1. A model of basic literacy for foreign language learning: EL1 learners of French
Lynn Erler
Oxford University Department of Education
Acknowledgements: Prof. E. Macaro

2. Process model building
Metaphorical representation of cognitive processing
Parsimonious
A schematic synthesis
Based on theory and empirical evidence
Pedagogically useful
In process
“Waves” of models of reading processing
Ruddell and Unrau (2004, 5th ed.)

3. Series of empirical studies
Descriptive
N= 359
24 interviewees
Cross-sectional: all Year 7 (11 yrs) students in 2 comprehensive schools
questionnaire, onset & rhyme tests, timed
word reading,
interviews
Intervention
N= 118
9 interviewees
Cross-sectional:
students in 6 intact mixed ability groups: 3 intervention, 3 control; yrs
(Yrs 7 & 8)
15-month reading and writing strategies
pre- and post-tests, questionnaire
Survey
N= 1,735
Achieved sample = 25 schools, stratified for SES, school academic results (KS 3), 9 regions in Engl.
Ages
(Yrs 7, 8, 9)
questionnaire, two tests: rhyme, word segmentation

4. After a year of learning French in English schools 11-year olds were asked what happened when they saw written French words for the first time
“I can’t say the words”
“The letters are all muddled”
“A lot of French are pronounced differently to how they’re spelled, just a bit weird they are.”
“It’s scrambled”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s written”
“When they’re on the board, they look like a different word than what you’ve been repeating”

5. Reading disability / impairment
The subject is virtually unable to read visually unfamiliar words aloud, indicative of an impairment of grapheme-phoneme conversion and/or phonemic assembly. This condition is often referred to as ‘phonological dyslexia’.
Ellis (1993), Fawcett (ed) (2001), Derouesné & Beauvois (1985), Sprenger-Charolles & Colé (2003)

6. “I hear the words in my head – I think it’s my teacher’s voice”
11-year olds’ words: decoding, sub-vocalising, working memory, phonological loop, accessing meaning in long-term aural memory
“[When I read French] there’s kind of like a thing that’s going on in my head trying to pronounce it, but when I hear it, it doesn’t sound like anything like what I’ve heard [spoken by the teacher].”
“I hear the words in my head – I think it’s my teacher’s voice”
“When you’re doing silent reading, you read it and you can hear the words in your head, but you’re not saying them. If the teacher sometimes says that word and some other time you see the word and don’t know what it means, if you try and pronounce it in French and if it sounds like what the teacher says, you might recognise it.”

7. ‘decoding’ French; using English GPC to access meaning
“I say the words in my head but it’s an English pronunciation”
“When I’m reading I try and pronounce it, but if I can’t and I read it, it just sounds completely wrong. I try to carry on but it does stop me from understanding.”
“[Anyway] most of the words look a lot like English words, so I’d just pronounce them like English words, just to help me… it would probably make more sense.”

8. PPP – presentation, practice, production
Teaching and learning words and phrases in the Foreign Language Classroom in England
PPP – presentation, practice, production
automaticity
GPC
This model is taken from connectionism. You might recognise it. It serves well to describe the pedagogy of foreign language teaching in current classrooms, and it serves to conceptualise what students told me in the course of my research.
Sounds of word
Printed word
(Seidenberg 2002)

9. PPP – presentation, practice, production Sounds of words when spoken
MEANING
PPP – presentation, practice, production
L1 GPC
Phonology
Orthography
Printed word
Sounds of words when spoken

10. Sounds of word - heard or said
Context and schemata knowledge
MEANING
L1 GPC
Phonology
Orthography
Printed word
Sounds of word - heard or said

11. Sounds of word - heard or said
Context and schemata knowledge
MEANING
GPC
Phonology
Orthography
Orthography
print
Printed word
Sounds of word - heard or said

12. Year 9 verbal reports during piloting of the rhyme test for Study 3
% incorrect
bonjour – bonheur “Yes. Begins with the same letters ~ 50%
and ends with the same letter”
“No, because of the ‘j’ and the ‘h’”
salut – rue “No. different letters at the end” %
vert – verte “Yes” ~ 50%
chat – hâte “No” ~ 40%
nimbe – baleine “No, different number of letters” ~ 25%
bain – frein “Yes, same final letters” %
bleu – peur “Blau – um, ‘r’ at the end: no” %

13. Research on learning to read English as a first language: approaches to the form of the written word and “phonological assembly”
fine-grained or partial alphabetic, where only one or a few letters are used by the reader to try to identify the word;
an individual letter-to-sound decoding approach to the whole or nearly whole of the word;
large-grained, where a larger number of letters are used by the reader who recognises the correspondence of letter strings to single or multiple phonemes Ziegler and Goswami (2005)
Berent and Perfetti (1995) reported that there may be two cycles of phonological assembly involving the consonants first and then the vowels; also sequence changes of letters may occur.
Ehri (1991, 1995) identified a ‘pre-alphabetic’ stage in reading acquisition where the learner ‘identifies’ a word from the surrounding visual context with minimal if any attention being given to the actual graphic presentation of the word.
Goswami (2004) refers to the flexibility of phonemic manipulation required by learner readers of English L1 as an opaque language.

14. Input + lack of GPC knowledge + weak memory traces + need or desire to accomplishment task = overload in working memory
recourse to L1, L3, other approaches
Model 2
Phonology
GPC
sounds
Orthography
Task accomplishment
printed word
but:
wrong activation, production of nonsense, incoherent
sub-vocalisation,
confusion, poor memory storage and retrieval, struggle, sense of language impairment and of being a cheat; discontent
FL teacher needs an awareness of learners’ pre-literacy approaches: grain size, sequence changes, consonants, EL1 requirement of flexibility in phoneme manipulation, general mistrust of GPC consistency due to English lack of transparency.
Students need:
experience with orthographic forms;
exposure to script and sounds;
reassurance of the transparency of French GPC

15. Known word: think of sound – 53.1% say/whisper – 53.8%
The role which the sounds of the words play for KS3 students – results from questionnaires
N = 359
Known word: think of sound – 53.1% say/whisper – 53.8%
most often – 34.7%
Unknown word: sound it out – 63.3%
Pronunciation is useful for reading French – 74.9%
Hear words in my head when reading French – 45.0%
N = 1,735
say words in my head when reading French – 74.6% (1,294)
sound out words I know– 65.8% (1,141)
sound out new words– 64.8% (1,124)
say vocabulary in my head when learning it – 76.5% (1,327)
say the Fr words in my head when writing them – 74.7%
(1,296)

16. How do you feel when: Results of the pen and paper rhyme tests:
(1) 70% could not successfully identify more than a third of rhyming words correctly N = 359
(2) mean result was half correct; 3.3% achieved better than chance results; scarcely any difference over 3 years
How do you feel when:
happy; not bothered puzzled, worried,
angry, embarrassed
reading aloud in French? 45.3% %
pronouncing French aloud? 46.6% %
Asked how they felt about these activities – note that they include the physiological capability to say the sounds, not only to decode the writing, so in fact bring in other variables. Nevertheless decoding plays a role here. Fewer than 10% ticked that they were “happy”. The emotions were chosen by a class of 30 students who worked with me to develop that section of the questionnaire – there were 6 faces, one for each emotion plus a box labelled “not sure”. These results present groupings. Less than 3% ticked “not sure” so 97% felt that these options covered the ground.