Growing up with EnglishBarbara Mayor

Chapter 3 U214B – Communicating in English

Thinking Together

• What are the key practices in spoken English?

• What are the two key approaches to understanding written English?

(Semiotics Approach vs. Functional appproach/Literacy Practices)

• What is the role of English in people’s life around the world? (Cross Reference: U214A – Who speaks English?)

• Why Do Children cry? Coo? Babble? Speak? What are the functions??

Introduction • Chapters 1 & 2 discussed a variety of practices in spoken and written

English that English-speaking adults are involved in. • Chapter 3, here, addresses how children take part in such practices,

how the make sense of the English language as a system, and how they learn to make meaning in English, and ‘crack the code’ of written language.

• This is more and more important to study, as according to David Crystal ‘approximately one in three in the world’s [seven billion] population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English’ (Crystal, 2012, p.155) and exposure to English has become a fact of life for many millions of children on all six inhabited continents (Mayor 91).

• David Graddol envisages ‘a new generation of English-knowing children’ around the world, for whom English represents a ‘basic skill’ (Graddol, 2006, pp.101, 72)

• Children use language to perform the same functions of language that adults perform – Halliday’s ideational and interpersonal functions.

Learning to talk in English David Crystal outlines the knowledge that children need acquire in order to speak

English. 1) the twenty of so vowels and twenty four or so consonants of a particular spoken

dialect, and over 300 ways of combining them. 2) an active vocabulary of 50,000 words and a passive ability to understand about half

as many again3) at least a thousand aspects of grammatical construction4) several hundred ways of using the prosodic features of pitch, volume, speed and

rhythm to convey meaning5) a large number of rules governing the ways in which sentences can be combined into

discourse6) a large number of conventions governing the ways in which varieties of English differ,

and7) an even larger number of strategies governing the ways in which all the above rules

can be bent or broken in order t achieve special effects. For example jokes, story telling, poetry..

The various aspects of this task develop at different rates at different stages of life, with some continuing into adulthood.

How infants communicateChomsky’s universalist/innate theory

Theoretical linguist Naom Chomsky was the first to argue for a so-called ‘nativist’ position that language is an innate human ability which is biologically determined and follows a predictable developmental path.

Chomsky acknowledged, however, that some minimal language input is required to trigger the language learning process, and that this needs to occur in the very early years of life, in other words, that there is a ‘critical period’ for language acquisition (p.92).

Chomsky emphasized the role of instinct, human infants are programmed to process such language input, in order to generate hypotheses about its underlying structure and develop rules of use.

More recent research findings have taken a step back in the direction of imitation, recognizing that, although much of any language is probably stored as a set of rules, there is also a large element of habit formation. In other words, children learn much of their early language in ‘chunks’ as part of interactions with those around them.

How infants communicateChomsky’s universalist/innate theory

Evidence has shown that children in ‘isolation’ do not spontaneously develop language nor go on to develop normal language competence beyond a certain stage of maturation.

No baby is pre-programmed to speak English or any other language, but it has been observed that as early as being in the womb, or as an infant, (through monitoring of movement, gaze, and natural cries among babies) babies are primed to attend to the particular ‘melody’ of the language that surrounds them, for example the frequent stress on the first syllable, and their initial babbling differentiates the particular sounds that are meaningful in their linguistic community from those which are not (p.92).

How infants communicate Pragmatic alternatives to words

Anthropologist Ochs and Shcieffelin were the first to argue that children begin by learning the meaning of speech acts and only gradually learn the language that corresponds to these in the community around them. Ochs identifies a range of ‘pragmatic alternatives that are available to young children even before single words emerge . . . Touching, pointing, and eye gaze. . . reaching, holding up, waving . . . Pushing away, head shaking, and the like (Ochs, 1979, p.13; qtd p. 93)

Gordon Wells has compared this to a ‘conversation without words’ between infants and their caregivers; he argues that ‘infants come be able to have and express communicative intentions by being treated as if they could already have them (Wells, 1985,p.24, qtd p. 93)

So it can be said that learning to speak is initially a matter of learning the rules of social behavior and meaning making and only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by which these are realized in English or any other language.

How infants communicate The role of the caregiver & CDS

The key society of the child is the caregiver [an adult of either sex who takes regular care of a child] , for example, the child’s mother and father.

When communicating with babies, adults in many English-speaking cultures tend to use a simplified style of speech with exaggerated intonation, referred to as child-directed speech (CDS) , or more colloquially, ‘baby talk.’

Jean Berko Gleason, who carried out her studies in the USA, described child directed speech as:

“ Briefly we can say caregivers raised the fundamental frequency of their voices, used simple short sentences with concrete nouns, diminutives, and terms of endearment, expanded the children’s utterances and in general performed the linguistic operations that constitute baby-talk style. . .One mother, for instance, spoke in a normal voice to her husband, a high voice to her 4-year old, a slightly raised voice to her 8-year old and when she talked to her baby she fairly squeaked”; In CDS, adults tend to speak more slowly, use exaggerated intonation patterns, as well as exaggerated stress within the sentence.

How infants communicate The role of the caregiver & CDS (2)

The function and usefulness of CDS: Research has observed that CDS may help children attune their ear to the characteristic strong weak stress

pattern of English words (like ‘function,’ ‘children,’ and ‘pattern’ and this same pattern can extend to common diminutives and terms such as Mommy, Daddy, baby, and words like doggy and milkie.

Second, by use of exaggerated stress at the sentence level, CDS may serve to direct the child’s attention to the key elements (usually the content words) in an utterance.

Third, by means of exaggerated intonation patterns involving rising and falling pitch, CDS may also help to facilitate turn taking in conversation, by emphasizing question-and-answer exchanges and other adjacency pairs.

However, cross-cultural studies (such as Pye, 1986) have demonstrated that CDS is not essential to language acquisition since children are able to acquire language in cultures where CDS is not practiced. The difference in adult input, however, may well have an effect on the kind of language a child goes on to produce (p. 94).

Cognitive Perspectiveson learning to talk

Research in the cognitive tradition seeks to understand the mental processes within children’s minds, focusing on the relationship between the outward form of their utterances (especially the grammar and vocabulary) and what these may reveal about their developing understanding of language and the world.

A cognitive perspective usually seeks to investigate what is common to all normally developing children, rather than what makes each child different.

It has provided a body of evidence that the linguistic development of monolingual English speaking children follows a predictable path, and that the key stages in the acquisition of English are constant even though each child’s rate of progress and actual linguistic output will differ.

So all normally developing children will go through the same stages of grammar, or vocabulary development, but some children will progress from one stage to another faster than others.

Cognitive PerspectivesGrammatical development

Chomsky (1986) argues that in learning grammar, children follow some ‘universal principles’ (such as arguably the concepts of noun and verb) that are common to all grammars of all human languages, but that ‘parameters of variation’ (such as the word order or details of morphology e.g. nominal and verbal sentences in Arabic vs. English, dual in Arabic vs. only plural in English) which need to be set differently according to the language to which children are exposed.

So, children are born with an awareness that language is composed of certain building blocks (e.g. noun phrases and verb phrases), but they do not know how to combine these elements into sentences until they are exposed to some input in a particular language.

So in English children learn the SVO word order, and know which few inflections they can and need to add to words, special endings for plural and past tense, for example. Once they have the benefit of input to trigger the learning process, children very rarely opt for word orders that are not permitted in the language spoken around them. According to Stephen Pinker, children get it right almost 95% of the time.

Cognitive PerspectivesGrammatical development

Telegraphic language is one of the most commonly reported phenomena in English speaking children, between the ages of 18 months and 2 years. Telegraphic speech is the production of two-word ‘mini sentences’ expressing simple semantic relations such as action, or belonging. This is a kind of emergent grammar, so to speak.

For example, children may say: Give ball/ Want Teddy/ Shoe wet/ Doll big/ Daddy go.

This type of ‘sentences’ as you can notice usually consists of content words only. It seems that function words, like articles (the, a, an), pronouns (my, I), prepositions (of), auxiliary verbs (is, was,..) as well as morphological inflections (s, possessive ‘s , -ing) are normally acquired relatively late.

Cognitive PerspectivesGrammatical development

Once grammatical inflections, such as the ones mentioned above, start to appear in the child’s language, it has been observed that normally developing English-speaking children actually appear to move ‘backwards’ in their learning and start making more mistakes. This is because they gradually replace simple imitation (as in she held two mice) with the application of certain set of rules (as in she holded two mouses), before settling on the unique mix of rules and special cases/exceptions

Children’s early mistakes in generalizing rules are thus a sign of creative minds at play, rather than the mere imitation of adult speech. Pinker remarks that “a child who echoed back a parent’s sentences verbatim would be called [a poor communicator] nota powerful learner’ (Piinker, 1994, p.416, in Mayor 99).

Some examples of creative use of language are in Activity 3.4 pp. 94-96 – Suzie and Lawrence MiamaYour ‘ami . . . You may be able to come up with many of your own examples if you observe young children speaking English or even Arabic, where ‘overgeneralization’ of the grammatical rule is at place. Irregular plural forms of nouns in both languages are very common – Arabic madrasat similarly to talibat, mu’alimat, or English: childs instead of children.

These are examples of independent analysis and creative rule generation.

Cognitive PerspectivesChomsky’s distinction

Drawing on Chomsky’s ideas on innateness and universality and the specificity of the grammatical system of each language (‘parameters of variations’) , a distinction has been drawn between the child’s active linguistic performance and their underlying knowledge of the language system or linguistic competence. A child may thus be sensitive to a distinction between their own developing language and that of a mature speaker, even though they are unable to reproduce precisely what they hear. (See example p. 99)

Cognitive PerspectivesVocabulary development

Another strand of cognitive research treats language learning as closely related to a child’s experiences and understandings of the world. Much of such research focuses on lexical/ vocabulary development, with emphasis on both the size of vocabulary and the types of words produced.

Inventories / lists of young learners’ comprehension and production of English words (e.g. Bancroft, 2007, p.20) and these attempt to categorize functions of these early words (Aitchison, 1994m p.170ff).

One main observation is that children tend to use overextentions of word meaning/sense reference.

For example, a child may use the word daddy to refer to most men, or may use the word ball to refer to anything round. (See other examples and categories p.100).

Most overextended words can be classified as words describing movement (bird: used for any moving creature), shape (moon / ball used round objects such as cakes and the letter O), size (fly used for all small things such as bread or cookie crumbs, specks of dirt, or black …) , sound (koko – sound of cockerel for music of all kinds), texture and function (hat for anything in contact with the head such as scarf, ribbon or even hairbrush. .

Bilingual children We had so far been discussing monolingual English-speaking children. But many infants around

the world are learning English differently, quite naturally alongside one or more other languages. These are first type bilingual children. Others are learning it as a second language in childhood contexts outside the home. Research with the second group lends support that there may be a natural order of acquisition of grammatical structures within English, regardless of whether the child is learning it monolingually or bilingually.

Mistakes non-native English speaking children make, that we automatically attribute the fact that English is not their first language and to interference between the two systems, may very well be simply mistakes that a native speaking child makes, as part of the developmental stages we described earlier.

For example, we may refer to the study by Roar Ravem (1974) of his own natively Norwegian children’s production of the sentence Where is Daddy going? as Where Daddy go? Whereas the influence of Norwegian should have lead to use Where go Daddy? (101)

One of the ways that bilingual children come to know what is ‘English’ and what is not is that they first tend to distinguish the different sound systems of their languages, followed by the vocabularies and then the grammars.

Whether the child sees the two languages as one system or two, mostly has to do the language practices of the individual child is exposed to and whether the two languages are kept separate or regularly used side by side.

This takes us again to the social aspect of language learning, the social, rather than the cognitive perspective.

Social Perspectiveson learning to talk

Whereas cognitive perspectives on language learning focus on processes internal to the child’s mind in making sense of language as a system social perspectives focus on the role of language in social context, with emphasis on communicative function.

According to this view, language learning is seen as part of the child’s socialization into a community with distinctive language practices, and language itself is seen as a resource for its users. As Michael Halliday observed, from an early age a child ‘uses his voice to order people about, to get them to do things for him; he uses it to demand certain objects or services; he uses it to make contact with people, to feel close to them (Halliday, 1975,p.11, in Mayor p. 102).

Social perspectives , therefore emphasize the ‘pragmatics’ of language use, focusing on how children learn to take part in conversations with others, and how they use language to perform particular speech acts and to express social identities.

Meaning Making Semantic Relations expressed by Children

• Pioneer researcher Roger Brown and researchers de Villiers and de Villiers have studied children’s early utterances and admit that they are often open to interpretation (Mommy off), they identified what Brown believed to be the eight most basic semantic relations expressed by children at the two word stage, including: Agent-Action, Action Object, Agent – Object, ….

• De Villiers and de Villiers built on Brown’s fundamental work and said that:English-speaking children … talk about actions, what happened to what and who does what….are concerned, not to say obsessed with the relationships of possession . . . location…. labeling… and nonexistence. Children learning different languages , among them Samoan, German, French, and Russian, seem to encode the same limited set of meanings in their first sentences.

Formulaic languagevs. Telegraphic speech

In Formulaic Speech, much of the regular input and output is not processed analytically but rather in socially contextualized ‘chunks’ .

A child repeats a whole phrase but may not understand its individual words. An example of that is Ellen’s (aged 1:9), saying ‘time for a cup of coffee’ while

she actually meant {as her caregiver guessed} ‘please may I have a biscuit?’ presumably because this expression was associated in Ellen’s mind with the daily routine of stopping for a snack (Mayor, pp.96-7). Many other examples can be quoted, such as ‘Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen’ or ‘See you later, my dear wife’ spoken by children.

ComparingTelegraphic Speech , for example, Dolly hat, Bottle juice, Shoe wet …(p. 98) which are not completely grammatical and Formulaic Speech which is fully grammatical, telegraphic speech shows more independent and creative language use on the part of the child.

Children as cooperative conversationalists

• See Katherine Nelson’s ideas on ‘referential style’ and ‘expressive style’ pp. 103 -- 104

• See reference to Suzie talking to her babysitter in Activity 3.7 . p.104.

• Even before children utter their first recognizable word, there are many ways in which the patterns of discourse between children and caregivers differ according to the culture, or cultures in which they are being brought up. It is often the social routines of language that children learn first … such as the ‘pragmatic particles’ meh and a in the questions by the Singaporean English speaking girl .

Communicative Competence

• According to communicative competence theory, generally attributed to linguist Del Hymes:

A normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where , what manner (Hymes, 1972, p.277, in Mayor 105,106)

Communicative Competence Speaking as a child

There are certain social acts that children regularly get to perform as children, and this has led to increasing interest in children’s language as an object of study…Sensitivity to relative status in relationships is particularly apparent if we look at children’s developing recognition and use of the different ways of performing the speech acts of making requests and issuing commands in English. It would appear that children take some time to develop sensitivity to the full adult repertoire for ‘getting people to do things’

See example of 7-year old boy confusing status and defining himself as ‘big’ (p.107)In order to choose the appropriate expression for the occasion, a child not only needs to be aware

of the range of linguistic forms available to perform the speech acts of requesting or demanding, but also needs to have a sense of how likely the addressee is to comply with the request. In many (but by no means all) English-speaking communities, the word ‘please’ serves a powerful interpersonal function.

Children are sensitive to its effect, perhaps because of explicit teaching. Children also resort to indirect means of getting what they want, such as asking questions or making hints.

See example from Roger Shuy’s study of the five-year-old Joanna who got herself invited to dinner (p.107)

It is important to remember that adult-child role relationships are not reciprocal. When adult researcher tried jokingly to use language more typical of a child, it caused some bemusement in the young listener (p.108).

Learning to read and write in EnglishEmergent Literacy

Children, from the beginning of their life, grow up in communities where literacy plays an important part, (and they) react to the written environment around them, making sense of its functions and forms.

For children, taking part in literacy practices doesn’t depend on being able to read and write in the adult sense. Particular genres of text, such as product labels, restaurant sings, street banners, and so on, may be recognized long before individual letters are known

Children attempt to write, before they can make intelligible signs (e.g. the child writing her name on the list to get a turn in Soft play at school , producing ‘pretend’ shop signs, shopping lists, telephone messages, newspapers, and so on) Children will (also) use many strategies to work out what adults are doing with magazines, pens, computers and all the other things associated with literacy, and will attempt to join the adult literate world in different ways (See examples on understanding literacy p.110)

These first discoveries of reading and writing have been described by some as emergent literacy (p.109).

Learning to read and write in EnglishCognitive perspectives

on learning to read and writeA child’s eye view – what do children encounter? What are a child’s first experiences with literacy? The different writing systems: Systems where the symbol represents

an object, or meaning or Systems where the symbol represents sound:

1) Systems where the symbol represents an object, or meaning:a) Logographs: also known as ‘logograms’ (where a symbol stands for a whole word), as in the Arabic- based numerical system, various weights and measures such as kg, $, £, H for hospital, or the heart shape sometimes used to represent ‘love’. a) Pictographs: also known as ‘pictograms’ (where an image denotes an entire phrase or concept), such as many road traffic signs [two cars to represent no trespassing], and pictorial symbols for male and female toilets.

Learning to read and write in EnglishCognitive perspectives

on learning to read and write2) Systems where the symbol represents sound:

a) The Alphabetic system: where the symbol/ the letter/ the grapheme stands for a sound, more specifically the phoneme), as in the English writing system for the most part and in languages such as Arabic, Spanish, French…. b) The Syllabic system: where the symbol/ the character stands for a sound, more specifically the syllable), as in Japanese.

The child’s world of written texts is not limited by the adult divisions into ‘writing’ and ‘not-writing’, and part of the task facing them is what to identify as ‘English’.

Mathematical and musical notation, map signs, computer graphics…. need to be worked out for their individual meaning as well as their place as part of a system.

Learning to read and write in EnglishIs English literacy harder to acquire than literacy

in other languages? Which of the two principles does the English writing system

follow – Symbol represents sound?

Or Symbol represents meaning?English worlds are written from left to right, whereas Arabic or

Hebrew for example, which are both alphabetic, words are written from right to left. Chinese which is predominantly logographic was from top to bottom, and Japanese which has syllabic and logographic symbols, writing may be either vertical or horizontal.

Learning to read and write in EnglishIs English literacy harder to acquire than literacy

in other languages?

Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic system

Advantages of learning to read in the alphabetic or syllabic system

Some inconsistenciesReasons for lack of correspondence between

pronunciation and spelling (orthography)Strategies to help young learners to overcome

the challenges of English orthography

Learning to read and write in EnglishIs English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in

other languages? Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic system: the orthography (or spelling system): In languages such as Spanish, Arabic,

Finnish or Welsh (phonetic languages) – there is a very close relationships between the phonemes and their letters.

English writing is more complex, as there are fewer symbols in the twenty-six letter alphabet of English than

there are sounds in the spoken language 113), so there is little consistency in the grapheme-phoneme relationships, partly as a result of frozen spelling, reflecting earlier pronunciation, and partly because of the large number of words imported/borrowed from other languages.

some symbols are used to represent more than one sounde.g. C as a letter/ grapheme corresponds to either /s/ or /k/ phonemes/f/ as a phoneme is represented in many graphemes , (f in fan, ph in phone, gh in enough)

Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages?Disadvantages or challenges of the alphabetic system: Some inconsistencies:

there are silent letters, and there are many letter combinations which may have to be memorized as though they were logographs (e.g. knight/ fight/light/right…through)

some combinations can be treated as morphemes or syllables (e.g. the ending –tion station)

the standard orthography does not correspond precisely to any particular accent.

This lack of consistencies causes problems for the child learning English, problems not faced by other European counterparts whose phonetic language is transparent (Richard Hanlely, Reading A pp. 120-1).

1) When children read a word in transparent orthography that is part of their speech vocabulary, they can reliably generate its spoken form and access its meaning even if they have not encountered the word in written form before.

-- This strategy is not successful for many words in English, e.g. lack of linear reading [pin – pine/ medicine, medical], words like one (not the author’s examples)

2) The existence of exceptions means that letter-sound correspondences that apply in regular English are likely to be more difficult for children to learn. Decoding skills may take longer to develop in opaque writing systems.

Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages?

Some inconsistencies in the alphabetic system o Two main reasons for the lack of correspondence between

pronunciation and spelling/ lack of grapheme to phoneme correspondence in modern English are/ Why English is not transparent in its orthography:

i. First , although the pronunciation of many words has changed over the centuries, their spelling remains frozen in its earlier form. For example the now silent k in knight was sounded out at the time when its written form was established. Another example (not the author’s) is the word blind – which is spelled as the word used to be pronounced before the vowel changed into a diphthong {the Great Vowel Shift}.

ii. Second, when foreign words are imported into English, the written form of the word was kept (the original spelling) in the language from which it originated . For example, café (not spelled as caffay) , beautiful , or Fajita.

Learning to read and write in EnglishIs English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other

languages? Strategies to help young learners to overcome the disadvantages of

English orthography: Using the concept of onset & rime to teach children helps in configuring

common initial or final syllabic combinations, usually CV (consonant vowel in languages other than English such as Italian or Spanish) but often consonant clusters in English (Hanley, quoted in Mayor p.113).

Onsets and Rimes are letter combinations used respectively at the beginnings and endings of English words, example, bl-ock, st-ock, r-ock, where –ock is the rime, and bl, etc. are the onsets {or ch-air, ch-in, ch-eck)

Hanley, drawing on the work of Goswami, suggests that learners’ attention may be drawn to: - the greater orthographic consistency of English spelling at the level of the syllable or morpheme. e.g. –plural –s, -ly , ation, -ment, er/or (for the doer)- the way in which words break down into onset and rime (p.114)

Learning to read and write in EnglishIs English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages? Advantages of learning to read in the alphabetic or syllabic system : One of the main advantages of learning to read in an alphabetic or a

syllabic system is that, once the initial breakthrough in understanding happens, any new word can (more or less) be worked out, while learning of new logographs has to continue for many years.

Potential advantages to the lack of grapheme/ phoneme inconsistencies are:

Homophones with different etymologies (like knight and night/ no & know) may be distinguished by spelling.

Morphemes may retain the same surface form in different contexts, for example, plural –s in words like rocks or rods [are pronounced differently but spelling rods as rodz will lose the plural form inflectional morpheme –s]; and ability to know that foxes is spelled with an ‘s’ like rocks and not as foxiz (compare the past tense morpheme –ed, which varies in pronunciation in words like wanted, laughed and called) (Hanley, discussed in Mayor 114).

Social perspectives on learning to read and write

Engaging in literacy practices

Shirley Brice Heath conducted an ethnographic study (Heath, 1982) that revealed differences in preschool literacy practices among three communities in the American Piedmont Carolinas that she called Trackton, Roadville & Maintown. (VERY IMPORTANT see p.116, 117 for Activity 3.12 & Comment)

Social perspectives on learning to read and writeBecoming bi-literate

All children experience a range of forms and functions of writing. However, children acquiring literacy in bilingual or multi-lingual communities are additionally faced with working out the particular forms and functions of a variety of different scripts or orthographies. Mukul Saxena (1993), for example, describes the complex choices available for spoken & written communication among the British Panjabi community in Southall, London (See areas of variation, languages used, literacy practices involved, which language is used in which domains, who in the family uses which language, etc.) (Mayor p.117).

It is clear that young children who have the opportunity to do so are able to develop two or more literacy systems alongside each other with relative ease (See example of Raki, writing left to right in all English, Urdu and Bengali, Mayor p.118).

Biliterate children widen their horizons with respect to the making and placing of marks on the page. The have to recognize what counts as important in each script and be able to produce their own version, whether this involves writing [in an unfamiliar orientation] or using Chinese stroke patterns are compared to English (128).

Social perspectives on learning to read and writeBecoming bi-literate

Comments on Reading B

Refer Reading B (pp.127 -134) + Comments p. 118,119. In Reading B, Young children learning different writing systems by Charmian Kenner, there are various points

made about special skills or attributes that the bi-literate children may be acquiring. • Biliterate children develop a wider range of ‘visual and actional capabilities’. Gunther Kress [1997] explains that all modes of representation offer different potentials [capabilities] and potentials [for action]. Each writing system uses the visual and actional modes in particular ways. (p.129)• They learn ‘to recognize what counts as important in each script’ and to ‘identify what really matters when

distinguishing one letter or character from another’; in so doing, they build up ‘a vocabulary for concepts of shape, angle and size.’

When children produce written symbols they have to pay attention to a number of different facets – the type of stroke to be used, directionality, shape, size, spatial orientation, placement on the page -- and these will be culturally specified in the teaching experience by the child. Check what matters in Arabic, and how writing facets of Arabic to help in visual discrimination are explored and taught (p.131)- a) writing words on the board, requested children themselves to write on the board, asking children to trace• They learn to ‘adapt to different contexts’ and in particular, to recognize that their classmates ‘might not

have the same expertise’. • They develop interest in ‘exploring connections’ between their writing systems. See example of 6 year old

Selina’s drawing of both her mother and sister, with comments in English “I love my Mum” and “I love my sister” below the images (p.127), and Chinese characters on top of each of the images, saying “Love” for her mother, and the other “Girl Power” [an English concept adapted from one of her western pop star icons, for her sister.

• They can use their different scripts to express a distinctive personal identity. Selina’s world is lived simultaneously in both English and Chinese.