BLOG ENTRY #12, Resarch article: Exposing preschoolers to the printed word: A case study of preschool teachers in Mauritius

Owodally,A.M.A.(2013). Exposing preschoolers to the printed word: A case study of preschool teachers in Mauritius. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 13: 52

This article is about the emergent English language education in preschools in Mauritius. The unique language context of teaching is very interesting: in Mauritius, people all speak Mauritian Creole, but English and French are the main print languages for education.

The curriculum and teacher manuals in Mauritius suggests that the teacher should just provide a print-rich environment (books, letters, signs, etc.) and do not need to teach letters, or words or other literacy skills, however, the teacher should be focusing on the meaning-making process of books, and enlighten children with the pictures in the books. I think it is interesting because most of the above is what I would agree with when teaching emergent literacy to young children: which is to fully immerse children in a print word, and many things and skills will kick in when the children are ready. But the writer doesn’t agree with that idea because he has considered the unique multicultural context of teaching English. He thinks that in such multilingual context, the teachers should be trained to teach letters, words, sounds and decoding. Studies showed that children at the very initial stages of English acquisition could learn both linguistic comprehension and decoding-related components of early literacy from explicit group instruction’ (Roberts and Neal, 2004, p. 283)

After reading this I have two major thoughts.

First, based on my field experience in preschool and what I learned and read about emergent literacy, I changed my mind from “just provide the literacy environment and occasionally meaning-making reading lessons and wait for everything to kick in” to “it would be beneficial and even necessary to do direct instruction on print/decoding skills (consist of print knowledge, the alphabetic principle, phonological/phonemic awareness) with children who are emergent language learners”.

Second, when the author worries about the lack of picture books in Mauritian Creole would do bad to children’s literacy learning process in the special context, it occurs to me to think about the language immersion programs both in the US and China. Because many second language educators believe that the “immersion” is the best way for children to learn “authentic language”. For example, in a Chinese immersion program starts from preschool, Chinese is the only language could be used by students, both written and spoken, and all the reading materials are in Chinese as well. Vice Versa, In a English learning center in China, English is the only language to use, and all the teachers are native speakers of English. This kind of programs are very common around the world, however, after reading and thinking, I start to question the necessity of using young children’s native language to read and to learn at some point, even though it is immersion program. I found myself confused with this: in Chinese culture context, should we teach literacy like letters and sound first before we get to the meaning-making process with picture books?I guess the answer should lie in future practices.