Multiliteracy Skills
How and when to introduce
reading and writing to
multilingual children

By Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Have you given any thought to biliteracy or multiliteracy? These are probably not the first things that come to mind between your trips to the grocery store and failed attempts to explain what sharing means to angry siblings.

NOW is the time to start thinking and planning. What do you envision for your children? Do you want your children to be able to read and write in your language? Do you have dreams of sitting in the living room with your children discussing your favorite authors?

The question is: How will you go about making this happen?

Will you send your children to a bilingual or immersion school? Perhaps a Saturday school or an afterschool program? Most likely, if you want your children to be biliterate or multiliterate, you will need to take on the task yourself.

In this issue of Multilingual Living Magazine, we will share the expertise of Tracy Tokuhama-Espinosa as she guides us along this path.

Don’t let fear or worry keep you from helping your children read and write in your language! The time your children spend with you at home reading and writing is absolutely essential to literacy in more than one language!

Learning to read is an exciting time in your child’s life, doing this in more than one language is doubly so!

Something that zealous parents should remember, however, is that while speaking more than one language is widespread (most of the world does so), reading and writing skills are not as common. To make matters even more complex, learning to read and learning to write are complimentary, but distinct skills in the brain. The following is a summary of key ideas related to multiliteracy skills (for more detailed information, see Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa’s The Multilingual Mind, 2003, Praeger Press).

To be a good reader in two or more languages, a child must give time and practice to each. This is different from oral skills as learning vocabulary in the first language usually transpires into increased vocabulary in the second language; the same spin-off benefits do not exist for reading and writing, however. Having said this, a child with strong oral skills in Spanish and English, who then learns to read in Spanish, has a very good chance of becoming a good reader in English as well—but it is not automatic! Each language has to be given time to develop.

According to linguistic experts, on average, it takes a child about two years to reach native-language speaking levels in a second language, but 5-7 years to reach academic written equivalency (see table).

© Tokuhama-Espinosa. Based in part on information from Cummins (1983); Gibbins (1999); and Corson (1993, 1995).

There are five basic steps to assuring multiliteracy skills (being able to read and write in more than one language):

1. Understand the use of the written word
2. Learn the phonemic alphabet
3. Acknowledge exceptions in sound to letter relation
4. Acknowledge exceptions between languages
5. Practice: Familiarity, Repetition and Frequency

Let’s look at these steps in the context of a fictitious situation:
Jane is an American married to a Spaniard, living with their two children in Spain. She speaks English, her husband Spanish. Their four-year-old son, Juan, goes to a Spanish preschool. Juan is beginning to learn the vowels, recognizing the written letter and also the sound.

1.Understand the use of the written word and 2. Learn the phonemic alphabet.
In an ideal situation, Juan’s mother, Jane, has been reading and speaking to him in English since he was born. At around three or so when Juan began showing a natural curiosity for letters she encouraged this interest and helped him label the symbols that corresponded to letters using her native English. (If she sees a sign that says pescado she can tell Juan that it starts with a “peee,” not “peh” as in Spanish.)

There are many ways natural curiosity about language manifests itself. For example, Juan might see a “P” in a billboard, newspaper or book and ask, “hey mom, is that my letter?” When my youngest was three, I remember him telling me he “read” the McDonald sign, while a four-year old friend accompanying us said “That’s nothing,” as she pointed to the four circles which are the Audi car logo, “this says a-u-d-i!” This sophisticated matching of symbols (logos) to words (concepts) is a huge first step towards building literacy skills. At this stage, children learn that written language can be used to label things, and especially, to record information, such as in stories, or making lists.

3. Acknowledge exceptions in sound to letter relation and 4. Acknowledge exceptions between languages.
Ideally, Juan starts pre-school in Spanish with a working knowledge of pre-literacy skills in English already in place. Then, when Juan begins to learn letters and their corresponding Spanish sounds at school his mom continues to read in English at home, but stops (temporarily) explicitly teaching the names of the alphabet and their corresponding sounds in English. Why? It is very hard for a child to learn biliteracy skills simultaneously, especially from two different trusted sources: “But, my mother says something different,” or “My teacher corrected me and said it was like this…” When the child is slightly older and has a cognitive understanding of the different languages (can label them by name), then mom can begin again to point out that “yes, in Spanish we say “eeee” but in this English word the letter “e” sounds like “ehh”. This helps the child with understanding not only the exceptions in the letter sound to symbol correspondence, but also the exceptions between languages. It is important to note that most consonants are very close, and that the exceptions are usually found in the vowels (a,e,i,o,u). If Juan’s mother has not yet taught him the phonemic alphabet in English before he starts learning Spanish, she should not try to do so until he (1) gains a firm grasp on the Spanish alphabet and (2) can clearly label and distinguish between Spanish and English. She should, however, continue to strengthen Juan’s mother-tongue vocabulary by reading to him in English frequently.

5. Practice, Familiarity, Repetition and Frequency
As noted above, good readers read a lot, and give time to each of their languages. My daughter learned pre-literacy skills in English with me before she started reading in German at school in the first grade. About two years later she told me it was “too bad” she had never learned to read in Spanish (her father’s language). When I asked her why she thought she couldn’t read in Spanish she said because she had “never had a class in it.” Excitedly, we took advantage of this opportunity and my husband began to read more with her in Spanish, pointing out the sound to symbol correspondence, while I explicitly pointed out that the vowels in Spanish were very similar to those in German (which she found easy by that point). She began to read in Spanish more fluently. We lived in Switzerland at the time, and Spanish books were expensive and not commonly found. We had more English books available than anything else (thanks to my mother! And the nearby American Library), and so she spent more time reading for pleasure in English than in Spanish or German. When she got to the third grade, however, German began to dominate based on the amount of school reading. Spanish picked up four years ago when we moved to South America. Because of the equal amounts of opportunity (country, school and parental presence), availability of resources (books in all languages), and personal motivation (friends and relatives who highly recommended X book in x language), she now reads at or slightly above age level in these three languages: Practice, familiarity, repetition and frequency were vital factors. Her writing skills, however, are another story.

Because all of her schooling is in German, I would have to say this is her superior written language. To my chagrin, her English spelling is still pretty atrocious, but as English and Spanish are now also required in school as subjects, I find she accepts corrections from her teachers better than from her parents and her writing is improving here as well. An additional factor in writing that did not exist when “we” were kids is the computer. My daughter argues endlessly about the unnecessary need to learn to spell (“the computer can do that later!”). To her credit, her teachers (English, Spanish and German) always comment on her sophisticated content—just before they slam her awful spelling. I have faith, however, that with time (practice, familiarity, repetition and frequency) her writing skills will also blossom.

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TRACEY TOKUHAMA-ESPINOSA is the author of Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children (2000) and The Multilingual Mind: Questions by, for and about people living with many languages (2003). www.multifaceta.com.

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