Chapter 4: Reading and the Bilingual Student:

Fact and Friction

This chapter is one of the longest in the book, but with the least usefulness to me. From the subhead you can gather that it's about controversy - the controversy of "phonics" over "whole language." Cummins' general conclusion, through many pages of text, is that both are important - phonics initially to help the student "decode" the written word, and then as soon as possible reading, which doesn't have to be all "decodable text." This applies for both the L1 and the L2. However, if students have already learned to read in one language, they have a cognitive context for learning to read much more quickly in the second language.

Once students get the gist of reading, they can also guess the words in between. I observed this with my bilingual daughter, who was exposed to books - both Danish and English - all her early childhood, but who really broke the reading barrier after starting first grade - in Danish. The following summer, when we visited my parents, who had collected a lot of children's books for the grandchildren, my daughter picked up a Dr. Seuss book with a reading emphasis on the difficult ough words. Even though she had never been taught to distinguish the different sounds of this letter combination, she read the book fluently with correct pronunciation.

Cummins constantly repeats that the job of the teacher is to "support ELL students [I would say, all students!] in developing strong reading skills, because reading is the primary way in which students get access to academic language." (Cummins, p. 85) Reading, of course, is not enough if the students don't actually comprehend what they are reading, so we have to work with them on comprehension skills as well, although just doing a lot of reading is the major issue.

Simply put, books are the only place where students get access to the low frequency Graeco-Latin lexicon of English. It follows that a diet of engaging books works much better than a diet of worksheets and drills in developing reading, comprehension and academic language.
(Cummins, p. 87)

Cummins goes on with a quick review of how people acquire a second language. The most important issue is that a learner must be presented with sufficiently comprehensible input, a term that was introduced by Stephen Krashen in his 1981 book, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, now available online. Reviewing Krashen's discussion, Cummins writes:

Exposure by itself is not enough - it must be exposure that learners can understand [i.e. be comprehensible input.] Furthermore, the input should contain structures that are a little beyond what the learner already knows [for otherwise the learner isn't learning anything new - about language at any rate.] Despite the presence of "unknown" words and/or structures, learners can utilize context, extra-linguistic information, and their knowledge of the world to understand the meaning.
(Cummins, p. 88, with my comments in brackets)

This is confirmed with the observations of my daughter mentioned above, and my own learning experience of German described in the previous blog post.

Cummins goes further to ask how we can get bilingual students to invest in their learning process, to activate their language through speaking and writing, "so that they come to see themselves as powerful users of language with additional insights about language and its potential in comparison to monolingual students." (Cummins, p. 89, my emphasis) This, I think, is a crucial reason to emphasize bilingualism, that the students gain a knowledge about culture that is more fully developed because they are cognizant of the similarities and differences between the two languages and cultures. If they are taught that their own language and culture are inferior, they lose the cognitive background to contrast and compare. Later he writes that "the fuel that drives the development of reading competence is the extent to which students are enabled to invest their identities fully in the process of becoming powerfully literate." (Cummins, p. 91, my emphasis.) If they lose part of their identity, they can no longer use it to interpret the world (or their reading.)

In a long section called Decoding, Cummins reaches the conclusion that phonetic awareness is necessary to start decoding written language (in other words, reading), but it is not necessary to get into all the details that pure phonetics advocates impart to unsuspecting students. As my daughter clearly demonstrated with the ough words, she was ready to take on such challenges with her Danish reading skill and her knowledge of English. Obviously some students may gain an advantage with more formal training in decoding, but most students will learn much faster with challenging original texts. On the other hand, students who have been immersed in a literate background in the home (no matter what language) have an advantage that we teachers must offer all the students in class.

In a section on Reading Comprehension, Cummins (p. 110) lists two emphases that improve comprehension:

• focus on extensive reading and writing for self-expression
• development of explicit awareness of how language works [discrete language skills]

Academic language includes structures (like the passive voice) and vocabulary that are rarely found in conversational language. High frequency words used in conversation are primarily of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the more high-frequency academic vocabulary tends to be Graeco-Latin.

This is of course an advantage to students with languages of European, particularly Romance, roots, like Spanish, because they have a very similar academic vocabulary. I assume that non-European languages, like the languages of Asia, do not use the Graeco-Latin vocabulary, which presents a greater challenge to these students.

Of course each academic field has its own specialized jargon, which must be learned in connection with the concepts of that field. Besides these three types of vocabulary, English has an enormous trove of extremely low-frequency words, which speakers learn through their reading in particular. One study (by Laufer in 1992) determined that "[w}hen the proportion of words in a text known by the reader falls below [a] 95% threshold, the possibility of inferring the unknown words decreases significantly." (Cummins, p. 114)

As a teacher of secondary mathematics, I can expect that my ELL students may have already been exposed to the mathematical vocabulary that their English-speaking peers have learned if they have had good school experiences in their home country. I plan to provide textbooks in some of the students' home languages if they are available, so that they can continue their bilingualism in academic language.