Following Roba: What happens when a low-educated adult immigrant learns to read

Abstract

This longitudinal study follows concurrent changes in a multilingual adult English learner's mastery of alphabetic print literacy and his oral learner language. The learner was 29 years old, and began to read and write an alphabetic script for the first time in English, his seventh language, during this study. Systematic observations were made of both his development of specific literacy skills and specific structures in his oral English over the course of six months during one-to-one literacy tutoring sessions with the first author; these occurred one to two times each week. Mixed methods were used for collection of data, including learner observations, oral language tasks, interviews and review of relevant documents. Results document the learner's development of a set of specific literacy skills during the six-month study. Findings include: knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet seemed unrelated to his decoding ability; some syntactic elements of his oral production became more complex with increasing alphabetic literacy, while oral fluency, lexis and pragmatics did not appear to be related to development of alphabetic literacy.

Keywords:

• Second language acquisition
• Alphabetic print literacy
• Learner language

Notes

¹ At the time of the study, Roba said he knew seven languages.

² The Harari and Oromo are ethnic groups from Eastern Africa whose lands are now located within modern-day Ethiopia and northern Kenya. See Melbaa (1999).

³ During one tutoring session, Roba wrote the five symbols he remembered from the Ge'ez script for the first author; when prompted to write his name or any word, he stated that he did not know how.

⁴ We decided to exclude verb + -ing from our verb analysis in this paper because the form was so massively overgeneralised throughout the data set, with and without any subject present, that we found it hard to identify a clear pattern in its use. It would be a good topic for future analysis, but lies beyond the scope of the present study.