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In this book review, I will discuss the academic monograph Teaching of National Languages in the V4 countries edited by M. Pieniążek & S. Štěpáník (2016). The review discusses the value and quality of the book, and at the same time tries to identify issues in L1 education that can be of interest to readers outside the Central European context. In reviewing the monograph, I will attempt to illustrate that many of the issues that the V4 countries are dealing with are in fact of a more universal nature. In doing so, I argue that the book may be seen as a good starting point for a detailed international comparison of L1 curricula and the challenges associated with them.
Recent studies have yielded contradictory results regarding how reading from print or from the screen influences reading comprehension. This study examined 12-year-old students' (N = 142) reading comprehension using printed text and digital text. The results indicated that performance was similar for printed text and digital text, even when gender, decoding skills, preference for school tasks on paper, screen, or both, and self-concept as a reader and computer user were controlled for. Regardless of the reading medium, students with better decoding skills and a higher self-concept as a reader performed better, boys outperformed girls, and students equally willing to study with books and computers outperformed students who preferred computers. The results of this study highlight the benefits of flexible use of both printed texts and digital texts for reading comprehension. As students are getting as used to studying via computers as they are to studying from books, the emphasis on the medium of studying seems to become less important. The topic of this study is of great relevance in a modern school context where ICT use has become a part of daily schoolwork worldwide.
This paper analyses how English-medium policy in schools silences children's power of self-expression in Pakistan, and how linguistic deficiencies and disadvantages in school language minimize their potential for meaningful cognitive/academic engagement. The study focuses on the degree of inclusion children enjoy linguistically, culturally, emotionally and cognitively. Conducted within 11 low-fee English-medium schools, it uses multiple data sources such as a questionnaire survey, interviews and non-participant observations. Theoretically, it draws on Jim Cummins' (2000) concepts of 'coercive relations of power/collaborative relations of power' to illustrate how educators as powerful individuals exercise coercive powers to glorify English-only policy, legitimize and normalize erroneous assumptions about students' linguistic/cultural resources. We also find that theoretically inspired by foreign concepts of TESOL/EFL/ESL, educators explicitly devalue and abandon children's native languages as pedagogical resources in English teaching. Pedagogically, being deficient in the English language, English-only policy excludes children from maximum cognitive/academic engagement as they are coerced to rely on copying, and rote memorization during reading, writing and examination. Towards the end, the study calls for a paradigm shift and proposes educators to create collaborative relations of power that affirms children's identities, and invests on their languages/cultures as valuable pedagogical resources. This could make education more participatory, liberatory and empowering.
Students' productive work constitutes an essential part of the various learning activities students are involved in while in school. However, empirical research on students' productive work in schools is quite sparse, and thus, we only know little about what kind of products the students make in different subjects, and how they relate to learning. This article presents a mixed methods study on students' productive work in the subjects L1, science and mathematics in primary and lower secondary school in Denmark. The article focus in particular on multimodality as an aspect of students' productive work since this aspect encapsulates a number of the main findings of the study. By combining a quantitative scoring of a large sample of tasks and student products (n = 451) and qualitative classroom studies in L1, science and mathematics, the mixed methods study provides a picture of the practices related to students' productive work in Danish schools. This picture shows, on the one hand, that there is obvious potential related to students' multimodal productive work, and, on the other hand, that this potential is difficult to fulfil due to a number of barriers indicating the prominence of conventional approaches to students' productive work in Danish classrooms.
The reading level of Arab students in Israel is a source of concern for educators and scholars. Arabic is a diglossic language: there are significant linguistic differences between spoken and standard Arabic. Research reports that diglossia affects students' reading literacy in Arabic. The aim of the present study was to examine how teachers conceptualize the difficulties they encounter while teaching reading, and their perceptions of the factors causing reading difficulties in Arabic. Interviews were carried out with 20 1st grade teachers engaged in the teaching of reading. Content analysis of the data showed that teachers described differently difficulties which are related to the characteristics of Arabic and those related to personal or contextual factors. They ascribed a great importance to letter-sound recognition in the preparation of the young students in kindergartens and stressed the significance of an ongoing practice at home as a channel to master reading literacy in Arabic.
This study examines the use of Seychelles Creole (hereafter, Kreol Seselwa), and English as languages for testing knowledge in the Social Studies classroom of the Seychelles. The objective of the study was to ascertain whether the languages used in the test affected the pupils' academic performance. The paper is theoretically influenced by the Social Practice approach to writing (Street, 1984), challenging a monolingual (autonomous) approach in favour of a more multilingual (ideological) model which takes into account all the learners' language repertoires. A within groups experimental design was implemented, and 151 primary six pupils (11-12 years) from three different schools wrote a short test, in a counterbalanced design, in two languages. The topic of the test was fishing, mostly local contextual knowledge, taught in English. The tests were marked for content in both languages. The results showed that the scores on both languages highly correlated, indicating that both tests captured the same knowledge constructs. However, pupils achieved significantly higher marks in the tests written in Kreol Seselwa than in English. The study has implications for policymakers, teachers and most importantly learners in other multilingual settings, particularly in post-colonial countries like the Seychelles, where the mother tongue is undervalued in the classroom.
The pedagogic rationale for welcoming literature in multiple learning settings lies in the claim that it is conducive to language learning. Language and literature are mutually supporting experiences. In fact, sufficiently sophisticated grasp of language is witnessed when literature is introduced in language study. Language is an input-rich source for coming to good terms with knowledge of language structures, reading proficiency, enriched vocabulary, improving skill in the target language, thinking skills, and cultural awareness. To put the matter at its most basic, language learners can accrue quite tangible benefits from exposure to literature. The core premise of using literature is that it provides clear advantages for learners to perceive the characteristics of target structures in contexts. Both preliminary and final survey questionnaires included the same questions for revealing learners' experiences in relation to literature and its potential contributions to language development. Initial and final responses of the students were compared to each other to determine whether the study of literary texts provided them an occasion to make noticeable gains regarding language proficiency development. A large majority of the survey participants indicated vested interest in the inclusion of literature in language teaching owing to its effectiveness as a valuable tool on augmentation of language learning.
Using the accurate relative pronoun (RP) in a formal writing task presents challenges for writers since they seem to be influenced by forms used in the popular oral variety of French which are far from the linguistic norm (Blanche-Benveniste, 2010). Studies describing the teaching of the relative clause (RC) in the secondary classroom have highlighted the problems encountered by students not only with handling this grammatical object, but also with using their grammatical knowledge in revising their text (Dolz & Schneuwly, 2009). However, to our knowledge, no study has yet been conducted to conceive and test an intervention for teaching RCs in French L1 classes. Based on theoretical and empirical work converging toward the fostering of sustained verbal interactions throughout grammatical and revision instruction, a series of lessons was implemented with 52 grade nine students enrolled in a French course (Montreal, Canada). Pretest and posttest texts were analysed in terms of RC frequency, usage and accuracy. While no difference was found in the general frequency of RCs, results show a significant increase in the use of complex RPs. Students, especially the weaker ones, also make significantly fewer mistakes overall on RPs and also on complex RPs. These results could indicate that certain structures associated with complexity and formal register are used more frequently and more accurately during written production after our intervention. Our results contribute to the ongoing discussion on the complementarity between direct grammar instruction and writing and revision instruction and their positive impact on students' syntactic constructions in texts.
Discourse―yes, Grammar―no: Influence of Arabic mother tongue on Arab students' writing in Hebrew
(2018)
Learning Hebrew among L1 Arabic speakers in East Jerusalem, Israel, has gained momentum, since being fluent in the language of the majority contributes to socioeconomic mobility and inclusion.
One of the main challenges L2 learners face is writing, specifically expository and argumentative composition. Writing products of native speakers of Arabic (L1) in Hebrew (L2) reveal cross-linguistic influences, including language transfer from L1. This L1 interference is strengthened by the strong resemblance of these two Semitic languages, and is manifested in morphology, syntax, vocabulary, semantics, and rhetorical structures.
In this study we examine changes in the expository-argumentative writing in Hebrew (L2) of Arabic speaking students who participated in an intensive Hebrew learning program. We used qualitative textual analysis based on 52 writing products [26 pre-, 26 post-tests]. Our research questions were: 1. What are the main characteristics of Arabic speaking students' writing in Hebrew? 2. What types of changes are evident in their writing samples after completing two years of Hebrew study?
In order to characterize their writing, study participants completed pre- and post-tests. Our findings suggest: (a) a strong interference of Arabic, on writing in Hebrew in different language fields: (b) a noticeable improvement in discourse, but much less in grammar, and in lexicon – mixed results.
In this paper, we aim to explore and exemplify what opportunities to develop disciplinary reading literacy students are given access to in particular types of classroom reading environments in social science subjects. The investigation focuses on how the teacher organizes activities around reading, on what content is approached in text-related discussions and on whose perspectives are allowed space in the classroom discourse. The empirical data consists of classroom observations from two classes in year five and two classes in the Swedish upper secondary school, using different approaches to teaching reading, one being Reading to Learn. With a theoretical base in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), dialogism and reception theory, the classroom discourse was analysed in terms of sequential reading stages, text movability and dialogicality. The findings reveal how differently organized reading environments provide different support structures for students' disciplinary reading. For example, the findings indicate that text activities that support the reading process in several stages bring about a larger potential for the development of reading literacy. However, the picture changes depending on to what extent students are given room to express their reception of the text, and thereby contribute to an active understanding of text in a dialogical classroom.