Victoria A. Murphy, Department of Education, University of Oxford

Becoming literate in the majority language

Outline

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•  Theoretical Accounts of Reading Skill –  Simple View of Reading

•  Decoding skills in English and EAL learners

•  Comprehension skills English and EAL learners –  The role of vocabulary –  Different types of vocabulary knowledge are important

•  Theoretical Accounts of Writing Skill –  Simple View of Writing

•  Lower vs. higher-order writing skills in EAL pupils

•  Conclusions

EAL learners

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Who are they?

•  Home language that is not the same as the majority language of the society/governance/education –  Significant variability –  Variability in how bilingual they are and support for L1

•  UK has predominantly ethnic minority language learners (rather than regional) (De Bot & Gorter, 2005)

•  Despite the potential for advantages to bilingualism, ethnically/linguistically diverse pupils often perform in the bottom range in international achievement studies

PIRLS 2006

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OECD Family Database www.oecd.org/social/family/database OECD - Social Policy Division - Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs

4 Last updated 5/01/2012

Chart CO3.6.3 Student performance in reading scores at age 10 by immigrant background, PIRLS 2006

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Countries are ordered from left to right by decreasing order of the performance of children with both parents born in the country. 1) See note (1) for chart CO3.6.1. Source: PIRLS 2006.

Chart CO3.6.4 shows cross-country mean differences in mathematics scores among 10-year olds by parents’ country of origin. Similar to previous results, on average, performance in mathematics at fourth grade was lowest among students with neither parent born in the country, and highest among students with both parents born in the country (29 score-points difference between these groups). However, this was not the case in Australia, Canada and New Zealand where students with neither parent born in the country had mathematics scores similar to or higher than children with both parents born in the country of assessment.

Chart CO3.6.4 Student performance in mathematics scores at age 10 by immigrant background,

TIMSS 2007

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Countries are ordered from left to right by decreasing order of the performance of children with both parents born in the country. Source: TIMSS 2007.

Factors which influence academic performance

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•  Socio Economic Status (SES) •  Mother’s level of education •  Number of books in the home •  Proficiency in the majority language:-

–  Language underpins all learning (both within and without school)

–  Whiteside, Gooch & Norbury (2016):- when EAL pupils are matched on English language proficiency to nonEAL… EAL as good or better than nonEAL on social-emotional development measures and academic assessments at KS2 •  Weaker language proficiency, not EAL status, was a predictor of

academic achievement in Whiteside et al (2016). •  Associated with language proficiency is LITERACY – which

underpins academic achievement.

Sammons, Toth, Sylva, Melhuish, Siraj & Taggart, 2015

Theoretical accounts of Reading Development

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Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read

•  Gough & Tumner, 1986

•  R = D x C

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Printed Word Recognition Phoneme Awareness

•  Phonological Awareness:- the knowledge of the sound structure of a language, and the ability to analyse and manipulate those sound units

•  Used in reading, writing, listening and speaking •  Example:

–  How many sounds are in the word skip? –  Which of the following start with the same sound? ship,

fat, fox –  Which two words in the following end in the same

sound? made, hide, fade •  Children who are good at these tasks tend to have good

reading skills (Carroll, Snowling, Hulme & Stevenson, 2003) •  How this knowledge develops often depends on early

experiences with English – not having much exposure before schooling to the phonological structure of different English words can impact on the development of these skills

Printed word recognition

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Phonics

•  Phonics:- A method for teaching reading and writing of English which is aimed at developing children’s phonemic awareness.

•  Critical is Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Children learning to read English have to learn how to map the Phonemes (sounds) on to the Graphemes (orthography/spelling)

•  English is particularly challenging due to all the exceptions –  research has shown that in meta studies of children

learning to read across many different countries/languages, English speaking children learn to read English slower than in other countries/languages

Learning to read English is challenging…

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Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse I will keep you, Suzy, busy Make your head with heat grow dizzy Tear in eye, your dress will tear, So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain, (Mind the latter, how it’s written) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low…..

And it goes on and on and on!

An example

Phonics

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Evidence? •  Stuart (1999)

–  Longitudinal study comparing two educational interventions for inner-city five year olds in the UK, 86% were EAL

–  Each programme offered daily for 12 weeks by classroom teacher •  Jolly Phonics vs. Big Books

–  Jolly Phonics did better than Big Books on all measures of phonological awareness, and on four standardised measures of reading, on a self-concept scale and on an author recognition survey

–  Jolly Phonics children had higher reading and spelling age than children in holistic Big Books intervention

–  Stuart, 2004:- JP group still outperforming Big Books group 30 months later.

–  This study shows that explicit and systematic phonics instruction can have a greater impact than implicit shared-reading on the development of phonemic awareness

–  BUT, while phonics is necessary, it isn’t sufficient (Duff, Mengoni, Bailey & Snowling, 2015)

EAL learners tend not to have difficulties with reading accuracy

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•  Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel & Shanahan, 2008 –  Large-scale meta-analysis of reading research across

countries (The Netherlands, Canada, UK, USA) •  Comparable word reading and phonological skills between non EAL

and EAL •  Hutchinson, Whiteley, Smith & Connors, 2003

–  2 year longitudinal study in UK comparing EAL and nonEAL matched on age, nonverbal IQ and sex •  Comparable word reading skills •  Similar results in: Burgoyne, Kelly, Whiteley & Spooner 2009;

Burgoyne, Whiteley & Hutchinson, 2011

•  Summary:- large body of evidence showing decoding (single word reading accuracy) is an area of strength for EAL pupils.

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✔ ✔

Language Comprehension

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Vocabulary

•  We know vocabulary is a strong predictor of reading comprehension (e.g., Nation & Snowling, 2004; Cain et al., 2004; Roth et al., 2002)

•  We know children with EAL have less vocabulary knowledge (small vocabulary sizes) than NS children (e.g., Cameron, 2002; Mahon & Crutchely, 2006; Bialystok et al., 2010)

•  Children from ethnically/linguistically diverse backgrounds tend to underperform on vocabulary measures, and in turn have lower scores on reading comprehension. August & Shanahan, 2008; Burgoyne et al., 2009; Burgoyne et al., 2011; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders & Christian, 2006; Hutchinson et al., 2003; Lesaux et al., 2010; Melby-Lervåg & Lervåg, 2014; Verhoeven, 1990; Verhoeven & Vermeer, 2006

EAL Learners and Vocabulary

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(as well as L1 students) • EAL children score significantly below their age-matched EL1 peers on measures

of Expressive vocabulary breadth and Receptive vocabulary breadth

• The relationships between vocabulary breadth and comprehension are stronger for EAL than for EL1 children

• The relationship between expressive vocabulary breadth and reading comprehension is particularly strong for EAL children

(Beech & Keys, 1997; Burgoyne et al., 2009, 2011a, 2011b; Cameron, 2002; Hutchinson et al., 2003; Stuart, 2004).

Tester: (points to picture of a lighthouse) “What is this?” Child: “Lighthouse”

Tester: (points to four pictures, one of which shows a lighthouse) “Which of these shows a lighthouse” Child: points to the picture of a lighthouse

Vocabulary depth is also important in reading comprehension

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•  In our research, we have seen that multiword vocabulary phrases, idioms, collocations and metaphors are all important contributors to students’ reading comprehension skills (Martinez & Murphy, 2011; Smith &

Murphy, 2015; Kan & Murphy, in progress; Hessel & Murphy, in progress)

•  These findings suggest there is a place for focused, explicit vocabulary instruction, particularly as students may be unaware of some of these items

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✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

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DYSLEXIA NO PROBLEMS/IMPAIRMENT

MIXED DEFICIT SPECIFIC COMPREHENSION DEFICIT

Summary of Reading research

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•  Reading development:- –  Is multi-componential with the two key elements being

decoding, and language comprehension •  And where language proficiency, phonemic awareness, phonics,

vocabulary and reading comprehension skills all make up the overall construct of ‘Reading Ability’

–  Children who struggle with reading can have different profiles of strengths/weaknesses and it is therefore critically important to be able to target precisely where the student is struggling

–  Children who are good decoders, but weak comprehenders can often hide in classrooms/schools

–  Educational interventions either targeted at word analysis (phonics) and/or vocabulary (semantic knowledge) can have a positive impact on children’s overall reading skills

Simple View of Writing

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Berninger & Amtmann, 2003

Writing is the product of low-level transcription skills x high-level language processing x mental control processes W = T x LP x MCP

Reading and Writing are mutually supportive (Graham & Herbert, 2011) And also for EAL learners (Goodrich, Farrington & Lonigan, 2016)

Writing and EAL

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•  EAL learners can lag behind nonEAL on writing (Cameron & Besser 2004) –  EAL as much as 9 percentage points behind nonEAL, and make errors

on grammar and less likely to use complex syntax than nonEAL. •  Babayiğit (2015):- year 5 EAL (aged 10/11)

–  No differences between EAL and nonEAL on lower-level features such as handwriting and spelling

–  EAL lower than nonEAL on higher-level features such as holistic quality, organisation, vocabulary and compositional fluency

•  Similar pattern as with reading… no difference between EAL and nonEAL on lower-level features, but differences on higher-level.

Murphy, Kyriacou & Menon, 2015

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Profiling writing challenges in EAL learners

•  100 year 5 pupils (aged 9/10) with 48 EAL and 52 nonEAL •  No SEN, wide range of L1 •  Tested on a range of standardised language and literacy tests and writing

assessments (CELF, BPVS, BAS, WASI, LBQ) •  Experimental measures: WIAT II a standardized measure of reading,

language and numerical attainment. Only the spelling and written expression sub-tests were administered in this project to assess word-level and sentence-level skills

•  And Writing Ability Measure (WAM; Dunsmuir, Batuwitage, Hinson, Orr, O’Sullivan & Thomas, 2005) The WAM was used to assess children’s text-level skills and provided a more detailed picture of children’s writing. The WAM requires students to write a composition in response to a prompt such as “Imagine you could go anywhere you wanted on a school trip with your class and your teacher. Write about where you would go and what you would do”.

Murphy et al, 2015

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Chronological age-matched Results

•  for each of the different baseline tasks –  Receptive language score on the CELF; –  Expressive language score on the CELF, –  Language Age on the CELF, –  Receptive vocabulary (BPVS), –  Single word reading and Reading Comprehension (WIAT)]

•  the EAL children consistently scored significantly lower than the nonEAL children.

•  consistent with past research

Murphy et al, 2015

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Group differences on WAM Despite lower scores on their English language baseline assessments, EAL were not different from nonEAL on the linguistic features of the WAM (vocabulary and syntax) yet they had lower scores on those features of writing that involve organisation of paragraphs, writing cohesive text, extending themes, and being creative and imaginative with sufficiently developed ideas.1

Murphy et al, 2015

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Language Age Match Results

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This finding indicates that despite the fact that the children with EAL had lower scores on their English language baseline assessments, they were not different from the native-speaking children on the linguistic features of the WAM (vocabulary and syntax) yet they had lower scores on those features of writing that involve organisation of paragraphs, writing cohesive text, extending themes, and being creative and imaginative with sufficiently developed ideas. Language Age Match A smaller number of children with EAL could be matched to the native-speaking children on the CELF Language Age score (26 children with EAL relative to 42 native-speaking children). Interestingly, the Language Age match groups were no longer matched on the nonverbal IQ measure (WASI) as indicated in Figure 2. This finding suggests that only the most cognitively able children with EAL are likely to be matched to monolingual (ML) native-speaking children in terms of Language Age.

Nonetheless the native-speaking (ML) children still had higher scores on ‘organisation’ feature of the WAM - those aspects of writing that require greater cohesion of text, appropriate paragraphing and expanded themes. This difference is illustrated in Figure 3.

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Figure 1. Group differences on WAM between EAL and ML groups

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Figure 2. Group differences in non-verbal reasoning (WASI) A smaller number of children with EAL could be matched to the native-speaking children on the CELF Language Age score (26 children with EAL relative to 42 native-speaking children) Similar to Whiteside et al 2016?

Despite higher scores on nonverbal IQ, (and matched on English language age) – EAL still behind nonEAL on higher-level writing features

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In summary, the Phase 1 analysis revealed that in terms of baseline language ability, the children with EAL had lower scores than the native-speaking monolingual (ML) children. However, in the chronological age match analysis, they only differed on the writing assessment measure (WAM) on the more higher level features of writing (organisation and ideas). Fewer children with EAL were matched with the native-speaking children on Language Age, and these children had higher nonverbal IQ scores than the native speaking children. Nonetheless, the EAL children still had lower scores on organisational features of writing.

Results- Phase 2 In phase 2, the children were given another narrative writing task and an expository task to enable a comparison across genres. The available children to test in the study in phase 2 were matched on Language Age. Again, being matched on Language Age meant that the children with EAL had higher scores on the nonverbal IQ measure in phase 2. The only statistically significant group difference on the WAM was on the ‘spelling’ feature of the expository genre in favour of the children with EAL (see Figure 4).

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Figure 3. Group Differences in 'Organisation' within the WAM

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Figure 4. Phase 2: EAL outperform EL1 on expository spelling score

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Summary of Writing Research

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•  Similar findings as reading research •  Componential skills •  Contributions from cognitive, oral language, word and text-

level skills all play important roles •  EAL tend to be fine on lower level skills (decoding in reading;

handwriting and spelling in writing) but often struggle with higher-level skills (comprehension in reading; organisation/ideas in writing).

•  A significant predictor in both domains is vocabulary – development that we can support in the classroom

Educational Implications

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•  Murphy & Unthiah (2015):- educational interventions aimed at explicit teaching of vocabulary and word/text level skills can improve scores on English language and literacy measures

•  Interventions aimed at improving oral language (Dockrell, Stuart & King, 2010; Fricke & Millard, 2016) can be effective

•  Educational provision (e.g., Two-Way Immersion programmes) have been shown to be effective (in US) – suggests potential of supporting L1 for EAL pupils? –  More research needed on this in contexts like UK with high

levels of linguistic diversity

Conclusions

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•  Theoretical accounts and empirical research on both reading and writing have helped us identify that lower-level literacy skills in EAL learners tend to be an area of strength

•  BUT… higher-level skills are often an area of comparative weakness

•  Vocabulary knowledge implicated in both reading and writing •  We can support the development of vocabulary knowledge by

more explicit teaching of vocabulary in classrooms (shown to be effective from intervention studies)

•  Much work yet to be done:- role of L1, degree of bilingualism, most effective pedagogy, most effective CPD, etc.

•  Changes to Initial Teacher Education

•  Abolish the supremacy of the monolingual norm because it isn’t normal!!

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Thank You

Acknowledgements: EEF, Unbound Philanthropy, The Bell Foundation, ESRC, The Nuffield

Foundation, The R.E.A.L. Forum (http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/applied-linguistics/r-e-a-l/)

Applied Linguistics Research Group at OUDE