Writing Systems Research special issue

Adolescents and adults who develop literacy for the first time in an L2

Martha Young-Scholten (2015)

For entire volume: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/doSearch?AllField=Young-Scholten+&SeriesKey=pwsr20

Introduction

Who are adolescents and adults who develop literacy for the first time in an L2 and why are they of

research interest?

This special issue concerns a special population of second language learners: post-puberty second

language (L2) learners who are learning to read and write for the first time in their lives, in the second

language they are in the process of acquiring. They are among the roughly 781 million adult illiterates

worldwide (UNESCO 2014), and among those who emigrate from politically instable and/or

impoverished regions of the world to highly literate post-industrialised societies. Theirs is a unique

learning situation.

Children learning to read in their home language begin with a language they know. They know the

phonology, morphology and syntax of that language, and they know most if not all of the words they

come across in reading materials designed for them. Their linguistic competence confers a range of

advantages at the initial stages of reading. They are able to develop metalinguistic knowledge and

skills to facilitate learning to read based on their linguistic competence. Attempts to guess words can

be based on predictions of the next consonant in a cluster or of a possible word following a transitive

verb. Much has been written about children’s reading development. Much has also been written

about the development of reading by second language learners, including those learning to read in a

writing system different from their native language (Koda 2005). The older learners studied are

invariably educated and can already read and write in their native language. The younger learners

studied may be foreign language learners in school or immigrant children who, like their older

siblings and parents, need to learn to read in a language different from their home language. Here,

too, there is a good amount of research (e.g. Gersten & Geva 2003; Grigorenko & Takanishi 2009).

Older un-educated and low-educated L2 learners have long been neglected by researchers despite the

fact that more now fit the profile of the uninstructed migrant workers in northern Europe who in the

1970s and 1980s attracted considerable research attention (see Young-Scholten 2013). The amount of

research on the language and literacy development of older non-/low-educated L2 learners is

surprisingly small. Increased basic research on both the internal and external factors which correlate

with language and literacy success for these severely disadvantaged adults would yield evidence on

which to base arguments for the improved educational provision urgently needed in many countries in

the post-compulsory schooling sector (Simpson and Whiteside 2014).

The handful of existing studies on these learners indicates that with respect to linguistic competence

(e.g. morphosyntax), older literate and non-literate L2 learners may differ (Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen

2009), and that it can take far longer for those who start without native language literacy to reach the

same levels in their L2 as those who start with some literacy (Young-Scholten & Strom 2006).

However, their early reading development, including pre-reading phonological awareness, turns out to

be similar to young children’s, thus indicating that there is no critical period for learning to read. In

one of the first large-scale studies of low-educated adults, Condelli, Wrigley, Yoo, Seburn & Cronen

identified social factors which correlated with rate of reading development. Their findings,

corroborated in Kurvers’ work on low-educated adults in the Netherlands (reported on in this special

issue), underscore the importance of including social context in any such studies.

The simultaneous challenge of mastering oral language and literacy seems like an insurmountable

task. How can one possibly learn to read for the first time in one’s life in a language one barely

knows? The four papers in this special issue illustrate that the task is not insurmountable. The four

papers in this special issue represent the state-of-the-art of reading research on this population, in the

context of a decade of support by of a group of like-minded researchers.1 The papers report on reading

in three countries and three target languages: English, Finnish and Dutch. Research on these learners

has not yet progressed to comparative studies of learners from the same native language backgrounds

learning to read in target languages which differ linguistically and orthographically; such research

must await future researchers and future special issues.

The situation of learners in these three and in additional countries does not differ considerably.

Resettlement programmes, the asylum seeking process and migration of undocumented individuals

have led to increasing numbers of older low-educated L2 learners in traditional recipient countries

such as the USA and UK and as well as in countries such as Italy and Spain. Apart from chain

migration from former colonies (Bangladesh and Pakistan to the UK) or established migrant worker

programmes (Turkey and Morocco to northern Europe) and cross-border migration (Central America

to the USA), the demographics of these learners are highly similar: they hail from the worst trouble

spots on the globe. Somalia has been one such trouble spot, and due to the operation of refugee

resettlement programmes in the USA, this country, and Minnesota in particular, has welcomed

considerably more Somalis than elsewhere in the world (see e.g. Bigelow’s Mogadishu on the

Mississippi, 2010). The size of the Minneapolis Somali population and existence of a thriving applied

linguistics programme at the University of Minnesota have led to a high level of research activity and

to not one, but two contributions from Minnesota in this special issue.

The first paper in the special issue, by Bigelow and King, addresses the question of how native

language literacy, even when the individual is not literate, exerts a powerful socio-political influence

alongside target language literacy. Bigelow and King’s contribution is a fascinating account of how

the presence of Somali writing is played out in the secondary school classroom, in individuals’

interactions with their Somali peers and with their non-Somali teacher. The second paper is also on

immigrants from the Horn of Africa. In their paper, Pettitt and Tarone report on a longitudinal study

of a 29-year-old from Ethiopia whose literacy development was tracked alongside his oral language

acquisition. Like many sub-Saharan Africans, he was orally proficient in more than his native

language; in fact English was his seventh language. Rich, mixed-methods data do not clearly show the

parallel literacy and oral language development the authors predict. Importantly, his gains are revealed

to be task dependent.

Tammelin-Laine and Martin’s contribution is similar to Pettitt and Tarone’s: it reports on a

longitudinal study, but this time of five female learners, and of Finnish rather than English. Finnish

and English are at two ends of the orthographic transparency spectrum; English is the most opaque or

deep of all orthographies in the Roman alphabet, while Finnish the most transparent or shallowest

(Frost & Katz 1992). Their study reveals the importance of linguistic competence where, despite the

simplicity of Finnish orthography, these five women are held back due to their insufficient

vocabulary, which the authors connect to the highly complex morphology of Finnish.

The final paper in the special issue showcases Kurvers’ ground-breaking contributions to research on

low-educated immigrants. The first studies Kurvers and her colleagues carried out in the early 2000s

were only published in Dutch. This body of work only became accessible to outsiders with the

establishment of the LESLLA forum in 2005. The three studies Kurvers reports on vary in type, from

case studies to a large-scale study of several hundred children and adults. Results from the three

studies converge on an important point with which to end the special issue: these L2 learners are a

special population, but they are not different from others. They have the capacity to develop levels of

literacy and linguistic competence in their second language to enable their participation in the

1 The Low-educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition group started a forum in 2005 for researchers,

practitioners and policy makers to share findings and ideas. For a decade, LESLLA has held an annual symposium, alternating venues between English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries, publishes proceedings and hosts a website: http://www.leslla.org/ The term ‘low-educated’ covers those who have had no formal schooling whatsoever and those who have had some primary schooling which has, however, not resulted in any literacy in their home or other language.

economic and social life of their new communities. This special issue is thus a call to policy makers to

support Article 26 of the Declaration of Human Rights that “Everyone has the right to free, basic

education” by ensuring that sufficient high-quality instruction is accessible and available.

References

Bigelow, M. 2010. Mogadishu on the Mississippi: Language, Racialized Identity, and Education in a

New Land. Oxford: Wiley.

Condelli, L., H. Spruck Wrigley, K. Yoo, M. Seburn & S. Cronen. 2003. What Works. Study for

Adult ESL Literacy Students. Volume II: Final Report. American Institutes for Research and

Aguirre International. Washington, DC: US Department of Education.

Gersten, R. and Geva, E. 2003. Teaching reading to English learners in the primary grades: Insights into the

New Research Base on Teaching Reading to English Learners. Educational Leadership, 60, Spring,

44-49.

Grigorenko, E. L. and Takanishi, R. 2009. Immigration, Diversity and Education. London:

Routledge.

Frost, R. and Katz, L. (eds.) 1992. Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning. Amsterdam:

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Koda, K. 2005. Insights into Second Language Reading: A Cross-linguistic Approach. Cambridge, CUP.

Simpson, J. and Whiteside, A. 2015. Adult Language Education and Migration: Challenging Agendas

in Policy and Practice. London: Routledge.

Tarone, E., M. Bigelow and K. Hansen. 2009. Literacy and Second Language Oracy. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Young-Scholten. 2013. Low-educated immigrants and the social relevance of second language

acquisition research. Second Language Research 29: 441.454.

Young-Scholten, M. and N. Strom. 2006. First-time L2 readers: Is there a critical period? In J.

Kurvers, I. van de Craats and M. Young-Scholten (eds.) Low Educated Adult Second

Language and Literacy Acquisition. Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference. Utrecht:

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