In the course of a research project on the language use and literacy practices of trilingual children in the Gujerati Muslim community in London, I used dual language books as a means of verifying children’s skills in English and Gujerati.
In the course of a visit to the children’s homes by myself and a Gujerati speaking researcher we left a book with instruction for members of the family to read it to the children (and hear them read it themselves when they could) in both languages. The children were told they would be asked to retell the story on separate occasions in both languages. Some two weeks later the research assistant visited the children’s homes and recorded them telling the story in Gujerati. To ensure an appropriate language context, I then visited the children in school and recorded them retelling the stories in English.
The stories used on this occasion were the Raja’s Big Ears (Desai,) with children aged eleven, The Naughty Mouse (Stone) with children aged seven and The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle) with children aged three and a half. All children except two of the very youngest recorded their stories and these recordings were transcribed. The findings were used in the LLMF study (Sneddon, 2000) to comment on children’s levels of skill in spoken English and Gujerati and also on their story telling skills: their recall of the detail of story, their understanding of sequence and significant events. The stories of the two older groups of children were also analysed in terms of their personal interpretations of character and plot and their references to any underlying meaning. A detailed analysis of the language used by the children aged eleven in their Gujerati versions was carried out by Sneddon and Patel (2003)
For the purposes of the LLMF study a short comparison was made of the stories told in English by the children aged eleven with a group of monolingual English children who were matched on social and educational variables and had obviously encountered the story in one language only. The main purpose of this was to compare the Gujerati speaking children’s English language narrative skills with those of a monolingual group. However the findings suggested that the Gujerati children showed a deeper understanding of the underlying meaning of the story.
With a view to exploring whether this finding might be due to the fact that the children had encountered the story in two languages and that subtle differences in meaning between the two versions may have added depth, a socially and educationally similar group of Gujerati speaking children were recorded retelling the story after having encountered it in the same way as the original group (at home with their families), but in an English version only. The (unpublished) findings suggested a hierararchy.
When Kanta Patel and I explored the Gujerati recordings in detail we were intrigued and frustrated. With hindsight we wished that we had arranged to observe parents reading with their children and discussing the stories. Some parents and some the children made comments to us about the use of vocabulary in the stories; it was obvious that some children struggled with complex sentences and, for example, expressing causation in Gujerati. While few of the children aged eleven could read Gujerati, two could read a little and several had some basic decoding skills, but we had no information on how these skills were used in the interchange between parents and children. While parents had been asked to read with the children in both English and Gujerati (and all children were able to read the English text themselves) we had no idea how the two parallel texts were used.
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