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is paper focuses on the child reading the
literatures discussed in the other articles in this
special issue of Bookbird. More specically, it
focuses on how the bilingual brain diers from
the monolingual brain, and provides a general
overview of those areas of dierence that relate
to reading. I conclude with a brief discussion of
the implications of these dierences for literacy
development and education, paying particular
attention to the place for multilingual literatures
within literacy development.
Lydia Kokkola is Professor of English
and Education at Luleå University of
Technology in northern Sweden. She
speaks Finnish at home, English with her
father, and Swedish with her neighbors.
Her research interests include bilingual
literacy education, Holoc aust ction,
Adolescent Sexuality and she has just
begun a new project on advanced
reading skills. Her latest book, Fictions
of Adolescent Carnality, has just been
released from Benjamins.
by LYDIA KOKKOLA
Reading Multilingual
Literature: The Bilingual
Brain and Literacy Education
51.3 – 2013 | 23IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
As this special issue of Bookbird attests, multilingual litera-
cies and literature are ourishing all around the world.
is is hardly surprising: the majority of the world’s
population uses more than one language in their daily life (van
Heuven, Schriefers, Dijkstra, and Hagoort; Crystal). Neverthe-
less, in discussions of literacy education, the monolingual reader is
taken as the norm. Indeed, the assumption of monolingualism is so
deeply rooted in the literature and research that children who are
able to function in more than one language—for instance, immi-
grants, the children of rst generation immigrants and minority
language speakers—are discussed in terms of a lack of ability
(Gkaintartzi and Tsokalidou). Teachers often focus on how bilin-
gual children are “disadvantaged” by their inability to function on
the same level as their monolingual peers in the main language
of the school, rather than acknowledging the full breadth of their
language abilities (ibid.). e article by Teruggi in this issue shows
concretely just how much knowledge multilingual children bring to
literacy situations. is bizarre situation—as the article by Ghiso
and Campano above notes—is partly a legacy of
colonialism and partly a result of “melting pot”
mentality, which assumes that it is only success
in the dominant social language that matters. I
would also add that the sheer volume of research
into monolinguals learning to read has tended
to overshadow research on bilingual readers. As
a result, monolinguals—especially those who
read in English—have become a yardstick by
which bilingual readers are measured, and found wanting. In this
paper, I acknowledge that children whose literacy skills in the main
language of the country they inhabit do not match those of their
monolingual peers will face diculties to the extent that “educa-
tionally disadvantaged” may be an appropriate term, but rather than
dwelling on their problems, I wish to celebrate their achievements.
I will inevitably continue to use English as a yardstick as it is the
only language I can assume all Bookbird readers can understand.
e majority of this paper provides insight into how the bilingual
brain diers from the monolingual brain, and concludes with a brief
discussion of the implications of these dierences for literacy devel-
opment, paying particular attention to the place for multilingual
literatures within literacy development.
e Bilingual Child: Learning Contexts and Prociency
e term “bilingual brain” came into general usage following a
monograph of the same name produced by two Israeli experts—
Albert and Obler—in neurolinguistics in 1978. eir clinical
studies of aphasia (a language disorder usually arising from some
form of trauma such as a stroke in which the patient has diculty
…a legacy of colonialism and
partly a result of “melting pot”
mentality, which assumes that it is
only success in the dominant social
language that matters.
24 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
remembering words, or may be completely unable
to speak, read, or write) were not consistent with
the accepted norms. When they recognized
that most of the neurological research into the
organization of language functions within the
brain was conducted in monolingual societies,
they wondered whether, since very few Israelis
are monolingual, knowledge of more than one
language might be the causal factor. In 1978,
much of the sophisticated technology that is now
used to investigate the brain was simply not avail-
able. Nevertheless, they were able to demonstrate
that there were good grounds to assume that
bilingualism aected brain development, and
although not all of the questions they posed have
found satisfactory answers even today, many of
proposals they put forward, which I shall discuss
below, have been supported by clinical research.
Unfortunately, most
of these studies are
published in specialist
journals using highly
specialist language,
and so are inaccessible
to the people who
most need to know:
parents and teachers.
e descriptions
below are undeniably
simplications, but I
hope provide a useful
starting point.
e rst problem researchers face is with the
term “bilingual.” How well does a person have to
know both lang uages in order to be declared bilin-
gual? Are there any dierences between those
who have learned their languages at the same
time as a child and those who learned a foreign
language at school but became very procient?
Much research has conducted in these areas since
Albert and Obler published their study. For some
of the questions, it looks as though we may be
approaching answers, but not all, for the simple
reason that it depends on why you want to know
the answer. I start with the rst question, which
implies a whole series of other questions: What
does it mean to “know” a language? Does that
mean you have to be able to read and write in it or
is it enough to be able to speak in it? If you mean
the former, then the children quoted in Terug-
gi’s article below cannot be classed as bilingual
despite their obvious prociency in the dominant
language of Italian and their varying degrees of
familiarity with a host of other languages! And
what does it mean to say that someone speaks
“well”? In practice, what most people mean by
“well” is taken to mean “is able to use the stan-
dard grammatical forms, intonation and pronun-
ciation of a highly privileged minority,” academic
English, for instance. Speakers of less appreci-
ated forms (e.g. African American English, East
London English and EFL speakers) are often
treated as though they were not speaking “well,”
even though they are fully able to communi-
cate their ideas. I could continue, but suce it
to note that whenever
researchers use the
expression “bilingual,”
they have to dene the
term.
In this paper,
I am interested in
the children who
will be reading the
multilingual litera-
ture discussed in the
other papers in this
special issue of Book-
bird. Although I do
not know quite how well, the children Teruggi
clearly are used to communicating in a language
other than Italian. e ctional characters in
Before You Were Here (2009) by Samantha Vamos
and Santiago Cohen and Subway Sparrow (1993)
by Leyla Torres and the readers of these two
picture books discussed in the article by Ghiso
and Campano are used to shifting between
languages. ey do not nd this remarkable or
threatening; this just is how the majority of the
world’s population functions.
Children who have learnt both languages
from their environment (in the home, in commu-
nity or both) are known as simultaneous bilinguals,
and for my purposes it is of little interest whether
51.3 – 2013 | 25IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
they learned their languages because they were
raised in a family where more than one language
is spoken or whether they speak one language
at home and another at school, because the
impact on brain development and implications
for reading education are far more similar than
dierent. ere are slight dierences for sequen-
tial bilinguals, i.e., people who learn one language
rst and then a second, typically as a result of
migration, depending on when the move takes
place. Signicant changes in the brain at about
six, nine, and puberty will aect the child’s ability
to take in certain kinds of information which
aects literacy development. In terms of how
well the individual needs to speak the languages
concerned, I am not interested in whether or
not they are “balanced bilinguals,” i.e., equally
procient on both languages. For this paper, it
suces that the child needs both languages to
function in his or her environment, as is implied
by the reading of a text written in more than one
language or reading dierent language books at
dierent times.
Early Language Learning: e First
Five Years
A newborn infant’s brain is “plastic,” i.e., it can
mold itself easily to t its surroundings. Already
in the womb, the fetus has learned to recognize
certain features of the language of her environ-
ment and can distinguish the mother’s voice (and
often other familiar voices). In the early years
of their life, the brain of infants is particularly
attuned to identifying patterns in the language
and in language use. So although newborns are
capable of recognizing all possible speech forms,
fairly quickly, they start to pay selective attention
to those features of the language(s) in their envi-
ronment. is means, for example, that infants
rapidly distinguish between the limited set of
phonemes (identiably distinct sounds) used by
any particular language, and the full range of
possible phonemes that exist in human language.
e same is true in speech production: early
babbling shows that infants can produce the full
range of sounds used in all human languages,
but fairly quickly become selective about which
phonemes they use (Locke Phonological, Babbling;
De Boysson-Bardies, Halle, and Durand).
e connections between speech and meaning
follow slightly later. Intonation is one of the rst
features they will identify and use productively
(Locke Phonological). For instance, infants
surrounded by English speakers, quickly learn
that rising intonation is used to mark the ques-
tion form and so will use this intonation pattern
to initiate contact with others long before they are
able to use words. Word recognition is a decid-
edly more dicult task as, unlike the written
form, spoken languages often run words together
or use truncated forms. Consider, for instance,
the forms “couldn’t,” “wanna,” and “could’ve” as
perfectly acceptable spoken variants of “could
not,” “want to,” and “could have.” ese reduc-
tions of word boundaries are so common that we
have found ways to express them in the written
form, although their use in formal texts is still
frowned upon. But these are only a small part of
the way in which word boundaries are blurred in
speech. For instance, English—especially British
English—makes extensive use of what is known as
the “intrusive R” to link words together when the
rst word ends in a vowel sound and the second
one starts with a vowel sound, so “Grandma and
Grandpa” is pronounced with the sound [r] in
between the rst and second word: “Grandma-
rand Grandpa” and also when the vowel sound is
not written with a vowel, e.g. “Lawrand order.”
is linking of words may make the recognition
of word boundaries more dicult for the infant,
but are vital to later uency. When native speakers
claim that a speaker “sounds foreign” but cannot
identify any errors that might mark the speaker
as a non-native, the problem is very often that the
speaker is marking word boundaries too clearly
and this has aected the rhythm of her speech in
ways that mark it as “foreign.”
For the child growing up in an environment
in which more than one language is spoken, the
task will be that much greater. e palette of
sounds to which she needs to pay attention will
be that much larger as she needs to recognize
all the phonemes used in each of the languages
in her environment. Before she can get started
26 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
with word recognition issues, she will need to gure out which language
is being spoken. For this reason, children growing up in multilingual
homes often do not start speaking as early as their monolingual peers,
and when they do start speaking, they may not receive quite as much
support as it may not be clear which language they are trying to use.
is is not the same thing as speech delay,
which means that the child has diculty in
both understanding and communicating (Steiner
and Hayes). Already at this point, well-inten-
tioned but ill-informed monolingual “experts”
may become anxious and diagnose the child in
terms of “lack” or “problem.” In extreme cases,
teachers, health workers and social workers have
even suggested that the child is suering from
some kind of speech disorder and propose that
the home should become monolingual thereby
depriving the child of access to a second home
language—along with the rich culture that
belongs with that language—not to mention the strain on parent-child
relationships as the parent loses access to his or her language of choice.
Perhaps there would be less pressure to adopt a monolingual model as
the norm, if there was better understanding of how dierently the bilin-
gual brain develops.
In the monolingual child, language functions usually start to become
localized in the left hemisphere of the brain from the age of 36 months.
is process is called lateralization; it simply means that certain parts of
the brain become specialized in performing particular functions. Right-
handed and left-handed people show slightly dierent lateralization
patterns, so in the research literature you will nd that the dominant
hand of the individuals who were tested will be mentioned. By the age
of ve, nearly all the language functions are there. As the functions
become xed and honed to a particular language, the harder it is to
learn a new language. So, since phoneme (individual sound) recogni-
tion and production is one of the earliest aspects of language an infant
learns, a child who moves to another country after the age of six may
overuse certain phonemes from their rst language and/or have di-
culty distinguishing between phonemes or other sound qualities that are
central in the other language. For instance, as English is not particularly
strict about phoneme length, an English speaker learning Finnish may
have diculty distinguishing between and producing words like “tapaa”
(meet) and “tappaa” (kill), which dier only in terms of the length of the
“p” sound in the center of the word (a plosive sound which is dicult
for many non-Finnish speakers to either lengthen or distinguish the
length). e inability to distinguish key phonemes can result in confu-
sion, irritation, or mirth depending on the situation. Subsequent bilin-
guals who learn their second language after the main lateralization of
language functions has taken place may also retain other features such
…children growing up in
multilingual homes often do not
start speaking as early as their
monolingual peers, and when they
do start speaking, they may not
receive quite as much support as it
may not be clear which language
they are trying to use.
51.3 – 2013 | 27IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
the word order or other early grammatical features of the rst language
even though they are highly procient in their new language. So, in
this sense, it does make a dierence when and how one learns another
language.
Language Learning and the Brain: What Happens Where?
By the end of puberty, dierent areas of the brain have developed
specialist functions for dierent aspects of language processing. ese
areas work together to enable the individual to understand and produce
language. e earliest area to be identied is Broca’s area, a small area
near the left temple that is central to the production of speech. If this
area is damaged (e.g. through a stroke), the patient will understand what
he is she is being told, but is unlikely to be able to reply. Wernicke’s
area is located in the left temporal lobe (roughly in line with the top of
the ear) and is central to the comprehension of language. Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas work together all the time, but their slightly dierent
roles are visible when fMRI techniques are used to identify areas of
brain activity.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to detect
blood ow. When the neurons in the brain are active, they require more
oxygen and so uctuations in blood ow can be used to identify which
areas of the brain are working. Because fMRI is more sensitive to the
presence of oxygen rich blood than traditional MRI, it is able to provide
a more dynamic view of the brain and identify smaller neurological
connections without harming the subject being studied. Using this
technique, Dapretto and Bookheimer were able to show that Broca’s
area was primarily responsible for helping speakers recognize that
“e policeman arrested the thief” and “e thief was arrested by the
policeman” mean the same despite the change in syntax, but Wernicke’s
area was primarily responsible for recognizing that “e car is in the
garage” and “e automobile is in the garage” mean the same despite
the lexical change (427).
Both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were identied over 150 years
ago, but as investigative technology has improved, it has been possible
to identify more precisely areas within Broca’s area that are used for
processing vocabulary, syntax and certain aspects of grammar, whilst
areas within Wernicke’s area are used for gauging emotional content—
the kinds of things we mean when we say “reading between the lines”—
such as politeness and intention. It is physically structured in a very
dierent way (with longer interconnecting bers or axons which are
spaced further apart than the same area in the right hemisphere). As
Sousa notes, “e implication is that the practice of language during
early human development results in longer and more intricately
connected neurons in the Wernicke region, allowing for greater sensi-
tivity to meaning” (ELL Brain 21).
e more sophisticated research techniques have also revealed that
dierent neural networks are used to process nouns from those used to
28 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
process verbs. PET scans have even revealed that
dierent strands are used for processing words
that are semantically similar take place in slightly
dierent parts of the brain (words for animals are
processed in a slightly dierent place from words
for tools) (Chouinard and Goodale). ey have
also revealed that areas of the brain that were not
thought to be involved in language processing are
also used. ese include areas within the right
hemisphere, which are used for processing very
complex sentences. For instance, the area that
corresponds to Wernicke’s
area in the right hemi-
sphere is involved in
disambiguating words that
may hold a wide variety
of meanings (e.g. “stand”)
(Harpaz, Levkovitz and
Lavidor). More unexpect-
edly, areas of the cere-
bellum (located at the back
of the brain, close to the
top of the spine), which
are associated with motor
control, are also used in
language processing as
this part of the brain also
organizes symbolic infor-
mation sequentially and
is involved in aspects of
thought modulation and
the emotions. In fact, the cerebellum is so impor-
tant to speech production that children who
suer trauma in this area (e.g. tumors) are likely
to suer from mutism until other areas of the
brain take over those functions (Riva and Girogi).
A complete understanding of how the brain
comprehends and produces language is not yet
available, but already we know enough to identify
potential areas of diculty for language learners,
and to relate those to implications for literacy
education. For instance, we now know that tonal
processing and visual processing take place in
discrete areas of the brain. So speakers of tonal
languages (such as Punjabi and Vietnamese)
will be making much more use of this area than
speakers of non-tonal languages, such as Finnish.
Visual processing mostly takes place within the
right hemisphere, and so reading will involve not
only those parts of the brain that are associated
with language processing, but also those parts of
the brain associated with vision. is use of right
hemisphere processing is particularly evident in
languages that use logographs (e.g. Chinese). In a
brain imaging study by Buchweitz et al, Japanese
speakers’ brain activity when reading the older,
logographic Japanese script (kanji) was compared
with their brain activity when they read the same
text in the modern syllabic
form (hirangana). When
reading the logographs,
the subjects used parts of
the right hemisphere used
for visual processing, but
when they read the syllabic
form, they used parts of
the left brain that are
associated with phoneme
processing. Kümmerling-
Meibauer explains how
the images in picturebooks
and texts also form a kind
of bilingual processing, as
text and image function
as dierent languages.
e implication of Buch-
weitz et al’s study is that
picturebook reading
would demand even greater crossing between the
hemispheres than text alone.
ere is also some evidence to suggest that
women are more likely to use the right hemi-
sphere for language processing than men (see
Sousa ELL Brain 11-12 for a summary). ere
is considerable debate about the implications
of this nding. What we do know is that the
connective strands in the corpus callosum (the area
between the two hemispheres which enables the
two halves of the brain to communicate with
one another) are larger and thicker in the female
brain. is has been used to explain why girls
tend to speak a little earlier than boys and tend
to nd foreign language learning slightly easier.
is dierence is likely to be a blend of genetic
51.3 – 2013 | 29IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
and environmental factors, and determining
precisely which factors would be dicult and not
particularly useful. For teachers working with
bilingual children, it will suce to assume that
tasks involving hemisphere switching are likely
to be somewhat more dicult for boys and so
more educational support will be needed for such
skills. e studies of bilinguals’ brains reveal that
right hemisphere language processing and there-
fore hemisphere switching is more common than
it is for monolinguals.
e Bilingual Brain and Hemisphere
Dominance
Children growing up in a bi- or multilin-
gual environment, the research shows, develop
slightly dierently from their monolingual peers.
Brain lateralization can take longer, but more
interestingly, more of the language functions
are placed in the right hemisphere. As Fran-
çois Grosjean famously pointed out: “e bilin-
gual is not two monolinguals in one person” (3).
Albert and Obler worked this out by noticing
that their bilingual aphasics could often recover
from trauma to the brain in the left hemisphere
in ways that monolinguals could not. Now with
brain imaging techniques, it is possible to plot
more precisely what kinds of functions are situ-
ated where, but the rules are not absolute. For
the classroom teacher, however, the ndings are
suciently clear to draw some conclusions about
what kinds of teaching techniques are most likely
to prove successful with bilingual children.
e language functions are still primarily
situated within the left hemisphere, but the role
of the right hemisphere is somewhat greater,
especially when the speaker is “code-switching”
(shifting between languages) (Crinion et al.).
An activity that is required in the reading of the
picture books praised by Ghiso and Campano
in their article below, where the texts shifts
between Spanish and English (Before You Were
Here) or between multiple languages (Subway
Sparrow). Kovelman, Baker, and Petitto found
that bilingual children demonstrated almost
exactly the same patterns of brain activity when
they were thinking in just one language as were
their monolingual peers, but when they were
asked to perform tasks involving code-switching,
they accessed the equivalent of Broca’s area in
the right hemisphere. So when the children who
were cited in Teruggi’s study recognized their
home language in the pre-school setting, there
would have been a shift taking place in the way
they processed the information. is pattern is
not usually found in either foreign language
learners or subsequent bilinguals learning their
second language after the age of nine (Sousa
ELL Brain 24-5), although Perani et al did nd
it in highly procient subsequent bilinguals,
which led them to conclude that “at least for
pairs of L1 and L2 languages that are fairly close,
attained prociency is more important than age
of acquisition as a determinant of cortical repre-
sentation of L2 [brain activity]” (1841). Children
reading the books discussed in other articles in
the special issue of Bookbird are more likely than
not to use their right hemisphere more actively as
they process the materials.
e right hemisphere is typically where the
emotions and visual stimuli are processed. If a
person is right brain dominant, they are likely to
process information holistically, gaining the big
picture fairly easily, but possibly struggling to see
the details or be able to process them in a linear
fashion (as is more typical of left brain dominants).
e right brain dominant individual is also likely
to be more intuitive than logical, better equipped
to process non-verbal information than their left-
brain peers, but need concrete information rather
than symbolic input. Right-brain dominants are
also more likely to nd it easier to “think outside
the box” and come up with creative solutions,
where left-brain dominants require solutions that
are rmly tied to reality. One side is not “better”
than the other; on the contrary, the best learning
results are achieved when both sides of the brain
collaborate. For bilingual learners, it is particularly
important to ensure that the teaching techniques
access both sides of the brain. Kümmerling-
Meibauer’s comments on how images and text
function as parallel code systems implies that
picturebooks might be particularly valuable for
bilingual readers.
30 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
In the context of reading, let us take the “holistic vs. linear” right-left
opposition. e right brain is primarily responsible for making sense of
the whole: the sense of the story for instance. Teaching approaches such
as the “Apprenticeship Approach” promoted by Liz Waterland in the
mid-1980s celebrate this processing style as they encourage children to
think “top-down” rather than “bottom-up”: “reading is not a series of small
skills uently used; it is a process of getting meaning” (11: italics original).
is was the approach to reading evident in the pre-school setting in
which Teruggi recorded the bilingual children and their teachers. If we
take her rst conversation (p. 38), Jasmine proposes that they should
“Try looking at the photo,” a technique that clearly works for Altea and
Zaudi who produce reasonable narratives based on the pictures.
e left side of the brain struggles to work this way, and is much better
at processing small pieces of information in a logical sequence. Teaching
approaches that focus on sound-grapheme associations (also known as
“phonics” teaching), as is common in the Finnish school system, are
excellent for encouraging left-brain processing. Later in the example
from Teruggi, the children start looking at the letters and, in another
conversation, the children start looking for the letters with which their
name begins. All readers need to draw on the strengths of both sides of
the brain, and ideally will receive additional support for those kinds of
skills for which they show less natural aptitude. Bilingual children are
even less likely to ourish in a system that focuses on just one side of the
brain than monolinguals when taken as a group, because at least some
of the monolinguals in any given class will have the brain hemisphere
dominance that matches the teaching system and so will thrive, albeit to
the detriment of skills associated with the other side of the brain. (See
Williams for a fuller discussion of top-down and bottom-up processing
in the context of bilingual reading.) Teruggi’s
teachers began with top-down processing, but
supported the children as they moved to bottom-
up processing. ey managed this despite the
variety of languages spoken by the children in
the group, and presumably without the ability
to speak the children’s languages themselves.
Honoring a child’s bilingualism does not require teachers to be pro-
cient in all the languages their pupils speak!
Teaching Bilingual Children: Implications for Literacy
Education
ere are obviously more implications for the literacy education of bilin-
guals than can be covered in the scope of an article. I have limited myself
to just three topics: the processing of sounds and their connection to
writing systems (referred to as “grapheme-phoneme correspondence” or
GPC) where the bilingual brain has an advantage over the monolin-
gual brain, vocabulary (where bilinguals are typically disadvantaged)
and the place of code-switching in reading education, such as the use
Honoring a child’s bilingualism
does not require teachers to be
procient in all the languages their
pupils speak!
51.3 – 2013 | 31IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
of multilingual literature in the classroom. But before I examine these
issues, I wish to clarify a point that is occasionally blurred in discussions
of literacy education.
Proponents of the apprenticeship approach to reading (also known
as the “real books” movement) made many valuable contributions to
reading education as the shifted the focus towards meaning making,
reading for pleasure and activities associated with right-hemisphere
processing. However, they made a fundamental aw when they claimed
that reading could be acquired in the same way as the spoken language
(e.g. Waterland, 10). is is simply not true. Humans have been using
spoken language for so many thousands of years that our brains have
become specially adapted to deal with it. Literacy is a far more recent
phenomenon, and has not been an expectation for the majority of any
country’s population for more than a couple of centuries and even today
estimates of the proportion of the world’s illiterate adult population
range from one fth to one quarter. As David Sousa explains: “Speaking
is a normal, genetically hardwired capability; reading is not. No areas
of the brain are specialized for reading. In fact, reading is probably the
most dicult task we ask the young brain to undertake” (ELL Brain 81;
see also Sousa Learn to Read 31-3). Nevertheless, reading does build on
speaking, and learning to read will require teachers and learners to pay
slightly dierent attention if the learner is bilingual.
As I mentioned above, infants pay selective attention to the sounds
(phonemes) in the speech they hear. e child who is born into a bilin-
gual environment will develop slightly dierent patterns of selective
attention from the monolingual as she takes the phonemes from both (or
more) languages into account. If we take an English-Finnish bilingual as
our example, most of the phonemes will overlap but not all. It is dicult
to say exactly how many phonemes a language has because it depends
a little on which variety of the language and whether or not one counts
loan words (with imported phonemes) and diphthongs (sound blends
like the central sound in “singer”) or not. English is generally accepted as
having 44+ phonemes and Finnish 27 phonemes, but they are not quite
the same sounds. e child growing up in a Finnish-English bilingual
environment will pay attention to a greater number of phonemes than
a monolingual child of either language, and she will also pay attention
to phoneme length more carefully than monolingual English speakers
as well as sort out which sounds t which language. Subsequent bilin-
guals will have greater diculties with these tasks than simultaneous
bilinguals, especially if they enter the bilingual situation after the age of
six. e teaching implications are obvious: bilingual children, especially
subsequent bilinguals, will need help learning to identify phonemes that
they have learned to ignore and in making discriminations that are not
important in their L1. For instance, Finnish speaking children learning
to read in English will need help learning to identify the “” sound in
a word like “measure” because this sound does not exist in Finnish,
and an English speaking child learning to read in Finnish will need to
32 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
learn to pay closer attention to aspiration so that
they can hear how long a plosive sound like “p”
is in a word (“tapaa” or “tappaa”?). Even if the
child is a simultaneous bilingual, this focus on
areas of dierence will be helpful as it supports
appropriate selective attention for the language
concerned.
is focus on sound is called “phonemic aware-
ness” and, unfortunately, it often gets confused
with “phonics.” Phonics is a teaching method in
which teachers ask children to name the letters;
it is based on the alphabetic system and requires
children to connect visual
symbols with sounds.
Although it is closely
related to phonemic
awareness, it is perfectly
possible for children to
develop good phonemic
awareness and have a
poor sense of grapheme-
phoneme correspondence
and, conversely, children
who know their letters do
not necessarily manage
to distinguish between
closely related sounds
(Sousa Learn to Read
33-36). Bilingual chil-
dren will obviously need
to learn to connect sounds
with graphemes, but what
I am advocating is not a stronger emphasis on
phonics but more language play with rhymes,
near rhymes and rhythm patterns that are specic
to the language in which the child is learning to
read. e Haitian song book described in my
postcard, (page 35) Dis-Moi des Chansons d’Haïti
[Tell Me a Song from Haiti], for instance,
contains songs with rhymes and near rhymes in
three dierent languages. e basic ideas in the
songs are similar, but the wording has been wres-
tled around to t the music and so emphasizes
language specic rhyme and rhythm. is kind
of pre-reading experience is helpful for any child,
but particularly so for bilingual children.
is focus on the sound system is just as
important for writing systems that are not as
obviously phonetically written as Finnish (where
GPC is very tight), including Chinese. e basic
graphic unit of a Chinese character represents a
morpheme as well as a syllable; the written system
also contains a direct representation of the sound.
In their review of the skills Chinese speakers need
in order to learn to read in their native tongue,
Li et al acknowledge the signicant role of visual
processing in deciphering a Chinese character,
but draw attention to the strong connection
between phonological awareness and character
recognition. ey also
report on ndings that
show that early education
in Pinyin (a phonological
coding system that works
rather like the alphabet)
has a positive impact on
the reading of Chinese
characters. Phonological
training is necessary for
all forms of literacy educa-
tion, and primarily takes
place in the left hemi-
sphere. Visual skills are
primarily located in the
right hemisphere, but the
attention to detail required
for processing graph-
emes—especially visually
complex graphemes like
Chinese characters—will also draw on the left
hemisphere for logical organization. So simply
shifting between the sounds and forms of letters
or other characters will not be enough to provide
the balance between the sides of the brain I
advocated earlier. In order to activate right hemi-
sphere activity through the use of visual stimuli,
one would need to do something more holistic,
for instance prediction activities based on images.
Images can also be used to enhance vocabulary
acquisition. Vocabulary size is the most reliable
predictor of how well a child will learn to read
(Sousa Learn to Read 90-5). For monolinguals,
vocabulary size and class are closely related. A
fascinating longitudinal study by Hart and Risley
51.3 – 2013 | 33IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
revealed that, at the age of three, children from
the poorest homes in their study had a vocabu-
lary of just 525 words, less than half that of the
children from the wealthiest homes (who had a
vocabulary of 1116 words). So before we jump
to the conclusion that vocabulary size is a causal
factor, we must note that the other advantages
children from wealthy homes often have (e.g.
the availability of reading materials, access to
adult caregivers as well as more basic advantages
such as nutritious food and living arrangements
conducive to sleep). Nevertheless, the smaller the
vocabulary, the greater diculties the child will
face making sense of a text, especially if the sense
needs to be inferred from between the lines rather
than being directly stated (Sousa ELL Brain 23).
e socioeconomic status of immigrants varies
from the wealthiest, who often move country
precisely in order to maintain a higher standard
of living, to the most impoverished, including
those eeing hunger and war, which will have a
decidedly negative impact on the child’s ability
to learn. One generalization we can make about
children growing up in bilingual homes is that—
although the combined vocabulary in both or
all languages may be greater than a monolin-
gual child from a similar socio-economic back-
ground—in the early years, the child’s vocabulary
in any of the languages s/he uses is likely to be
less than that of the monolingual from the same
socio-economic background. Since we know
that a limited vocabulary usually results in poor
reading skills, it is wise to concentrate on vocab-
ulary acquisition. More specically, Sousa (ELL
Brain 38-9) suggests, vocabulary teaching should
be linked to the right hemisphere processing by
making links that are as visual and concrete as
possible (his examples include images that might
help a child understand the abstract notion of
“justice”). e reasoning behind this suggestion
is that meaning making and visual processing
both take place in the right hemisphere and so
activities that can help shift vocabulary use over
to the other hemisphere are particularly bene-
cial for bilingual children. Sousa also concludes
that new vocabulary needs to be learned orally
(i.e. teachers should not expect novice readers to
learn new words from the context of reading).
is is somewhat unexpected as, for monolin-
gual children, vocabulary is best learned through
reading. Picking up new vocabulary from context
(i.e. by reading) requires knowledge of about 90%
of the other words in the text (Lightbown and
Spada; Nation). is is where connections to the
other language, and the larger overall vocabulary
can be invaluable. For both sequential bilinguals
learning to read for the rst time and subse-
quent bilinguals who are already literate in their
dominant language, multilingual literature can
provide cross-language support and make e-
cient use of the way the child’s brain is formed
(ELL Brain: 59-62).
However, as I also noted above, bilinguals
tend to use the same areas of the brain as mono-
linguals when they are thinking exclusively in
one language. e use of the right hemisphere in
language processing is at its height when the indi-
vidual is code-switching. is is where multilin-
gual literature has a key role to play. In addition
to the social and emotional importance of recog-
nizing the child’s other language and culture and
the concrete support it can oer to the subsequent
bilingual whose knowledge of the language in
which she is being educated is limited, code-
switching activates the bilingual brain to make
greater use of the right hemisphere. Many of the
books discussed in other articles in this issue are
illustrated. Switching between image recogni-
tion and the necessary focus on word forms that
reading demands also encourages hemisphere
switching (see Kümmerling-Meibauer above).
ere is more to the “bilingual signature” in
the brain than the additional access to the right
brain, just as there is far more to multilingual
literature than the “same” text appearing in two
or more languages. e implications for literacy
education extend far beyond those briey listed
…multilingual literature can
provide cross-language support
and make ecient use of the way
the child’s brain is formed.
34 | BOOKBIRD IBBY.ORG
READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
above. What I hope is now clear is that the bi-
or multilingual readers of the books discussed
in this issue of Bookbird do not “lack” skills; on
the contrary, they have very special skills. Let us
hope that more attention will be paid to training
teachers to understand how to match the special
skills of bilinguals to literacy education.
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READING MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE
Steiner, Naomi, and Susan L. Hayes. 7 Steps
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Print.
The Adventure of Ahmad and the Clock written by
Feresteh Ta’erpoor and illustrated by Mehrnoush
Ma’soumian is an all around excellent bilingual book.
With the English text being displayed alongside the
Persian text, it is an ideal book for parents and educa-
tors striving to help children learn English, Persian or
both languages simultaneously. The plot of the book
revolves around Ahmad eagerly watching the clock,
anticipating the arrival of the hour his father said they
would go hiking together. With the aforementioned clock
face appearing on every page, the book also provides
an opportunity for children to begin learning how to tell
time. Although a story about a boy watching a clock may
strike some as potentially bland, Ta’erpoor tells the story
in such a vibrant way and has created such an amicable
character in the shape of Ahmad, that readers, young
and old alike, will surely be captivated by Ahmad and
his antics with the illustrations of Ma’soumian playing a
crucial role in achieving this effect.
Robert McClure
Feresteh Ta’erpoor
e Adventure of Ahmad and the Clock
Illus. Mehrnoush Ma’soumian
Tehran: Institute for the Intellectual
Development of Children and Young
Adults, 2012
ISBN: 9789643916800
32 p.
(Picturebook)
t
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h
r
a
n
i
r
a
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2012
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.
