Babel Volume 47 Number 2 | Page 17

Name

Country of birth

Language spoken at home

Visited Macedonia?

Petar Australia Macedonian( dialect) twice No

no

once

Attended kindergarten?

Yes, bilingual

Yes, English

Yes, English

Simon Australia Macedonian( grandparents) no Yes, English

Table 1: Sociolinguistic profiles of the children

brought to the attention of the public by their protests against the official designation of Macedonians as‘ Slav-Macedonians’ by the Australian Government and especially the renaming of the Macedonian language as‘ Macedonian( Slavonic)’ by the Government of Victoria in 1994( Clyne & Kipp, 1997).

RESEARCH BACKGROUND

The starting point for this study comes from the theory that suggests that a strong basis in the first language serves as the best foundation for high achievement in a second language. This is known as the‘ Interdependence Hypothesis’( Cummins, 2000). The theory holds that there is a common underlying proficiency in bilingual literacy development.

A successful bilingual program should provide for the development of academic skills and concepts in both languages( Cummins, 2000). Cummins and Swain( 1986) demonstrate that different languages often share the same properties such as concepts, skills and linguistic and cognitive knowledge. Furthermore, transferable to the second language are the linguistic and structural rules of writing in the first language( Hakuta & Diaz, 1984; Hakuta, 1986), even where the orthography and grammar rules are different( de Courcy & Yue, 2009; Aidman, 1995; Datta, 2004).

Transfer of literacy skills can be positive, as in Arefi’ s( 1997) study, or negative, as in Hayes-Harb’ s( 2006) study, where students transferred their habit, acquired in Arabic, of focusing on the consonants to work out the meaning of a word, to English, where the vowels are more important. This highlights the point, signalled by Cummins( 2000, p. 194) that‘“ Automatic” transfer of academic skills across languages will not happen unless students are given opportunities to read and write extensively in English in addition to the minority language’ and that formal instruction in the features of both languages is necessary to aid transfer. He further notes( 2000, p. 184) that where the two languages are quite

Three( aged 3,5 & 7)

Yes, English

distant, it may be more underlying skills to do with literacy that are transferred, rather than knowledge of surface features.

Bilingual literacy occurs when a child either simultaneously or successively understands all the language skills and processes – reading, writing, speaking and listening – in both languages. These‘ biliterate’ children have cognitive flexibility and a greater understanding of language systems, which is vital for academic proficiency and general literacy skills( Datta, 2004). Research by Ricciardelli( 1992) with Italian-English bilingual children and monolingual English speaking children highlighted the benefits of maintaining and developing bilingualism. Those who had age appropriate ability in both languages performed better in English than the other children. In addition, other research by Cummins( 1984) indicates that it is more than just oral or everyday competence that is needed to pass the second threshold, but a more‘ school like’ literacy-based, context-independent competence. He has described these as BICS( Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP( Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency).

Bilingual children understand that the two languages they use have grammatical differences and use different vocabulary, phonology, word order and functional aspects, and that different skills from the first language are used in order to understand the target language( Datta, 2004). They can separate different meaning units in a sentence for both languages, can identify word boundaries and understand how the language is used. Bilingual children use their experience, background and cultural knowledge of their first language to understand and make sense of the new language, when it is being learned after the acquisition of their first language( Baker, 2006).

There is an extensive literature validating the interdependence hypotheses in the similar Roman script language context( French-English, Italian- English, Spanish- English)( Ganschow & Sparks, 1995; Bialystok, 1997; Perez, 2004; Reyes, 2006). Therefore, this research intends to explore the interdependence hypothesis in a Macedonian-English bilingual context, where findings on the transfer theory are very limited. The Macedonian language is an Indo-European language from the family of Slavic languages belonging to the South- Slavic group. The other Slavonic languages are Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian. The Macedonian language is written in Cyrillic script, though only a transliterated version of its pronunciation will be presented in this paper, except for the handwritten samples of student work included in the appendix. Like English, the order of the main elements in the sentence is subject-verb-object( Friedman, 2001), but unlike English, spelling has a consistent sound-symbol correspondence.

Aidman’ s 1995 study is the only one we were aware of that investigated the development of literacy in English and a Slavic language( Russian). The study reported here is the last in a program of research into literacy in English and non- Roman script languages, by Michele de Courcy and her Victorian graduate students. Previous studies investigated the role of literacy in Arabic( de Courcy, 2007), Korean, Japanese and Hebrew( de Courcy & Yue, 2009, de Courcy, 2006).

Research questions

In order to investigate the major research question for this study( how does literacy in the first language, Macedonian, affect the acquisition of English as a second language in a bilingual setting?), the following questions were formulated: � What writing strategies, skills, and knowledge do bilingual children bring from their first language( Macedonian) to develop literacy in English?

� What are bilingual children’ s motivation, attitudes, interests, and learning styles in the acquisition of bilingual literacy?

� How do these children perform in English in comparison with other children in the state and native speakers of English in their own year level?

METHODOLOGY

The focus of the primary question for this study was to analyse the processes of literacy interaction between bilingual children’ s first language( Macedonian) and English. A qualitative research method was chosen in order to search for‘ meaning’ in the process of describing and interpreting. The most suitable design used in order to answer the research questions for this study was a case study. A case study is defined as an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a small number of cases or a single case( Yin, 2009).

The participants

The participants for this study are from a bilingual program situated in a government school, located in Melbourne. The school has three sections – a mainstream( English

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