Babel Volume 47 Number 2 | Page 18

BILINGUAL CHILDREN UNDERSTAND THAT THE TWO LANGUAGES THEY

USE HAVE GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES AND USE

DIFFERENT VOCABULARY, PHONOLOGY, WORD

ORDER AND FUNCTIONAL ASPECTS. medium) program with ESL support and two Heritage language bilingual programsone in Greek and one in Macedonian. The Macedonian bilingual program is divided into four groups- Preparatory / 1, 2, 3 / 4 and 5 / 6. The curriculum is taught through an integrated approach via themes suited to the interest of the particular age and year level and in line with the Victorian Essential Learning Standards( VELS). The Year 3 students, who are the participants in this study, have eight hours per week of the curriculum content of Mathematics, some Studies of Society and Environment( SOSE) and some Literacy covered in Macedonian and seventeen hours, including the specialist subjects( Music, Physical Education, Information Technology and Art), in English. The number of hours for language content classes differs for junior classes( Preparatory to Year 2). The students in junior levels have twelve hours of contentbased language learning in Macedonian and thirteen hours of English including the specialist subjects. Therefore the children in this study have been exposed to an extended time of content-based language learning in their previous schooling

The participants were six nine-year-old children, Angela, Maria, Petar, Ivana, Simon and Damian( not their real names). This group of six children was drawn from the Year 3 class after discussion with their teachers and those parents who had consented for their children to participate. The six children were deliberately chosen because they displayed diverse abilities in Macedonian and English literacy. The children were chosen according to the teachers’ assessment of their ability in Macedonian literacy: Angela and Maria have high ability in Macedonian, Petar and Ivana are intermediate and Simon and Damian are low. The children have been attending the Macedonian / English bilingual school from the age of five. Their mother tongue is Macedonian and their second language is English. Table 1, above, lists the children’ s biographical details. The setting for this study was the school environment, and all data were collected at school.

After university ethics permission was obtained and permission also obtained from the state education department and the research site, data collection could commence. Data were gathered through video-recorded‘ think aloud’ protocols of writing in Macedonian and in English, stimulated recall interviews with the children, and analysis of the writing samples collected. We also included semi-structured interviews with the children after they had finished writing, where they were asked questions about their language abilities and feelings about learning in both Macedonian and English. The official results from the literacy assessment National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy( NAPLAN) conducted at the school and assessed by Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority( VCAA) were also obtained.

Data collection and analysis

The data collection took place at school in the last two weeks of May, immediately after the completion of the NAPLAN tests. The teacher-researcher( Smilevska) asked each child to write two personal recounts, one in Macedonian and one in English, of the school activities that took place the previous day( Multicultural day). The children worked individually with the teacher-researcher. Since Smilevska had previously been the children’ s Macedonian bilingual teacher, the instructions were given in Macedonian. The children were given the opportunity to converse in English during the English writing protocol but all of them chose to speak in Macedonian even when writing in English. They were accustomed to speaking with this teacher in Macedonian, so this would have influenced their behaviour even in this research setting. The children were video-recorded while they were writing and talking aloud about what they were doing. The children wrote one text after the other in the same session, and followed their writing with discussion with the teacher researcher. The duration of the data collection for both languages was one school session( one hour).

The use of think aloud protocols in both languages was used to see whether a child’ s use of a writing strategy to write a Macedonian text was also seen when writing an English text. The main focus was not on examining the change of children’ s literacy development that occurs over a period of time, but on revealing his or her literacy processes during the writing of a text. Therefore, if a child used this writing strategy while writing both Macedonian and English texts, it can be said that the transfer of writing strategies tends to occur despite the language differences.

Once the students had completed their writing, the researchers conducted retrospective interviews with the child, using the texts he or she produced as a stimulus. This technique looks into the processes the child uses to produce the texts in accordance with given topics and how the child brings together a number of different experiences from Macedonian into English writing. These processes are called‘ simulated recall’ interviews.

In order to learn what children like to read and write, and whether they thought that reading and writing in both languages was important or not, informal interviews were conducted with the students. The reason to do this was to obtain valuable information about bilingual children’ s affective factors in language learning. In this study, in order

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