First Language Literacy

Hi Helen, Thanks for posting this important question. As many of us have learned, asking a learner about her/his education background does not always provide us with the information we need.

Our adult education colleagues in Florida have developed native language screening tools in 29 different languages, which are available for free download.These colleagues have also made an administration manual available, which would likely need to be adapted for different contexts.

Other members may have designed strategies for addressing this need. It would be great to hear from others on this issue.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition

Helen-- this is an important question with a not-very-easy answer.   I believe it is important to be clear about what the purpose of determining what the level of literacy really is. At the most basic level, from my studies, I think it is extremely important to find out if the learner is literate in any language simply because a literate brain, even if the level of literacy is very low, is quite different from a non-literate brain.   I have long advocated that whereEVER possible, persons who have no prior print literacy at all should be taught separately from those who have any literacy at all, even the most rudimentary amount.   This comes from the wisdom of "you only learn to read once"--- that is, once the brain has accepted the concept of getting a message from squiggles on a page, it is forever aware that that is the purpose of text.  Non-print literate persons do not have that awareness as yet.  Several studies have indicated that the big breakthrough with non-print adults is when they finally absorb and accept the concept of text having a message.    But until they achieve that breakthrough, they need to be working on the most fundamental pre literacy skills (phonological processing skills) and building oral language skills, which the literate students will be able to do faster and with a wider range of materials.   Non-print literate students are known widely to struggle significantly with pictures and other 2-dimensional information as well as with all school skills, setting them even further apart from even the lowest educated but yet literate students.   

Beyond that, things are still different.   The big breakthroughs in reading research in the late  90's and early 2000's indicated that previous ideas about reading basics and reading difficulties were incorrect.  Reading is a unique process in every language and in some instances the skills needed for reading and what is necessary to know about the sound symbol relationship in each language may not transfer when learning to read in a new language.  For example, some languages-- English for one--require a much higher level of syllable awareness and of phoneme awareness than other languages do.  If a person never developed finely grained phoneme awareness because his or her first language of literacy did not require it, then that person will not have that awareness to bring to learning a language like English, where phoneme awareness is very important.  Persons who read languages that are highly regular--or transparent-- and do not ever have to learn irregularities and oddities as we do in English-- are known to overgeneralize and try to read and spell English as if it were highly regular, and then are very frustrated when that does not work.  Also persons who are extremely literate in a script that is entirely different from English have little to no carry-over to developing visual skills in English.  They need to start at zero, as it were, to learn to decode and develop visual fluency and processing skills to be competent readers.   They are at a much bigger disadvantage than are students who read an alphabet similar to ours and may even look reading disabled until they develop a fairly strong competence in decoding English.   Keiko Koda, one of the chief researchers in the area of second language reading, reminds  us that virtually EVERYTHING one does when reading in a second language is first accessed in the first language-- whether it is the direction of reading or how to assign sound to symbols or where types of words appear in sentences (syntax).  Thus an actual measurement of literacy in one's first language does not give an indication of the skill needed for competent second language reading.   

Studies on reading difficulties in other languages confirmed the differences across languages.  One set of researchers studying Chinese readers concluded that it is orthography-- writing-- that leads to high levels of reading competence for Chinese readers, not phonological skills as was presumed for so long in the reading disabilities community.   That shift was one of many that recognized that reading is developed differently in different languages.  In some cultures and languages, reading develops as a result of rote learning of words while in others it develops gradually as children are exposed to text.  In still other cultures, reading is taught directly through phonics.  In English, we need a wide range of skills to be competent readers, including really well developed phonological skills, including phoneme, syllable and rhyme awareness.     

Another issue with finding out about a person's literacy level is that it does not give much of an idea of what the person has learned nor how skilled he or she is at school skills.   It is false to think that six year of education in one country is analogous to 6 years of education in another.   Furthermore, if the education system from which students come emphasizes memorizing over critical thinking, even those at college level will have difficulty with higher level reading skills that are required for American academic work.  And of course if a student is literate but low-educated, he or she will likely not have developed almost any higher level reading skills or text comprehension skills that more educated students have developed.   One study from PA confirmed this --it focused on Spanish speaking students in a community college ESL reading class and the researcher discovered that there was a wide discrepancy between those students with low education and those with high education when they tried to read and comprehend texts in their reading classes.   This situation often occurs in adult ESOL because students are so often placed according to their speaking skills and not their true education levels or literacy skills.   

One behavior that DOES seem to transfer is the habit of reading-- if a student has the habit of reading for information and for pleasure, then he or she is more able to transfer that practice to English, even if the actual competence in reading is hard to develop.  On the other hand, if a student has had very limited experience with reading and did not regularly have the habit of reading, he or she will apparently find it difficult to develop that habit in English.   

So the question is, as I said at the beginning-- why do you need to know the literacy level and how will that information impact what you teach and what you ask of your students?   Every time I do sessions about what causes adult ELs to fail in learning, I urge teachers to find out as much about their students' backgrounds as possible, including what the culture of education is and the reading habits, if any, of their students.  Literacy is a very complex skill--it is so much more than just decoding words!

I highly recommend the works of Keiko Koda, as well as of Durgonoglu and her colleagues and many others who have done research on reading and literacy across cultures and languages.   And once again, I cannot recommend highly enough the book by Helen Fox, "Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing"--which gives a detailed and often heart -wrenching view of what it means to become literate in another language and culture which conflict with one's own experience and beliefs about reading, writing and literacy.      

Robin Lovrien