Sing to read

Is the prerequisite of singing reading? Adults normally read the lyrics first before they upgrade the words into a song by adding melodious intonation. Or if the opposite is true, one would then claim that one sings first before checking out the lyrics. Normally, we listen to songs before deciding if we would like to be part of the fandom as a (singing) listener.

For Jia Yi, a three-year old, she sings first. The songs she sings contain 30 to 40 Chinese words. She does not understand the lyrics but she likes Chinese New Year songs very much, as the songs are sung by her peers in colorful costumes. Jia Yi sings and dances along for hours while watching her peers singing joyously. Below is a sample of Jia Yi having fun while watching a video in her parents’ bedroom:

Jia Yi singing to her favourite tune in her parents' bedroom

  

In case you think Jia Yi is a monolingual Chinese girl, she is also a true blue fan of Hi-5 and she watches Disney Junior Channel, which is part of a paid telebroadcast delivered by ASTRO, a company offering a private telebroacast service. Disney Junior shows English cartoons and musical programmes especially tailored for children below 12.

Arguably, singing has a captivating effect on young and adult minds. In Jia Yi’s case, the CD-Rom of Chinese New Year songs is a launch pad to pronounce Mandarin words in a melodious manner. We may regard the singing as an enhancement of linguistic and rhythmic intelligences in Jia Yi’s cognitive development.

                                                      The CD cover of Jia Yi's favourite Chinese New Year songs

The magical effect of singing on reading seems to garner a steady following. In an alumni sharing session, it was mentioned that Thai songs were used to teach secondary school students Thai before their actual volunteer work in Thailand. My Thai teacher Achaan Sudha included a lot of songs in her Thai lessons as part of our learning extension. My Thai learning became quite a memorable experience with the use of songs.

Beyond reading development via rhythmic intelligence, cultural strengthening is another plus point when Chinese New Year songs are used in early childhood. The songs in Jia Yi's CD-Rom are concerned with the celebration of spring in the lunar calendar. There are plenty of Mandarin references to red packets, good wishes, auspicious terms, as well as communal semiotics such as the color red, mandarin oranges, gold coins, the God of Fortune, peach blossoms and willow tree.

 

Jia Yi requesting a snap shot

The time spent listening to the songs is a blessing in disguise, not least because it is a positive distraction that prevents Jia Yi from playing digital games too often, like Scarecrow and Candy Crush, which are readily available on the family's iPad. That means Jia Yi's digital exposure to terms such as divine, life, saga and sugar is lessened. The risk of developing a distorted or engineered English comprehension by means of gaming lexicon also decreases. While Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings make some interesting alternatives in her collection of CDs, it is appropriate for Jia Yi to sing about some of the cultural references that are closely associated with her cultural heritage before her next trip to LEGOLAND.


Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore

Reading at three in a multilingual society

Jia Yi Chee is a three year-old girl born in January, 2010. She is the youngest growing up with three elder brothers. Literally speaking, she comes from a working class as both her parents are working full time, although her mother drives Jia Yi to school before work every morning. After the domestic helper left the family, Sheena, Jia Yi’s mother chose to put her daughter on a full day child care system. Currently, Jia Yi attends a multilingual childcare facility six days per week in the multilingual Pekan Nenas, a town in the state of Johor, south of the Peninsular Malaysia.

                                                                 Jia Yi (posing for iPhone)

Among other things, Jia Yi has received books and a few sets of mono-word card after six months attending the childcare facility. In between dinner and breakfast, Jia Yi watches a lot of English and Mandarin cartoons on television. Television, once-called the idiot-box, is a surrogate baby-sitter.  Despite her ritual television viewing, Jia Yi enjoys reading. Her reading stimulations are the word cards, which display words in English, Malay and Mandarin that are arranged in random order. The following are her progressive reading outcomes based on selected word cards as her mental stimulants:

Reading stimulants	Jia Yi’s reading output
Bantal	bantal (pillow in Malay)
学 Xué	*tóng > xué (learn in Mandarin)
Scissors	scissor [sic]
love	love
女Nǚ	nǚ (female in Mandarin)
Skirt	skirt
Luka	luka (scar in Malay)
You	you
eye	eyes [sic]
Play	play
Towel	*mouth > I don’t know (in Mandarin) > towel (upon correction)
I	saya, wo, I (upon correction)
Pagi	pagi
Seluar (pants)	*selamat > *beautiful (with a smile) > seluar (upon correction)
Kasut	kasut (shoes in Malay)
Morning	morning
Kawan (friend)	*friend, *pen yu > kawan (upon correction)
Baju	baju (shirt in Malay)
Toothbrush	toothbrush
Girl	girl
Milk	milk
爸bà    (father)	ba ba (wrong tone in Standard Mandarin; correct colloquially)
Feel	*Fail > *fail (with a smile) > feel (upon correction)
开kāi	kai (open in Mandarin)
心Xīn	xin (heart in Mandarin)
Perempuan	Perempuan (women in Malay)
Mouth	mouth
Saya	saya (I in Malay)

Table 1: A three year-old’s reading output in a multilingual society

                                                Jia Yi's favourite reading area (in front of the TV)

Initially, prior to the outcomes in Table 1, Jia Yi used to read in phrases: “I love you” for the word love, “good morning” for the word morning, má má for the mono-syllable word mother 妈 in Mandarin. Jia Yi has eventually corrected her reading output by tailoring it to a word-by-word reading pattern. This seems more like a reading detour if we believe that language development is not a word-based transformation.  Depending on one’s preference, one may look at formulaic language as part of psycholinguistic development (Alison Wray), emergentism (William O'Grady), nonlineal parallel processing as a state of mind (cf. Naomi Goldblum, among others), form-function construction as the cognitive process for language (Adele Goldberg), or core syntactic properties shared by human languages (Noam Chomsky) as our reference point(s).

The reading outputs contained in Table 1 were observed and recorded by the blogger who held the word card to Jia Yi’s face. The blogger said yes/good if Jia Yi has read correctly, nope if she has read wrongly, and offered the ‘accurate’ pronunciation if she has read the word on the card wrong for twice.

                                               Jia Yi before watching a movie on a Friday evening

What is interesting is that Jia Yi has recurrent difficulties with verb-to-be such as /are/ in a different observation and personal pronoun /I/ compared to nouns such as /scissors/. She uses any of the three languages as a basis of her reading knowledge and attempts to correct herself in two other languages. Jia Yi mimics the pronunciation of a word in a third language when she receives a correction in a third language.

Based on the simple reading interaction with Jia Yi, there are four questions that this blog post would like to raise as its concluding remarks. Firstly, is word-for-word the right way to adopt in teaching reading to preschools? Secondly, do the children growing up reading in a multilingual setting require different sets of learning materials compared to the children growing up reading and learning in monolingual setting? Thirdly, should language learning begin with one language per each contact time in a multilingual setting, if not across all the learning settings? Lastly, do the language educators and policy planners understand the difference between children coordinating multilingual stimulations and children receiving monolingual stimulations well enough when they manage language acquisition in general and plan reading practice in particular?

 

Jyh Wee Sew

Centre for Language Studies

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

National University of Singapore

Writing Like a Native: More Quick Tips for ESL Writers

This second round of tips has less to do with specific strategies and more to do with developing habits. Like playing the piano or riding a bicycle, writing in a particular language requires practice. The more you do it, the better you will become. The question is, how do you know if you are practicing it the right way? You don't want to spend years reinforcing bad habits, so here are few ideas for developing positive, language-building habits.

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1) Involve as Many Senses as Possible

Just reading words on a page will only get you so far. If you really want to learn how to speak and write like a native speaker, you need to immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. In addition to reading English, you also need to speak it and, above all, hear it. If you do not live in a place where English is regularly spoken, the internet provides many alternatives. With news podcasts, live radio streaming, and even YouTube, you have a wide variety of opportunities to access real, spoken English. Listen to a news program or radio broadcast and then try to mimic the words they say.

Unlike reading, which requires a large amount of brain power and attention, listening to a radio simulcast requires much less of your direct attention. You can play it in the background while doing other things, such as cooking, eating, or even sleeping. That's right. When I was trying to learn German, I used put on a simulcast of German radio when I would lay down for an afternoon nap. Sometimes, this type of passive listening can help you with pronunciation, pitch, and vocabulary.

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2) Read a Newspaper, Especially the Living or Lifestyle Section

Newspapers are the single greatest source for interesting and up-to-date information in a target language. Newspapers also contain more idiomatic (colloquial) language than anything else. There was a woman who came to the Writing Lab Conversation Group every day with questions about the words used in the Purdue student newspaper. Just by reading the student interviews and profiles, she was able to gain quick and easy access to the linguistic world of native speakers. If there are no English-language newspapers in your area, newspapers also have great online content. Just Google your favorite newspaper, and you will generally find the same information as you would find in the print edition.

If you have limited extra time during your day, I suggest looking through the Lifestyle or Living section of a newspaper (the one filled with local profiles, cartoons, and advice columns). These sections generally contain the highest amout of easy-to-read language, and they are also the most interesting. Sometimes it is tough to concentrate on a news story discussing complex political or economic issues. It is much more easy to relate to a woman seeking advice about her nosy mother-in-law.

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3) Write Emails to a Native Speaker

Most composition work is now done on a computer, and so if you are looking to improve your English writing skills on the computer, you should do it in as many venues as possible. The easiest and most rewarding venue is email. Make it a habit to write at least one email per day to a native speaker of your target language. Don't limit yourself to conversational topics such as the weather. Try to discuss what you are learning in one of your classes, or try to tell them about recent political developments in your country. Once you find success composing emails to native friends, you may find that composing an essay in English has also become easier. Emails are high reward, low risk writing tasks. You won't receive a bad grade or failing test score for making a mistake.

If don't have any native speaker friends, there are plenty of places that will help you. Try posting something on someone's blog. You could even post something on this blog! Or try an international pen pal Web site like,

http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/penpals.asp

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As always, good luck, and I would love to hear from some of you out there about your own L2 (second language) composition strategies.

Brady Spangenberg