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Abstract
Home language literacy education in Australia has been pursued predominantly through Community Language Schools. At present, some 1000 of these, attended by over 100,000 school-age children, cater for 69 of the over 300 languages spoken in Australia. Despite good intentions, these schools face a number of challenges. For instance, children may lack motivation and perceive after-hours schooling as an unnecessary burden. Trained teachers and suitable teaching materials are often not available. Moreover, not every language can be offered in each city or region. Hence, home language speakers’ needs are often not met. This situation has detrimental effects for children, families and communities, and entails a loss of opportunities for the country. Reporting on an alternative approach, this paper presents a pilot study conducted in Australia with English–German bilinguals. We sought to investigate whether primary school-aged children can self-direct their home language literacy acquisition through playing online educational games in the privacy of their homes and with little adult input. Results indicate that the games can be effective in promoting emergent literacy development. Thus, such a grassroots approach could become a viable option for multilingual societies, addressing some of the practical challenges faced by, for instance, Community Language Schools.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Griffith University’s Arts, Education and Law Collaborative Research Project Grant Scheme. We sincerely thank the reviewers of this paper for their helpful and detailed comments, which have helped to improve this paper considerably. Last but not least, we are indebted to Kirsten Hartel and Alexander Borkowski for their exceptional research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Whether Anglo-Australians can be considered migrants is a matter of debate. In an interesting discussion, Smolicz (Citation1999, 12) asked, ‘Could Captain Phillip [first Governor of the British penal colony of New South Wales and founder of the settlement that became Sydney in 1788] be viewed as a migrant?’ His answer was ‘It would seem not, since migration generally implies prior permission to land, and none was asked at the time’.
2. ‘Longer-standing’ arrivals are those who arrived before 2007, and ‘recent’ arrivals those who arrived in the period from 2007 to the Census Night in 2011 (9 August 2011; Australian Bureau of Statistics Citation2012a, section on ‘Cultural Diversity in Australia’).
3. The ‘White Australia Policy’ or ‘Immigration Restriction Act’ was the first Act of Parliament passed after Federation (1901). Its aim was to promote a homogenous population by restricting immigration to mainly northern Europeans (Clark Citation1987).
4. In fact, according to Clyne (Citation1991), bilingual education in Australia was better accepted in the nineteenth century than it is today.
5. A number of alternative terms have been used in the literature (including ‘mother tongue’, ‘first language’, ‘home language’, ‘native language’, ‘heritage language’). None of these is unproblematic. For lack of a better term, we adopt ‘home language’, the language acquired by the child through immersion at home.
6. The census documents this process of home language attrition: while 53% of first generation Australians speak a language other than English at home, the proportion of second generation speakers is much lower at 20%, and lower still for the third-plus generation (1.6%). These figures indicate clearly that despite what some opponents may claim, the home language is not a threat to English.
7. As Minister for Trade in 2010, Dr Craig Emerson claimed, ‘Australian exports generated more than 20 per cent of Australia's gross domestic product. Both exports and imports create employment: one in five Australian jobs is related to trade and expanding our international trade will help secure a high-skill, high-wage future’ (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Citation2011).
8. As Piller (Citation2012) noted in a response to a blog, there is a significant overlap between ‘foreign language’ and ‘community language’, as some of the most frequently taught ‘foreign languages’ (Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean) are also major ‘community languages’.
9. Despite parents’ and teachers’ concerns that literacy in the home language may impact negatively on literacy in the mainstream language (e.g., through a possible confusion between writing systems), most researchers strongly emphasize the benefits of home language literacy (see Bialystok Citation2001 for a thorough review of the literature).
10. It should be noted that transfer from the home to the mainstream language could be facilitated or hindered by the literacy practices the child experiences, e.g., at home and/or in a formal environment such as Sunday schools.
11. The concept of ‘semi-lingualism’ has been criticized by scholars such as Skutnabb-Kangas (Citation2000) and Grosjean (Citation1985), to name just two. Due to length considerations we will not discuss this issue in the paper.
12. Smolicz (Citation1999, 89) sees that children of non-English-speaking backgrounds come not empty handed, but bearing cultural gifts, chief among which are their linguistic resources.
13. By ‘basic literacy skills’ we refer to the development of emergent reading and spelling competencies, mainly at the word level, including complex words (such as compounds).
14. Recent German migrants in Australia are predominantly middle-class families. Thus, the Australian context limited us to this particular social class for our pilot study.
15. This discussion is beyond the scope of the present study but see Schalley, Eisenchlas, and Moyes (forthcoming).
16. Children were asked to add dashes in the dictation to indicate when they recognized that a sound was present but they could not provide a written representation for this sound. The stimuli included: Sofa ‘sofa’ /zoːfaː/, Baum ‘tree’ /baum/, Mund ‘mouth’ /mʊnt/, Fahrrad ‘bike’ /faː ɐraːt/, Mauer ‘wall’ /mauɐ/, Eimer ‘bucket’ /aimɐ/, Leiter ‘ladder’ /laitɐ/, Besen ‘broom’ /beːzən/ and Lokomotive ‘railroad engine’ /lokomotiːvə/.
17. Note that in both the pre- and post-test, the children performed the free writing task before the other tasks, so that results obtained for the free writing task were not influenced by performance of the other tasks.
18. Even the all upper-case spelling of LKW ‘truck’ is correct, as LKW is the usual abbreviation for Lastkraftwagen.
19. English interference effects are still present in results for both the pre-test (e.g., carten instead of the target form Karten) and the post-test (e.g., Tea instead of German Tee).