Charmian reminded that us that in India many children learn to read and write in three different languages and three different scripts before they are 7 without any problems. Children in nurseries i.e. 3-4 are aware of different scripts used at home and are interested in them.  They were even more interested when examples of those scripts were brought into nursery and talked about there.  Children are particularly interested in real life writing e.g. shopping lists, letters, crosswords, subtitles rather than exercises in books.

From the study, Charmian’s findings were that:

1. Children can compare different writing systems and compare how they work
2. Learning two systems developed childrens’ skills – visual skills i.e. noticing differences but also the different pencil control abilities need to write different scripts
3. Biliterate children live in simultaneous worlds.

 She gave practical examples of each of these

• The Chinese speaking children could produce pages of extremely accurate and extremely detailed characters using six or more strokes at precise angles and precise curves (very surprising compared to the standard of writing produced by most monolingual children of this age).
  
  Any form of writing includes learning shared skills e.g. decoding, noticing differences and children benefit from the additional input on this.
  

Arabic speaking 5 year old children not only knew that Arabic books start at what would be the end of an English book, but knew that their English classmates would not know and would need to have this explained.

When she gave a Spanish speaking child wooden letters and asked her to sort them, the child asked if she wanted them “a, b, c, d, e ..” (English system) or “a, e, i, o, u” (Spanish system).

The Arabic speaking children insisted that the monolingual children wrote in the right direction – even if the writing they produced looked ok otherwise.

The children could explain in English to their classmates, things that they had been told in e.g. Spanish at the Spanish language school, showing that they had understood it.


• Children would write in both languages e.g. a comment in Chinese and English on a picture – not necessarily a direct translation.
  
  Children would use both systems if they did not know how to write what they wanted to in one system.

 

We have bought Charmian’s book “Becoming Biliterate” and members can borrow it – contact Valerie or Cedric.

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