Assignment 8.2: Basic Literacy

Identification of Language Learner with Literacy Needs

The subject of this assignment is Abdus Shahid, a 35-year-old pre-Entry learner from Bangladesh. He has lived in the UK for ten years and has studied ESOL at South Tyneside College for around nine months. Although Abdus’s speaking skills are of upper-E1 level, his initial assessment showed up basic literacy needs in both writing and reading. In his general classes, he has been concentrating on reading short texts about jobs and families.

Learner Profile: Background and Contexts

Abdus attended a religious school in Bangladesh where he was taught to read and write in Bengali and Arabic. Raised in a rural part of the country, he had never studied English prior to arriving in the UK. As part of his job in a takeaway restaurant, Abdus is required to speak English when taking orders from customers and communicating with kitchen staff. However, his work does not require a high level of literacy: brief notes (such as Ch Tka for chicken tikka) are usually sufficient. His spoken responses, though not always grammatically accurate, are effective for communication on a wide number of topics, from his childhood to recent DIY problems.

Abdus has considerable problems with the written form of English. Although he is able to form upper and lower case letters, he is uncertain about their use. This is partly due to the influence of his first language, in which capital letters are not distinguished (Swan, 2001) and partly, perhaps, through lack of familiarity: his children, schooled in Britain, do most of his writing at home. Problems identified by the learner included writing addresses, spelling common words like the name of his street, and knowing when to use upper case letters.

Diagnostic Assessment (Appendix 1)

After a brief oral interview in which some basic personal details were elicited, Abus was shown the My name is Mohammed Topal text (Appendix 1.1) and asked to read through silently. He successfully answered four of the five comprehension questions. His response of Elif to the question What’s his name? may have been caused by initial unfamiliarity with the proper noun, as he was later able to extract the correct answer when asked to find Mohammed’s wife’s name. He was unable to recognise the number of sentences in the text (answering 27) and, though able to pick out upper case letters by sight, he couldn’t give any reasons for their usage other than in a person’s name. Asked to point to words in the next, Abus was able to locate factory in addition to short high-frequency words (name, married, children), indicating some awareness of sound-letter correspondence. When subsequently reading the text aloud, Abdus struggled with contracted forms – pronouncing I’ve /aɪvi:/ and omitting the possessive s in my wife’s name – and mispronounced live (/ laɪv /), suggesting a use of logographic rather than alphabetic reading strategies. (Uta Frith,1985). In common with many speakers of the mainly phonemic South Indian languages, Abdus is often over-faithful to written forms, hence the full pronunciation of the –ed ending in lived. (Swan, 2001)

In the next stage, I elicited the word signs and asked Abdus to match common visual signs with their written equivalents, which he managed to complete without any difficulty.

Abdus identified the birthday card and predicted a limited number of expressions common to the genre (lots of love). His reading of cursive script was generally sound, and his slight difficulties could be attributed to lack of clarity in the handwriting. Similarly, when shown the calendar, Abdus quickly and confidently found the month, date (given as an ordinal number) and day of his birthday.

In the final stage, Abdus was given a simple form to fill in and then asked to write a sentence. Although he was able to fill in the sections appropriately, his writing showed a number of spelling mistakes – Suht Shiil for South Shields; Tny for Tyne; Rod for Road. In writing the sentence, Abdus wrote in the middle of the line and, possibly influenced by the example in the form, used only upper case.

Areas for Development (Agreed with Learner)

Compose a simple text, spelling key words correctly (Ww/E1.1; Wt/E1.1); Punctuate a simple sentence with a capital letter and full stop (Ws/E1.1; Ws/E1.2); Use a capital letter for the personal pronoun I (Ws.E1.3); Learn strategies for decoding simple, regular words (Rw/E1.2; Ww.E1.3)

Design and Deliver Lessons for the Learner

Composing a Simple Text (Appendix 2)

Following a brief introduction to raise interest in the topic, I asked Abdus to predict what kind of information he would expect to find in a text about one of my friends and noted down his guesses as questions. Abdus read the text to find the answers and was then asked to count the number of sentences. This led into an eliciting of the use of upper case letters to begin a sentence and, after some prompting, he was able to recognise the lack of upper case letters in the text. After demonstrating the task with the opening line, and differentiating the first paragraph by noting down the number of errors in each line, Abdus started underlining letters that should have been written in upper case.

After providing feedback, during which Abdus was asked to justify his choices, the learner wrote out the upper case letters above the lines, while I monitored the sizing and formation. We then returned to the use of upper case letters, elicited by references to the text and examples on the board, after which we read through some basic rules together.

In the controlled practice stage, I handed out sentences and asked Abdus to correct the mistakes. Before writing, he was asked to give reasons for his choices. We then found similar examples of upper case usage in the initial text.

Abdus wrote out a brief text on lined paper. At this stage I monitored without assisting. Abdus made an error in the second paragraph, which he self-corrected. His spacing was slightly erratic but he made a noticeable effort to write on the lines of the paper ensure his upper case letters were larger in size.

Finally, we focused on some basic sound-spelling rules, eliciting other words with the /ɑ:/ sound matched to –ar spelling and /əʊ/ to –oa.

Language Experience (Appendix 3)

The model of the lesson followed that suggested by Spiegel and Sunderland (Teaching Basic Literacy, 2006). After introducing the topic by asking Abdus how long he’d lived in South Shields and identifying some local landmarks through pictures in a tourist guide, we composed a text together describing why Abdus liked living in the town. Abdus then read the text aloud. He initially found it difficult to pronounce there, which I dealt with by drilling. He was asked to identify specific the number of sentences, capital letters and full stops.

I then cut the text up into four separate sentences and asked Abus to put them back in order. He managed to do this easily, then read the text aloud for a second time. Cutting the first sentence up into individual words, I asked Abdus to reconstruct it. He moved on to reconstructing the two subsequent sentences, starting by placing the full stops at one end and words beginning with upper case letters at the other. He finished by reading the text aloud one final time.

Abdus was then asked to copy out the text on lined paper. As he was copying the spelling and capitalization directly from the cut-up text, I monitored the size, spacing and positioning of the words. Although all three were slightly erratic, his writing showed an improvement from the sample in his diagnostic test. In particular, his writing was noticeably faster.

Evaluation of Lessons

The first lesson achieved its aims of enabling Abdus to write a simple text spelling familiar words correctly. The lesson was appropriately paced and was challenging without being de-motivating for the learner. The lead-in could have been improved by more patient eliciting – Abdus got slightly off topic with his answers and I fed-in more language that I had originally intended.

Unfortunately, the text in the language experience lesson failed to give Abdus a real sense of ownership, mainly due to the fact that I rushed the introduction and therefore did not make the text truly meaningful or relevant to the learner (Spiegel and Sunderland, 2006). Despite this, Abdus was motivated by the text reconstruction process (particularly its kinesthetic aspect) and was clearly using strategies picked up in the first lesson: placing words starting with upper case letters at one end and full stops at the other before commencing work on the rest of the sentence. Although the copying of the text provided practice in sizing capital letters and writing with appropriate spacing, owing to the reasons above it felt too similar to the final exercise of the first lesson.

By the end of the two lessons, Abdus’s writing was noticeably quicker, and he was able to self-correct an erroneous use of the upper case in I’m. His feedback – “I understand more now. I need more practice later” – was positive and, as a result, we arranged a further lesson for a later date.

In future, Abdus needs to continue learning sound-spelling strategies, increase his exposure to written texts (which will enable him to move onto a more orthographic acquisition of lexis (Frith)), and practise writing on lined paper, paying attention to his use of sentences and the differentiation of upper and lower case letters in both size and positioning.

Areas for Development: Personal and within Institution

Institutionally, I believe there is a need for specialist literacy classes as part of the ESOL provision at South Tyneside College. Presently, students such as Abdus with spiky profiles are placed in pre-Entry classes alongside students who have only basic oral ability. As a result, Abdus feels his classes are “too easy” whilst simultaneously repeating the same fossilized errors when asked to produce a written text. Further to this, I feel a specialised diagnostic assessment should be created for students who display strong oral but weak literacy skills, incorporating student needs and enabling specific diagnosis of literacy requirements mapped to all relevant areas of the core curriculum.

Personally, I feel my knowledge of basic literacy – a subject I knew almost nothing about before starting this assignment – has improved a great deal. In the past, I was prone to using bottom-up approaches, presenting sounds in isolation without developing meaningful contexts. The personalized format of the Language Experience lesson is something I would particularly like to use in future classroom practice. To further my experience of this and other aspects of basic literacy, I have agreed to give Abdus lessons dedicated to filling in forms and the use of spelling strategies. Ultimately, I would be interested in taking a Literacy Subject Specialist Certificate.

Bibliography

Spiegel, M. and Sunderland, H. (2006). Teaching Basic Literacy to ESOL Learners. London, L.L.U.
Swan, M. and Smith B. (2001) Learner English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Frith, U. (1985) Beneath the Surface of Developmental Dyslexia. In Patterson, K.E. Marshall, J.C. and Coltheart, M (Eds) Surface Dyslexia: neurophyscological and cognitive studies of phonological reading. London. Laurence Erlbaum Associates.
Wikipedia entry on Bengali:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language#Writing_system

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