A key to independent learning
in early years
Theoretical Framework:
It has been understood popularly that newborns have the capability of producing the sounds of every language in the World. This occurs during what is called the babbling stage, in which babies start to produce sounds. Even some of these produced sounds could sound strange or odd to their parents. That is why English native babies can utter sounds that are not part of the English phonology repertoire as the “double r”, a sound that is particular to Spanish. Or a Spanish native baby can produce the “v” sound from German or the “ts” sound from Japanese, for example. But this capability of producing those sounds will vanish as the babies grow, especially in those babies who live in a monolingual setting. (Lyons, 1981). That is because monolingual babies will start to discriminate the sounds they do not listen or perceive. And thus, they will stop producing the sounds they do not hear as a feedback. Therefore, monolingual babies will only produce the sounds that they perceive. On the contrary, bilingual babies will embrace a more extensive repertoir of sounds to reproduce, just because they are involved into two phonological systems. (Bialystok, 2009)
However, it is not enough to acquire sounds that are presented in a pair of languages. As bilingual babies become infants now they need to produce words with those sounds, and later to combine words to form sentences (Lyons, 1981). For children that are immersed in a bilingual setting, as they now own an extensive repertoire of sounds belonging to two different languages, they are instantly getting conscious that some objects have two names (Bialystok, 2009). For instance, the word “water” that in the one-word sentence period of language acquisition will mean “I want water”, then could be replaced by the Spanish word “agua”, meaning the same that in English, but now in Spanish will refer to “Quiero agua”. This is the beginning of what later will be developed as the capability of children to start forming accurate sentences through grammar awareness. This is property is known as Linguistic Competence and is something children develop unconsciously to become competent in speaking, and later in writing a language. This grammatical aspect will lead them with the time to acquire a Pragmatic and Discourse Competence that will assist them in forming coherent and cohesive sentences (Van Dijk, 1985. See also Module 5). Or in other words, well-structured sentences combining the correct set of words and ordering them into the right position within the sentence. Thus, babies, infants and then children who live in a bilingual setting when getting to school will make use of the awareness of being linguistically bilingual, even if they are not conscious about all this. They will “feel” there is something there, although for some children the fact that objects have two names could be natural to them considering the Bilingual context they live in.
Moreover, something some children are not conscious yet is that now they have certain cognitive skills that make them process new information faster than monolingual children. The big deal here is for bilingual teachers who know this fact and should take some advantage of all this. In other words, teachers should assist their students to be proficient in the correct use of both languages(Bialystok, 2009). Obviously, this would take some time and pupils should not be banned in the meantime to combine and mix the source and target languages; that is, they should be allowed to translanguage. Ofelia García defines this last concept as “a process of Students and Teacher use of bilingual/multilingual discursive practices as ‘sense-making’ of learning and teaching in multilingual classrooms”. (Garcia, Keynote Speech, 2009)
Translanguaging invokes code switching but in a ‘sense making’ setting. That is, the use and mixing of two or more languages as long as sentences and utterances could make sense to both, the writer/speaker and the reader/listener. This is just because that is how bilingual students really communicate within their families at home. Bilingual students and teachers after all will use a combination and mixture of languages, but also of cultures for communicating as well. As a result, teachers must develop communicative competence in the source and target language in order to help students develop it too. And in such a way, teachers will assist their students to become competent bilinguals,. Mrs. Garcia also refers that these trasnlanguaging practices must make sense from the speaker’s perspective, and not from the language perspective, as code switching and diglossic phenomena have always been studied. Here, this is something new, a real innovative perspective: To study diglossic matters from the speaker’s point of view. (Garcia, Keynote Speech, 2009). Such practices, apart from others, could be used as a means to help and guide students in the development of a communicative competence for the exercise of two or more languages at the same time.
If you wish to know more about the concepts Mrs. Ofelia Garcia presented in her Speech Keynote: Reimagining bilingualism in education for the 21st century, during the National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum's (NALDIC) 17th Annual Conference in 2009, conducted at the University of Reading, in Reading, Berkshire, UK, you can visit the following links:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVI41CMw6HM
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HXo25S16a4
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxrjxLgKD3I
Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFXbXrpcOSA