I have a cousin, some 15 years my junior, whom I will call JACKIE because that is not her name. Jackie is a single mom with one child whom I will call DIANA. Jackie, like mini parents of only one child, thanks her baby is of incalculable genius, and so was quite set back when Diana’s kindergarten teacher told her she was having difficulty reading. As I understand it, there has been no diagnosis of anything pathological; Dianah is simply not at the top of her class as Jackie expects.
Jackie is an engineer whose work frequently takes her to Mexico and so requires her to speak Spanish in professional contexts. She often does so at home simply to keep in practice, and so Diana has acquired not if you words of that language. Diana’s father is not in the picture, and so far as I know, there is nobody else in their life who regularly talks Spanish to Diana.
Recently Jackie wondered aloud to me whether her daughter’s difficulty with reading might be because of the lack of phonemic orthography in English, Coming to me because my three bio-kids are very close in age to Diana and none have suffered similar difficulties. I replied that I don’t know but that it might be possible. Jackie then speculated that teaching Diana to read Spanish might assist the little girl in her acquisition of English literacy. Again she requested my input; again I declined to offer much, partly because I simply don’t know for sure and partly because offering criticism of other people’s parenting is fraught with peril. Bbut I am dubious. Jackie and Diana live in Chattanooga, and thus the vast majority of the baby’s interactions are with English-speaking people and literature. Teaching Diana to be multilingual is a good idea in and of itself, I think, but adding the task of acquiring Spanish-literacy proficiency when she is already having difficulty with literacy in her primary language just doesn’t seem like the best idea to me. If I were going to give Jackie advice (Which I am not), I would say to double down on home drills in English, but not before consulting a specialist in the topic.
But that’s just me. What do you think? Would encouraging my baby niece to read and write Spanish help her to learn literacy in English?
If you think about it, the phonemic consistency of Spanish is not a million miles away from the phonics that is taught in many early years contexts in English-speaking schools, before we expose them to the full brunt of English spelling.
So… I can see how it could help, but I could imagine ways it wouldn’t. Hard to judge without actually being there (and without being an education professional)
Anecdotally a former co-worker grew up in Mexico going to local schools (his family moved there from the U.S. to manage a manufacturing plant) and his English spelling was often terrible and looked as if he was trying to write English words as if they were Spanish words. Like, Brian might be spelled Braian. On the other hand, he was a terrible student and didn’t care about education and spelling.
On the third hand, lots of six year olds are terrible spellers; they’re still learning!
I’m not sure this is relevant, but my kids all went to French immersion schools and were taught to read French before English. Parents were enjoined not to teach them to read in English for fear of interfering with their French. One of my kids taught himself to read around 4 years old but none of this seemed to make any difference. At one point the self-taught one was reading aloud to his year and a half older sister and she kept correcting his reading errors. My wife caught on and asked her to start reading. She objected that she could not read English. My wife insisted she try so she did and then chuckled that maybe she could read English after all.
I don’t know what conclusion to draw from all this except it probably doesn’t matter what you do. Probably the most important thing to do is read to your kids. Every day.
The whole point of phonic reading instruction is that the learner already is fluent in listening and speaking the language in which literacy is being taught. That fluency is used as a bridge towards decoding the printed form of the language. If Diana isn’t already fluent in Spanish, using it as a daily language, then she isn’t likely to have any advantage with acquiring general reading skills through Spanish. So unless she’s bilingual, there’s no point.
Besides, the consistency of English orthography is not really the issue with struggling readers anyway.
The key to this whole question is why Diana is struggling with reading. With some reasons for struggling, learning another language might help, while with other reasons, it might hurt. And it sounds to me like nobody has yet consulted the foremost expert on the question of what trouble Diana has with reading.
Jackie should sit down with Diana (and ideally, also with Diana’s teacher, if that’s possible), and just ask her why she thinks she’s having difficulties.
I apologize for the hijack, Skald, but what is the doohickey peppered throughout your OP? It looks like capital OBJ inside a dash-lined box. Or, am I the only one seeing it? :eek: TIA.
The weird character in the OP is U+FFFC (Object replacement character). It’s supposed to be a “placeholder in the text for an unspecified object”, whatever that means. I guess it’s an artifact of Skald the Rhymer’s text-to-speech software, but I don’t know what it was intending to do.
I agree 100%. It’s true that English-speaking children take longer to learn to read, but in the long run a child should reach the same proficiency (more or less) regardless of the language.
If, on the other hand, a child is dyslexic, for example, that could be more pronounced when learning to read in English. However, any advantage to learning to read in another language would best be accomplished by attending a dual-language program–one that is truly dual-language (50-50), and properly delivered, with qualified teachers. “Also studying” Spanish on the side is probably not going to make a great difference, although I don’t think it would hurt, either.
Also, the kid is in kindergarten. There’s nothing wrong with not reading at 5 or 6. Kids develop at different rates; it has nothing to do with their intelligence.
I don’t know of any research which would support Jackie’s theory.*
So long as Diana isn’t falling behind expected benchmarks for her age, all Jackie really needs to do is work hard to instill a love of reading in the lil girl. That means lots of together-time reading, lots of encouragement, lots of fun trips to the library. If the teacher reports actual skill deficiencies, interventions should be taken with the guidance of the school’s literacy specialists.
This. Unless she’s at the bottom of her class or her teachers have seen something that alarms them, this is meaningless. Kids develop at their own rates. It’s often about interest as much as anything.
Many of the kids who have come through the family tutoring biz have had eye problems that were not being diagnosed properly. I’m partial to the Visagraph.
:pI’m told I spoke only Japanese (probably because we had a Japanese maid) until we left Japan when I was four (only remember the bad words now) and eye cne tawk and rite iinglish reel gooder!
Seriously though, I don’t know if this a real concern or not, but what if the child speaks and is more comfortable with the second language, especially if others praise him/her for his/her fluency, and lets the English slip even more?