It wasn’t neglect, in fact, it was
pragmatism. My little ones had as much use for Portuguese orthography
as for truck driving licenses. Their need to use printed Portuguese
came first when they turned into big ones and left home: things like
SMS and email are printed forms of language, and it was in printed
Portuguese that my children chose to write to me. Mostly
spelt-as-it-sounds to start off with, which soon became
spelt-as-it’s-spelt because I wrote back in Portuguese too.
There are two reasons, I believe, for
my children’s self-taught literacy in Portuguese. One is that they
were literate in their two other languages. Once you realise that
certain printed symbols are meant to represent speech sounds, you are
ready to transfer that knowledge across your languages. It may have
helped, when the children were small, that I asked them to write
their shopping lists for me in Portuguese, and that we got ourselves
a run-of-the-mill magnetic alphabet, through which we could leave
silly messages to one another, like sou um gato (‘I’m a cat’) or mais
bolo? (‘more cake?’), on the fridge. The other
reason is that there were plenty of books in Portuguese around the
house. If you read Portuguese yourself, you
can check out Cláudia Storvik’s report of similar experiences, in a
series of posts dealing with Alfabetização de crianças
bilíngues em português at her blog, Filhos bilíngues.
We read those books in the classical
way: child on lap, back towards parent, parent following text lines
with finger. We read one page, or a couple of lines, or a whole
story, or half a story, Scheherazade-way, depending on the day’s
mood and attention span of all involved. Reading sessions
nevertheless invariably resulted in all kinds of questions about
Portuguese things and Portuguese ways of talking about things, that
the children had no first-hand knowledge of, because we didn’t live
in Portugal. Books do this for you, they
tell you about what may not be there for you right now, right here,
but is
there anyway.
These Portuguese books were also
beautifully illustrated. The children attempted to copy those
drawings themselves, and we spent many hours deciding whether and how
to improve colours and lines of the originals – all of this in
Portuguese. Gaining awareness that three-dimensional objects, and
living things, and abstract concepts can all be represented in two
dimensions on paper teaches you about those things and teaches you
about language: “doggie”, for example, is what you rightfully
call both that drawing on that page in a book that you can hold in
your hand, and the neighbour’s pet that is bigger than you.
This is why books are, to me, the epitome of
user-friendly didactic multimedia. You can open and close them, you can touch
them, smell them, see them and hear them, in your head or through
someone else’s voice, and you can leave them and return to them any
time, satisfied that whatever they store remains safely stored. Just
for you, just you and them, when and where you want them. No crashes,
no short-circuits, no breakdowns. Unless, of course, you relate to
the situation portrayed in the Medieval help desk sketch, from the
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) show Øystein og meg.
Practice with books does not just teach
you language-related skills that you don’t know you are acquiring – not knowing that
you’re learning, by the way, is the best way to learn. Books also tell you about
what matters to someone else, whom you’ll probably never come to
meet face to face, but who took the trouble to write things down for
you, and through whom you can learn more, precisely because you live
in different places and different times – and are likely to use
different languages to think about things and talk about them. Not
least, books tell you about yourself. Viv Edwards captured the
delight of engaging with books in a previous post,
when she wrote that “children like to see – and hear –
themselves in the books they read”. If you still need to be
persuaded about the joy of reading, and of creating reading, check
out this BBC report about ciShanjo, in Zambia.
Meanwhile, I’ll
walk my talk: I’ll be worming into books until next year, when I
come back to this blog.
Image: Clipart from Clipartheaven.com |
© MCF 2011