchers tried to reveal not only phonological awareness but also orthographic, morphological awareness and syllable awareness. I know to do this is not easy. The researchers had to analyze the data over and over from different view point which may reveal evidences on those metalinguistics awareness they tried to prove.
The result of the research suggested that home language enhance a particular metalinguistic (phonological and orthographic) awareness which then influences children early spelling in English. However the research showed no evidence for Morphological awareness. This leaves us questions (1) why children did not show any morphological awareness (2) Does morphological awareness is a metalinguistic which will later be developed after phonological and orthographic? I can’t contribute answers for those questions but I think the absence of morphological evidence probably deals with the combination practice of SCE (Singapore colloquial English) and SSE (Singapore Standard English). It has been described in the article that SCE contains of very limited affixation and SSE has the full range of affixes. Therefore, the exposure of non standard form of spoken English may likely moderate the children’s acquisition and use of morphological knowledge.
The research, I think, may contribute evidence of the influence of home language towards the metalinguistic awareness which is later used as an approach for English spelling. This, then may be a worth-noting for any education practitioner to develop a particular English spelling teaching method that may work accordingly with the metalinguistic awareness the children may use. To make it possible, I think further researches on spelling teaching method that works accordingly with particular metalinguistic awareness are needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment