A community of learners: Cambodians in an adult ESL classroom

Abstract

This article focuses on the English literacy development of Cambodian adults living in the United States. Using an adult ESL classroom as a c o n t e x t , the researcher describes: how the Cambodian adults, literate in K h m e r, participate in each other's English literacy development; h o w Cambodian children, fluent though not typically literate in Khmer, participate in their parents' development of English literacy ; and how a Cambodian teacher participates in his students' development of English literacy. To answer these questions it examines how the participants draw on multiple linguistic competencies to help each other accomplish classroom tasks. In contrast to traditional home-school discontinuity studies, it is argued that people have multiple ways for sharing knowledge and creating environments for learning, e s p e c i a l l y in the case of immigrant communities that are in the process of cultural change and adaptation. This article focuses on the English literacy development of Cambodian adults living in the United States. Using an adult ESL classroom as a context, I will describe: how the Cambodian adults, literate in Khmer, participate in each other's English literacy d e v e l o p m e n t ; how Cambodian children, fluent though not typically literate in Khmer, participate in their parents' development of English literacy ; and how a Cambodian teacher participates in his students' development of English literacy. By 'participate' I mean the ways in which the students, their children, and the teacher utilize their various complexes of biliteracy competencies to help each other complete classroom literacy activities. Of course, approaches to literacy in immigrant families are not static, b u t constantly changing. Wo l c o t t 's (1991: 267) notion of ' p r o p r i o s p e c t s ' , © Arnold 1999 1362-1688(99)LR044.OA

Multilingual pedagogies in practice

“…To enable this, teachers can group students with shared languages together (Chau, 2007;Goldstein, 2003) and explicitly support home language use in collaborative activities (Goldstein, 2003;Mohanty et al, 2010). Teachers can also engage students as classroom experts (Hardman, 1999), inviting them to co-teach, translate, translanguage, or present in home language (García, Flores, & Woodley, 2012).…”

“…Students can create translanguaging texts, as in Schwinge's (2003) example of home language speech bubbles alongside English language stories. Additionally, students can share feedback and explain corrections multilingually in peer drafting activities (de Jong & Freeman Field, 2010;Hardman, 1999).…”

Developing mental orthographic representations in refugee spellers with low literacy: how much input is too much?

“…A growing number of researchers are investigating this community and their learning needs, most notably the Low Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition Symposium, which meets yearly to share research and develop plans to better serve this community. Many suggest that learners are to be instructed in phonics and sound–letter correspondences (Hardman, ; Haverson & Haynes, 1982; Shaughnessy, ), and best practices include explicitly teaching word recognition and alphabetic print literacy(Bigelow & Schwarz, ; Bigelow & Vinogradov, ; Burt, Peyton, & Schaetz, 2008).…”

Conflicting Ideologies and Language Policy in Adult ESL: Complexities of Language Socialization in a Majority-L1 Classroom

“…Others stress the need to look at the diversity of bilingual and multilingual educational settings in order to get a better grasp on the benefits and challenges of language learning (Hélot & de Mejía, 2008). This includes English language learning settings, where studies have found benefits in utilizing and valuing students' first languages in the classroom (Hardman, 1999;Lucas & Katz, 1994;Malicky & Derwing, 1993).…”

“…It has been pointed out that discussion around bilingual education and ideologies must focus not only on institutions and students, but also teachers. Having not only a space for bilingual learning but also bilingual instructors is something that is important (Hardman, 1999). In addition, it is important to understand teachers' ideologies of learning and language and for teachers to be reflective of this in order to create spaces for agency and change (Pease-Alvarez et al, 2010).…”