Here is Columbus Ohio, we have a large population of Somalis and also Ethiopians and others with little or no literacy in their first language nor in English.  Ideally, preliterate learners should be in a separate class with an experienced teacher. However this doesn't always happen and they are often put in the same level one class with literate (and sometimes highly literate) students.  
 

>From a practical teaching stance, I have found that the textbooks for low literacy students move far too quickly.  When I taught pre and low literate students, I used my own materials - lots of visuals, colorful flashcards, movement, chants and so on.  I planned lessons with lots of repetition and recycled concepts over and over in subsequent lessons.  Since the students couldn't write notes to help them remember new vocab, they needed to review the material over and over. Each lesson covered just a few concepts - a couple of letters (names and sounds), a couple of sight words, a few vocab words around a theme (body parts, days of the week, community places etc), and some useful phrases.  The students I worked with developed oral skills more quickly as they had an oral tradition.  I used a combo of whole word and phonics.  Students could remember whole words with sufficient exposure.  But they need phonics too.  I focused on things like

 filling out forms, and reading signs.
 
It was a slow process but there were many successes.  Students got jobs. Some became citizens.  Some dropped out but came back a year or more later and continued their studies.  It was rewarding and fun to teach this level.  
 
Jill Kramer
Columbus Literacy Council

--- On Mon, 1/26/09, Elaine Tarone <etarone at umn.edu> wrote:

From: Elaine Tarone <etarone at umn.edu>
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3590] Re: Working withlearners with limitedliteracy - posted for Martha Bigelow
To: "The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List" <englishlanguage at nifl.gov>
Date: Monday, January 26, 2009, 7:59 PM



Learning a first language as a child is a very different process from learning a second language as an adult.  An obvious difference is the influence of the native language on the adult's second language, something that doesn't occur in first language acquisition. And, children acquiring a first language have at least 4 years to listen to and speak their first language before they have to start reading and writing it.  Immigrant adults with major funding deadlines do not have that luxury; they have to learn to read and write at the same time they are learning the oral second language.  And *if* they don't already know how to read their native language using an alphabetic script, then their learning process has to be very very different from that of literate adults acquiring a second language.

Most ESL teachers  probably learned to represent the phonemes of their native language with visual symbols ('letters') so long ago that they no longer remember how they perceived oral language before, whether they noticed phonemes, etc.  It's easy for them to assume that their students notice the same aspects of oral language that they do.  But, there is now evidence that having a visual sign to represent, for example, the 's' at the end of a word helps us to notice that ending in oral input. There's also evidence that alphabetic literacy helps us to notice changes in word order that don't affect meaning. R. Schmidt presents evidence that if we don't notice something in the second language input, we don't acquire it.


There are several research studies in cognitive psych (with monolingual adults) showing that if they do not have alphabetic literacy -- that is, if they do not represent sound segments with visual symbols -- they don't do as well as literate counterparts in their native language on certain oral tasks requiring awareness of linguistic units.   (By the way, illiterate adults do just as well on rhyming tasks and oral word meaning tasks.  And there's a great study done by Read at Madison showing that well educated Chinese adults who are logographically literate but not alphabetically literate in Chinese don't do well on phonological awareness tasks. That's important, because they are not only schooled but well educated, middle class, successful professionals who clearly process oral Chinese just fine -- but they don't have alphabetic literacy, and they don't seem to need phonological awareness. They process oral Chinese some other way. )


It seems clear that given these findings, teaching an illiterate or low literate adult an oral second language has to be different from teaching an oral L2 to someone who has alphabetic literacy. We need to learn what works with low literate and illiterate adults, from the ground up ... what makes things stick in their memory when they hear oral second language input? what gets noticed? word order? content words? function words?  what helps these words get retained? does rhyme and rhythm help?  Does whole body  movement help? 


And that's just about learning to process *oral*l second language -- what about learning to *read* a second language? Is it better to learn to read the native language first?  does reading instruction start out better as a whole word approach with this population? how then does one transition to acquiring sound-symbol correspondence?  does rhyme help?   This is where we need perceptive teachers to tell us what they see going on. 







On Jan 26, 2009, at 4:06 PM, Lorz, Angela wrote:


My question for S Krashen is then, when a student has no clue about how-language-works in his native tongue, how can that student be best introduced to a language rich environment.  I have tried the post-it note method with the target language on top & the native language on the back, so that at least the object is identifiable with some squiggly lines on a paper indicating the word.  I have used pictures in class when the objects are not available. Anything else?  especially for getting the 'sound' of the new word in the learner's brain?
We have a series that can be used with a DVD player, but it's less natural than targeting the "object (or phrase) of interest".


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