Multilingualism, Literacy and Dyslexia

Breaking down barriers for educators

Lindsay Peer, Gavin Reid, Lindsay Peer, Gavin Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317482956
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully revised new edition provides advice on the identification, assessment and support of bilingual learners and assists practitioners in identifying the difference between literacy difficulties due to bilingualism or multilingualism and dyslexia. An essential text for staff development, it includes innovative approaches in technology and teaching programmes beneficial to multilingual learners and advice on learning additional languages. With contributions from experts from across the globe, this book will provide guidance on key themes, including:

• 
  
  

• the assessment of multilingual learners
• the impact of dyslexia on bilingualism
• the literacy challenges facing learners from Indigenous cultures
• the role of the SENCO in identifying children with English as an additional language and Dyslexia
• the emotional needs of learners with bi/multilingualism and Dyslexia

This book will provide guidance to anyone involved in literacy development and language learning. With the increase in international schools around the globe and the ever growing desire for parents to ensure that their children become proficient in English, this book will appeal to teachers, teaching assistants, specialists, and all other practitioners who work with bi/multilingual children.

Foreword 1

The beginning of the new millennium promised a continuing acceleration in global migration and multilingualism. In societies that had previously appeared largely monolingual that acceleration challenged social scientists and human services professionals to move beyond a vision that had traditionally been quite limited. As this century began there were a number of initiatives to address the issue, including an earlier collection of papers put together by the editors of this book. Researchers and teachers in the fields of dyslexia and bilingualism had previously worked quite separately but began to learn from each other. This new collection shows the progress of this fertile activity in a number of countries and in various aspects of the effort to understand learning difficulties in literacy and intervene to ameliorate them. A successful bilingual reader must co-ordinate sensory, intellectual, linguistic, emotional and cultural resources in a single smooth, automated process. The chapter authors show how the many elements of that process may be challenged, but sometimes also enhanced, by working across languages. If we fully understand and respond to multilingualism and dyslexia when they occur together, we may better respond to the challenges of each in themselves.

5 October 2015

Tony Cline

Educational Psychology Group, University College London, UK

Foreword 2

This new edition of Multilingualism, Literacy and Dyslexia: Breaking Down Barriers for Educators provides a timely and welcome update on editors Peer and Reid’s 2000 offering on this same topic. Major geopolitical and demographic shifts are shaping the cultural and linguistic landscape of countries globally. For example, within the United States, census trends indicate that by the mid 21st century, speakers of first languages or dialects other than English will comprise the majority of citizens. Population changes such as these challenge educators to provide effective identification and intervention for literacy difficulties in multilingual learners.

This edition, with contributions from respected authors in different corners of the world provides helpful guidance through chapters dealing with: current theoretical questions in literacy learning; central issues related to test development; and perspectives on such important topics as foreign language learning, inclusion and public policy. In addition, readers will find meaningful explorations of multilingual identity formation and of mental health factors in immigrant populations. A linguistic sampling of the book’s multilingual contexts includes but is not limited to Chinese, Arabic, German, Māori, English and Scandinavian languages. Practitioners and researchers alike should find this new edition’s inspired contributions to be both useful and engaging.

29 September 2015

Charles W. Haynes, EdD

Senior Advisor, Global Partners Committee, International Dyslexia Association

Professor, Communications Sciences and Disorders Department at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Part I Multilingualism, literacy and dyslexia

The Context

1 Introduction

Lindsay Peer and Gavin Reid

DOI: 10.4324/9781315708478-1

This chapter will:

1. Identify some of the key issues in multilingualism and dyslexia
2. Provide an overview of the book
3. Highlight some issues that are critical in order that all people irrespective of culture are fully included in the education system (see also the Postscript)

The context

It is now over 15 years since we edited the first edition of this book. At that time it was very much a landmark book and we attempted to incorporate contributions from a diverse range of cultures and languages. The book followed the first international conference on multilingualism which was held at UMIST in Manchester in England in 1999 and organized by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA). It was by all accounts a well-attended and very successful event. Lindsay Peer, the education director of the BDA at that time, liaised with the International Dyslexia Association CEO – J. Thomas Viall – who secured the board’s support for the event.

A follow-up conference was held in Washington DC in the USA several years later, organized by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and arranged through the efforts of one of the board members, Dr Charles Haynes.

The European Dyslexia Association (EDA) ran the third in the series of three conferences as was originally agreed. Since then the EDA have arranged a series of European conferences which – by the very nature of a larger and diverse Europe – have focused on issues relating to multilingualism and this has contributed to taking the debate forward. Additionally there have been a number of high-profile European projects through Erasmus and Socrates European funding that have witnessed many European countries entering this area for the first time.

The European collaboration is a significant step in preparing and implementing diagnostic and intervention strategies to cater for the diverse needs of students who are utilizing more than one language within the family, education and community context. The area of teacher training has also been highlighted and there is currently a high-profile three-year ‘Erasmus Plus’ project underway which is commented on by authors from the lead institution of this project (see chapter 6). Despite these initiatives there is still much to be accomplished and further constructive government initiatives and support are needed at local, national and international level.

It is however recognized that dealing with dyslexia and issues relating to bi/multilingualism is a significant concern, particularly in the current climate, for example of free movement within Europe and the migration of large populations to western Europe, but also the ongoing migration taking place on the world stage in Asia, Australasia and North America. For that reason we have contributions for this book from these areas: Angela Fawcett from Singapore, Sonja MacFarlane and colleagues from New Zealand and Linda Siegel from Canada. These very positive contributions add to the debate and present messages that can be taken on board by all countries.

The key issues are therefore identification of dyslexia, accessing culturally and linguistically appropriate resources, and acknowledging the educational and social needs of all children who are operating in more than one language and culture. It is important to ensure that they are able to fully access the curriculum and that they feel included within the school community.

Overview of the book

It is appropriate to start this book with the chapter by Professor Angela Fawcett on the link between theory and practice in relation to the learning process for young people with dyslexia. Angela relates the research studies carried out by her and colleagues looking at procedural learning and the crucial point that children with dyslexia need specialized teaching to achieve mastery. Of particular interest is the debate which centres round the benefits of bilingualism and that bilingual speakers may have advantages when learning to read. Angela also refers to the Strand Report (Strand et al., 2015) which identifies Special Educational Needs (SEN) as the major risk factor for English as an Additional Language (EAL) pupils. Although not all these SEN pupils will have dyslexia, it is acknowledged that dyslexia is the most frequently reported area of need. As Angela points out despite the importance of this topic, there have been relatively few publications on EAL and dyslexia.

Professor Fawcett points out that the success of intervention depends to a certain extent on the transparency of the language and she goes on to discuss that point in her chapter. The nature of the language can therefore be a barrier to success. The issue of barriers to learning is taken further by Lindsay Peer in her chapter on otitis media (glue ear). As Dr Peer indicates, little has been done to investigate the impact of otitis media on educational success although this affects so many children in the early years and in all countries. Dr Peer goes on to discuss appropriate interventions and relates these very much to dyslexia and multilingualism.

In chapter 4 Dr Deirdre Martin provides a critical perspective on multilingualism and dyslexia and introduces the complex phenomenon of dyslexia in ‘superdiversity’. She refers to the work of Vertoveç (2007) that describes new patterns of migration as ‘superdiversity’. She describes this as a recent phenomenon in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia, characterized by a change in the linguistic landscape and that in some areas, the sum-population of linguistic minority speakers is larger than speakers of the majority language. She relates this new context to literacy development and in particular to the dyslexia debate and the sad omission in that debate (Elliot and Grigorenko 2014) of multilingualism. Dr Martin includes an informative and thought-provoking section on the construction of dyslexia in multilingualism. She also indicates that drawing on critical pedagogy in professional development can offer a methodology that can raise awareness in primary and secondary schools, and challenge assumptions about multilingualism in relation to classroom/curriculum learning.

This is followed by the chapter by Dr Gad Elbeheri and Professor John Everatt who discuss principles and guidelines in test construction for multilingual children. This is a crucial chapter as it is important that appropriate assessment tools are used to ensure that bilingual children are fairly represented in the population of children who are identified as dyslexic. At present this is not always the case. As the authors concede, multilingualism has been a problem in psycho-educational assessment for quite some time and there is a lack of diagnostic tools that allow practitioners to distinguish between ‘language differences related to the environmental context of growing up as a multilingual immigrant and language impairments of a neuro-linguistic origin’.

In their chapter they also refer to the importance of assessing the child in their first language in order to distinguish between an underlying cognitive deficit, as opposed to a lack of second language acquisition leading to poor vocabulary that may be improved simply by increased practice.

They refer to the Arabic context as an example of the importance of robust test construction and particularly the importance of assessing phonological processing skills. They indicate that dyslexia assessment is a dynamic process but, as they suggest, it is important that linguistic, cultural and other background elements of the individual should collectively form a framework for a dyslexia assessment.

This is followed up in chapter 6 by Dr Jennie Guise and colleagues who show how culturally and linguistically appropriate material can be accessed for an accurate assessment. They emphasize the importance of culture-fair assessment but also mention the underrepresentation of dyslexia among the multilingual school population. They also raise the issue of self-esteem – crucial for effective learning – and the importance of information gathering to ensure the assessment hits the right mark. The importance of assessing non-verbal skills is also raised as well as a range of intervention strategies. In addition, there is reference to a European-wide project spearheaded by Lannen and Lannen on Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) teacher training in order to create an EU SpLD website for information and long-distance interactive training.

In chapter 7 we travel to the other side of the world to New Zealand where Dr Sonja Macfarlane, Te Hurinui Clarke and Professor Angus Macfarlane reflect on the contemporary literacy challenges facing Indigenous cultures that dr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword 1
• Foreword 2
• PART I Multilingualism, literacy and dyslexia: The context
• PART II Planning and implementing intervention and addressing key issues
• Postscript
• Index