The Raja's Big Ears: The Journey of a Story across Cultures

Abstract

The story of The Raja's Big Ears, as we encountered it, has been on a long journey. In the course of a wider study of the language use and literacy practices of Gujerati-speaking Muslim children in a North London community, children were recorded retelling the tale both in English and Gujerati. The present study explores how the story travelled: from Gujerat, in India, where it is a well-known folk tale, via a skilled story-teller, to London, where it was transformed through contact with the multicultural world of London schoolchildren. The study is situated within the theoretical framework of language shift, social networks and the Cummins' concept of the Common Underlying Proficiency. As the children in the study retold the tale, we looked more closely at how they -third generation Londoners and speakers of a dialect of Gujerati -came to terms with the very formal and unfamiliar standard Gujerati of the story, and how they made it their own.

Magda and Albana: Learning to Read with Dual Language Books

“…A more recent study of the literacy practices of Gujerati and Urdu speaking families in London (Sneddon, 2000) found that parents appreciated the fact that teachers sent Gujerati/English books home because they had great difficulty in finding suitable reading material for their children in Gujerati. In a related study, Sneddon and Patel (2003) found evidence, from children's re-telling of stories encountered in Gujerati and English dual language texts, of complex negotiations of meaning across both languages. However, that study did not provide direct evidence of exactly how the parallel texts in the dual language books had been used.…”

“…The studies describe children comparing and contrasting their learning (Kenner, Robertson), playing school (Gregory), teaching each other (Kenner), negotiating meaning from a text in several languages (Creese et al, 2006;Datta, 2001;Robertson, 2004;Sneddon & Patel, 2003), blending and creating new strategies and demonstrating a wealth of metalinguistic knowledge. Gregory et al (2004) highlight the important role of family and community members acting as mediators of this process.…”