Shany,
M., & Geva, E. (2012). Cognitive, language, and
literacy development in socio-culturally vulnerable school children–the case of
Ethiopian Israeli children. In Current
issues in bilingualism (pp.
77-117). Springer Netherlands. http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/gevalab/UserFiles/File/20142015_Publications/2012_Shany_Geva_in_Leikin_Schwartz_Tobin.pdf
This is an interesting chapter by Michal
Shany and Esther Geva, discussing research that compared elementary school
children whose parents immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia with children from
low SES who are not of Ethiopian origin – in aspects of reading and cognitive
abilities.
The majority of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel
come from a rural, oral tradition society, where over 90% of the community
members are illiterate. About 35% of Ethiopian immigrant adults studied in an Ulpan (Hebrew courses funded by the government),
and for most of them this has been their first exposure to a written language
of any kind. Fifty five percent of men
and 70% of women of Ethiopian origin are illiterate in Hebrew. Parents
of Ethiopian children typically have 1 or 2 years of education, compared to an
average of over 11.5 years for parents of Israeli Jewish children. Over 52% of families
coming from Ethiopia live in poverty, as compared to 16% of families in the
general population.
Studies
found that there are no significant differences between immigrant children and
native speaking children in skills at the single word level like single word
identification, single word decoding, non-word decoding and spelling. This
finding is true for many languages. Thus
we can expect that there will be no difference in these skills between a child
of Ethiopian origin and his classmates who are not of Ethiopian origin, unless
this child has learning disabilities.
In a number of studies that focused on the
word level skills of English speaking children who were learning Hebrew in
bilingual English-Hebrew education , it was shown that in spite of limited
language proficiency in Hebrew, these middle-class children can learn to decode
and spell Hebrew words with accuracy, and decode Hebrew words with efficiency. Thanks
to the simplicity of the phonological structure of Hebrew, the lexical outcome
of assembling into words a series of matched grapheme-phonemes in vowelled
Hebrew is unequivocal, and can be accomplished with accuracy even in the
absence of linguistic proficiency. When spelling-sound relations are
straightforward (shallow orthography, there is only one way to read a word) –
syntax and vocabulary don't affect single word decoding. When the orthography is deep (the relation
between letters and sounds are not unequivocal, the same word can be read in
different ways giving different meanings) – syntax and vocabulary have a
significant effect on single word decoding.
Phonological
processing, speed of lexical access and phonological memory predict word
recognition skills in English as a second language. Geva found that
phonological awareness is more important in learning to read English than Hebrew. She found a correlation of 0.62 between
single word reading and phonological awareness in the native language (English),
but a correlation of only 0.32 between word reading and phonological awareness
in Hebrew (the second language).
Naming
speed may be a better predictor of reading fluency in languages that have
shallow orthographies like Dutch, than in languages that have deep
orthographies like English.
Bilinguals
or people learning a second language, who have problems in decoding and
spelling in their native language, tend to have problems in decoding and
spelling in the second language as well.
Compared
to single word decoding skills, immigrant children's reading comprehension is
affected by many factors like oral language skills, vocabulary, the level of
acculturation and familiarity with conventions of text structure and home
literacy. Homes
that are literate in the native language (there are book in the native language
at home, parents read stories in the native language) increase their children's
chances to succeed in reading comprehension in the second language. Reading comprehension skills transfer from
the native language to the second language, when the child reaches an
appropriate level of command of the second language.
Three hundred and twenty six
children participated in this study. One
hundred and seventy five were of Ethiopian origin and 151 were of other
origins. The children studied in the
first, second, fourth and sixth grades in six cities in northern and central Israel. The children of both groups in each school
and grade level came from the same classes.
The children of Ethiopian origin were born in Israel or came to Israel before
they were 2 years old. The other
children were born in Israel.
Although both groups of children came
from low SES, the situation of the students of Ethiopian origin was worse: their mothers spoke less Hebrew, their
fathers were more unemployed, they had more people per room at home.
Beginning in first
grade, there was no difference between the two groups in phonemic
discrimination and phonemic awareness. There
were also no differences between the two groups and the general population in
these skills.
In another study Shany found
differences between kindergarten children of Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian origin
in phonemic awareness and discrimination.
It seems that the gaps between the groups gradually close with the onset
of formal education.
There was no difference between the
two groups in single word reading accuracy in all grade levels. However,
compared with the national norms, both groups performed at the low average
range.
This finding is in line with other studies
showing that with the onset of formal education, there are no differences
between English as a second language speakers and native speakers in phonemic
awareness and in single word reading skills.
These studies also show that regardless of the language spoken at home,
the performance of children from low SES homes is lower than that of the
general population. Thus this delay can
be attributed less to the language spoken at home than to insufficient exposure
to reading, to a rich language and to literary contexts. Children in both groups were hardly familiar
with popular children's books.
In each grade level,
children of Ethiopian origin performed worse than children in the other group on
a test of working memory. Compared to
the national norms, the performance of both groups was within average limits.
In
rapid naming of letters and numbers, single word reading speed and spelling,
significant gaps between the groups closed by fourth grade. In lower grades,
both groups performed at the low to very low levels compared with the
population average. When the gaps
between the groups closed, both of them also performed within average limits.
Grammar skills: in grades 1, 2 and 4, the average of the
children from Ethiopian origin was in the 25th percentile, and the
average of the other group was in the 38th percentile. In 6th grade, both groups' average
was in the 25th percentile. This
means that the children who were not of Ethiopian origin got worse.
The low
performance of both groups in oral language is probably related to their low
SES, and to underexposure to rich language in written and oral contexts. What's important is not only the fact that
the parents don’t speak Hebrew or don't speak it well, but that the parents have
low literacy in both languages, and that the quality of the language spoken at
home, Hebrew or Amharic, doesn't prepare the children to the quality of
language and concepts needed to succeed in school.
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