Teenagers, Literacy and School

Researching in Multilingual Contexts

Ken Cruickshank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134220045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This unique and timelybook follows the experiences of four Arabic teenagers, their families and their community, focusing on the role of literacy in their daily lives and the differences between home and school. The author looks at the conflict between expectations and practices at school and in the home, arguing that problems are inevitable where class and cultural differences exist.

Emerging themes include:

• how literacy practices in the community are undergoing rapid change due to global developments in technology
• how the patterns of written and spoken language in English and Arabic in the home are linked with social practices in logical and coherent ways
• how many of the family practices that differ from school culture and language become marginalised.

Built around these insightful case studies yetgrounded in theory, this book is of immediate relevance to teachers working in multicultural contexts and students and lecturers in language/literacy or on TESOL courses.

Part I
Parallel lines
Home and school literacy

Introduction

Parallel lines are lines that never cross. The practices of reading and writing at home and at school seemed at times to be parts of two different worlds, not meeting, not crossing and not clashing, but both going along in predetermined tracks.

The six chapters in Part I draw on data collected from community workers and members, from 20 Arabic-speaking families and their children, and from staff in the schools the children attended. The families lived in the inner western suburbs of Sydney, which have been traditional destinations of postwar migrants. They all had Arabic and English as two of their languages. Whereas the parents had migrated from countries in the Middle East, the majority of the children were Australian-born. There were children in each family attending local secondary schools. The following accounts give details of the families and teenagers who are referred to most in the chapters. The first five families figure in Chapter 1.

Hassan and Siham Karam have four children, three boys and one girl, attending primary and secondary schools in the Punchbowl area. Their youngest son, Mohamad, is autistic and attends a special school. Tariq and Hussein attend the local boys’ secondary school, and Leila, the only girl, is in Year 5 at primary school. Hassan and Siham and their two oldest children came to Australia in 1984 from Lebanon. Siham, who was only 18 at the time, started work in a factory the day after her arrival and continued there until Mohamad was born. Most of her time and energy are directed towards caring for Mohamad, but she is also involved in her other children’s schools. Hassan works as a taxi driver and teaches Arabic in the community schools after hours. He is also doing a technical college course in interpreting and translating. The family is of Shi’ite Muslim background but ‘not strict’ according to Hassan.

John and Marie Issa have four girls. Josephine works in a jewellery shop, Rita is in Year 10, Donna is in Year 9 and Stephanie has still to start school. The girls attend the Maronite College. Their father, John, came to Australia when he was 18, in 1975. He completed some technical college courses in Australia and worked in factories for years. Two years ago he started up his own Arabic newspaper and has been working hard to make the business profitable.

Hala and Bilal Bashir came to Australia in 1979 from Lebanon where Bilal was in the Lebanese army. Hala had finished five years of school in Lebanon and like many of the mothers worked in a local factory when she came to Australia. Her five children are aged from 5 to 14 and her main job is running the household. She takes pride in running all the family finances since Bilal, who works in Bondi as a security guard, is ‘not very good with money’. Fayez, the oldest boy, is in Year 9 at the local Islamic college.

Hanna Tabber came to Australia from Syria 23 years ago. Abdul Tabber came in 1983 to marry her. They have four children, two in secondary school and a girl in primary school. Bachar, their elder boy, works in a local coffee shop. Abdul Tabber had to give up working in a factory five years ago because of an industrial accident. Hanna now works part time. Susan is in Year 9 and Ahmed in Year 8 at local secondary schools.

Abdullah and Raida Raja have been in Australia for 19 years, coming originally from the north of Lebanon. Abdullah had just returned from a four-month visit to Lebanon. His two older girls, Suzy and Nadia, were engaged. The third daughter, Khadijah, had just finished Year 12, Waleed is in Year 11 and Ramsi in Year 9 at Bellevue Boys’ High School.

Fadya Ibrahim came to Australia with her parents 26 years ago when she was 12. At the beginning of the study she was spending most of her time running her family of seven children, five of whom were still at school. Her husband had been unemployed for several years and by the end of the study Fadya was working in a local retail shop. Her eldest son is an electronics technician and her eldest daughter is married with her own children. Her third daughter, Mahassan, is in Year 9 at the local girls’ secondary school. The children form a close-knit group, often going shopping or to the pictures together.

Ibrahim and Hanade Tannous migrated from southern Lebanon in 1980. Ibrahim works part-time in a local grocery shop. His eldest son, Tariq, is an electronics technician. Zeina is studying at university. Lamise and her brother Ali are attending Kotara High School. Ali appears in Chapter 3, and much data in Chapter 6 is drawn from conversations with Lamise.

Mohamad Zohair came to Australia in 1971 and worked for 18 years on the railways. Basma came in 1980 to marry him. Mohamad has not worked since an industrial accident several years ago. Their five children attend local primary and secondary schools. Ahmad Zohair is a key figure in Chapter 5.

Karima Al Said was a dressmaker in Lebanon and also an accomplished musician. In Australia she worked in a factory for some years but stopped when her children were young. Her eldest son, Tariq, is a panelbeater, and Usman and Wafa are in local secondary schools. Her sister and aunt from Lebanon were staying with her for an extended visit since her husband had left her and the children.

Mohamed and Hoda Suliman are of Palestinian background but had worked in Kuwait for many years, Mohamed as a court interpreter and Hoda as an English teacher. They came to Australia four years ago with their five children who were all born in Kuwait. Ali, the eldest son, finished Year 12 in Kuwait and is now studying engineering at university. Amina is in Year 9 at Wilson Park Girls’ High School.

Rabieh Shoukr operates a successful pastry business in Punchbowl. His nine children range in age from 31 to 4. Hala, Sarah and Eman all attend an Islamic College. The boys attend Bellevue Boys’ High School where Omar is the school captain. Rabieh had four years of school in Lebanon before he went out to work in the fields. He came to Australia in 1976 with an older brother and considers himself very much a self-made man. His shop is a social centre in the suburb and his pastries and sorbets have a good reputation.

Hanna and Belal Mougraby have been in Australia for 20 years. They both came from very poor families in the north of Lebanon, upbringings which made both politically aligned as socialists. Belal only had four years of school and is self-educated. He had to give up his factory work five years before because of health problems. Of their six children, the eldest girl, Diana, works in a local supermarket; Lena, Ahmed and Sadia are in secondary school; and Samar and Hussein are in the local primary school. All the children are keen on karate and have won many prizes. They are of Sunni Muslim background.

Joseph Moussa was a primary teacher in Lebanon but has done mainly factory work since he arrived in Australia in 1978. He did several technical college courses and worked his way up to supervisor at the factory before health problems stopped him working three years before. Amyra Moussa is of Muslim background while her husband is Christian. She came to Australia with her family at the age of 17 and met her husband in the factory. Three of their daughters, Helen, Marie and Catherine, attend Wilson Park Girls’ High School. Peter, the youngest, goes to primary school.

Ahmed and Fatima Elkheir have six children. Ali and Eman left school two years ago and have done a few courses but are now looking for work. Suzy is in Year 11, Muhamad in Year 10 and Sahar in Year 9 at the local state coeducational school. The oldest girl, Maryam, was recently married. Ahmed has worked as a taxi driver for many years. Ahmed and Fatima came from the south of Lebanon, from tobacco farms, in 1983. Chapter 4 draws heavily on conversations with Suzy and Sahar.

Hashem Al Talib has been out of work for seven years since his factory closed down. Jimmy, the eldest, works as a panelbeater. The twins, Alex and Sam, left school the year before. Sam is doing a graphic design course through a private college. Alex is looking for work. Danny, the youngest, is in Year 9.

Houda Khoury has been married to Mohamed for four years. She has three children from a previous marriage to an Egyptian businessman. Mohamed has been in Australia for 26 years and works in a local garage. They have two young children together. Ali, the oldest boy, is in Year 9 at Bellevue Boys’ High School.

Chapter 1
Patterns of community literacy

Among all the different literacies practised in the community, the home, and the workplace, how is it that the variety associated with schooling has come to be the defining type, not only to set the standard for other varieties but to marginalize them, to rule them off the agenda of the literacy debate? Non-school literacies have come to be seen as inferior attempts at the real thing, to be compensated for by enhanced schooling.

(Street and Street 1991)

The word ‘literacy’ was first recorded in 1883 in the New England Journal of Education and all uses of the word around that time are to do with education (OED 1971). Other terms such as ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ are much older and pre-date the introduction of compulsory education in English-speaking countries. ‘Literacy’, however, became identified with schooling and has subsumed all the older words. With all its currency and connotations in English, it is still a very culturally specific term and has no direct equivalent in most other languages. Despite the wealth of recent historical, anthropological, philosophical, linguistic and other work focusing on literacy in the broader society and its development and use outside school, it is the norm of school literacy by which everything is judged. This chapter questions the ways in which the uses of literacy in domains outside schooling have been seen only through the lens of schoolbased literacy and the ways in which divergence from this has been judged as deficit. It is not an argument of value – that literacy in home and community contexts is any better or worse than school literacy – just that it is natural that reading and writing vary in logically patterned ways according to context. Such variation is greater when there are language, cultural, class or other differences at play. A fundamental need is that there is mutual understanding of the uses of literacy between school and homes.

Urban myths

The presumed absence of (school) literacy in homes has come to be seen as a factor in the low schooling outcomes of students from some ethnic minoritybackgrounds. Negative comments have regularly been made in press coverage, by politicians and other commentators on education. Similar statements were made about different groups in the early 1900s and then in the successive waves of postwar migration and have always been made about indigenous students. The statements below were taken from the media reports or from interviewee comments in the study.

The parents don’t value education. They have low aspirations for their children.

There are many variations on this type of statement, which basically attributes low outcomes and problems at school to lack of parental interest and motivation. When parents do not attend school functions it is put down to their supposed lack of interest. Parental aspirations for children are said to be limited to teenagers becoming car mechanics or hairdressers and teachers say that it will take another generation for the students to achieve in schools.

In fact, every study of parental aspirations shows that migrant ethnic minority parents have higher-than-average educational aspirations for their children. This is only to be expected since many families migrate because of greater educational opportunities for their children. Many come from countries where access to education firmly decided children’s and their families’ economic and social futures. There are many studies that show that parents maintain high aspirations for their children often in the face of contrary evidence or advice from schools. In my study I found that all parents expected education to provide a pathway for their children to better opportunities than they themselves had been given. Parents often quoted to me a saying translated from Arabic, ‘We give you the body; just give us back the bones.’ In other words, they were giving their children to the schools for education, something to be gained at whatever the cost!

They study Arabic and it interferes with their English. The problem is that they have no language: they have kitchen-sink Arabic and kitchen-sink English.

These statements frame bilingualism as a problem and Arabic as interfering with the learning of English. There is a large body of research evidence showing the cognitive benefits of bilingualism for children. Literacy skills from one language transfer to and support learning in the second. There is an equal amount of evidence indicating that bilingual children do not often perform well in education systems where the majority group is monolingual. The reasons perhaps lie not in bilingualism itself but in the ways bilingualism is treated in educational contexts.

There are no books in the home. The parents can’t read or write in their own language, let alone English. They don’t read to their children. It’s not a reading culture.

There is a widespread belief in schools that ethnic minority parents have a lack of reading material in the home and hence do not value education (Delgado-Gaitan 1990; Vincent 1996; Blackledge 2000). Many studies into literacy in the homes, in fact, indicate that reading and writing play a wide and significant role in the lives of ethnic minority families. The problem has more often been with research that defines reading only as ‘books’ and, even more narrowly, as novels in English which are read for enjoyment. This excludes the evidence of the interaction with a wide range of reading materials in a range of languages in the homes (Saxena 1994; Taylor 1997). The idea that the only pathway to literacy is through school-sanctioned notions of parents reading to children ignores the range of ways literacy is achieved in different languages and cultures (Gregory and Williams 2000; Gregory et al. 2004). Much of the literacy in the home is not seen as ‘reading’ or ‘writing’ but ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part I: Parallel Lines Home and School Literacy
• Part II: Making Sense of Literacy Research
• References