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How culture can affect reading comprehension

15/6/2013

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For many years now researchers have looked into how and what we learn is affected by our cultural background. One of the methods they have used to look at these affects is to compare the reading comprehension of students from different cultural background when exposed to the same passage.  What they have found is that students from different backgrounds recall different things even though the text is the same.  
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Margaret Steffenson et al have undertaken considerable research in this area.   In “A cross-cultural  perspective on reading comprehension” they describe how they asked 20 American and 19 Indian students to read and answer questions about two descriptive passages on the topic of weddings.  All the students were given the same two reading passages, which were equally complex and of the same length.  Both passages described a wedding but one was set in India and the other in America.  They then asked them to recall what they had read.  Their findings were as follows:

  • Americans took approximately 20% more time to read about the Indian wedding, whereas the Indians took 10% more time to read about the American wedding.
  • Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Americans recalled 27% more about the American wedding compared to the Indian wedding, whereas the reverse was true for Indians who recalled 28 % more of the Indian wedding.

What this demonstrated was that culture affects what is coded and what is stored in memory. It also determines the ease or difficulty with which certain materials are read.

Steffenson et al went further and also looked at whether the ideas in the passages were elaborated on or distorted by both sets of readers and found that when they were recalling culturally familiar content they tended to elaborate by filling in gaps, deducing outcomes and making inferences.  However, when they were recalling unfamiliar events they tended to distort the evidence. The following examples to illustrate these points:

  • In the passage about the American wedding it stated that the bride was wearing her grandmother’s wedding dress.   The Indians recalled this as the bride wearing an old and dated wedding dress.   They did this because in traditional Indian weddings the bride’s dress would demonstrate the family’s economic and social status.  They therefore, construed that because the bride was wearing her grandmother’s old wedding dress the family suffered from improverishment and poor taste.   They misconstrued this because they did not understand the cultural tradition of wearing ‘something old and something borrowed’ and the role this played in the American bride’s dress choice.
  • In contrast, in the passage describing the Indian wedding it mentioned the fact that gifts were given to the groom’s family by the bride’s family.  The Americans construed this as reciprocal gift giving because they did not understand the practice of dowry-giving in the Indian context.  This led them to distort the practice  of  Indian dowry-giving’ with something they were more familiar with.

In another study, this time led by Ralph Reynolds, in which Steffenson and her colleagues also took part, called “Cultural schema and reading comprehension” they asked White and Black 8th grade students to read a passage on ‘sounding’ or ‘playing the dozens’, which was a form of ritual insult found mainly within the Black community.  Black students read the passage and interpreted is as being about verbal play because they were culturally familiar with the practice, whereas White students tended to interpret is as being about  physical aggression.  The evidence from this study shows how cultural schemata can influence how reading passages can be interpreted.

These are just two examples of the significant amount of research which has been undertaken in this area. What this and other research demonstrates is how subjects understand more of a text based on their own respective culture than that of the others.  The reasons for misconstruing and distorting the factual context of the passages was because they were trying to fit the text into their own cultural framework not the framework of the target culture and as a result they were less successful in understanding the passage from the other culture.

The examples above are illustrative of the issues that teachers and practitioners should be aware of when interpreting reading comprehension scores of minority ethnic and EAL students in their classrooms.  The Steffenson studies demonstrate the need for teachers to  use pre-teaching activities to activate prior knowledge (in the case above, the schema of a wedding ceremony) and to actively engage students so that they become familiar with the diverse cultural norms and nuances evident in the text.  In many cases the text pupils are exposed to in school won't necessarily be as culturally nuanced as those mentioned in the above research.  However, even texts that seem to be 'culture free' may have aspects that require careful consideration to ensure that all students are able to engage with them on a level playing field, whether this is for cultural or linguistic reasons.  There are well known
pre, during and after reading activities that teachers can build into their teaching, so that EAL and minority ethnic pupils can proactively engage with texts. These strategies will also benefit pupils who are eligible for free school meals and require assistance to improve their reading.


Future blog postings will focus on some of these pre, post and during reading activities. In the meantime, if you would like either training or coaching in this area, please note that we at Equitable Education have considerable expertise of working with teachers and Literacy co-ordinators to develop both whole school and classroom strategies to raise the attainment of EAL and minority ethnic pupils in reading.  We work with both primary and secondary schools.. Contact us by e-mailing us on [email protected] or by using the contact form page above to discuss your particular school needs. We look forward to hearing from you.
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Underachieving boys in schools and what can be done to raise their achievement.

10/6/2013

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I have recently had the pleasure to become acquainted with Dr James S. Brown.  Dr Brown is a Canadian who has over 40 year’s career in education in a variety of senior roles, including working in England.  His research interest and expertise is in improving education, especially for those disadvantaged by existing educational systems.  He has undertaken intensive research into the issue of the underachievement of boys and has published a book entitled “Rescuing our Underachieving Sons”, which provides an in depth analysis of the underlying issues based on intensive research and his own experience in education in both Canada and the England.   His book also provides suggested strategies parents and the education system as a whole can deploy to raise boys achievement.  

Dr Brown has also written three smaller booklets, based on his research and book.  His second booklet entitled ‘How the education system can help boys to become achievers in school” is available to download here and covers the 4 major characteristics that tend to be common amongst achievers such as:

1.    They come from more stimulating environments, where parents  speak and read to them more,

2.    They receive more support and encouragement from parents, teachers and society in general,

3.    They have high self-esteem and more confidence in their abilities.

4.    They work harder, not only because of their need to achieve, but also because they like what they are doing and are more engaged by it.

The booklet provides detailed information on each of these four characteristics, as well as suggested ways in which parents can support their sons to become achievers.

Dr Brown has kindly provided the booklet for readers of
Equitable Education’s blog free of charge to download.  Our thanks go to Dr Brown for generously sharing his research with us. We hope this will support colleagues in improving educational outcomes for boys in their schools.
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'You can't speak Panjabi at school.  You have to speak English......'

1/6/2013

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Yesterday, I was visited by my four year old nephew.  As most four year old he is still at an age where he is curious about his surroundings.  He was fascinated by the magnets I have stuck to my fridge.  Most of them have been collected as souvenirs whilst on holidays abroad.  He went through the magnets and wanted to know which country they were from.  He was particularly taken by this one similar to the picture below bought from Marrakech which had the Arabic alphabet colourfully displayed. 
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I asked him if he could read any of the letters.  He was able to read out a few at the beginning - Alif for the ‘a’ sound and Baa for the ‘b’ sound and then tuned to me and said in a serious tone, ‘ You do know though Aunty, you can’t speak Panjabi at school.  You have to speak English…’  I asked him why that was the case and he replied, ’You just have to speak English’.   Now, I wasn’t surprised by this statement, as I myself many years ago had gone through similar experiences as a bilingual child and knew instinctively that my language was something that was not valued at school and that there was no room for it to be used within the classroom context.  That was many years ago and was indicative of the times.  Indeed, it was quite common for children to make fun and ridicule any languages other than English being spoken.  They obviously weren’t aware of the hours of endless fun you could have by ‘code switching’ or making your own unique language up by mixing the languages, so that it was only understood by speakers of both languages.

Due to my own interest in languages and multilingualism in a particular, I decided that I would ensure that my own children would be fluent in their mother tongue Panjabi and become proficient in Urdu (written in the Perso- Arabic script, hence my nephews comments on the Arabic Alphabet) because of the valuable role that it plays as a Lingua Franca [1] across the Indian subcontinent, not mentioning its popularity across the world for many reasons, including its prevalence in Bollywood movies many of whom use Urdu and Hindi.  I therefore, made a conscious effort to give my children the opportunity to learn both languages in a natural way as possible, ensuring that they had a wide range of bilingual books at their disposal to reinforce the use of both Panjabi and Urdu within the family.   What I found surprising, especially in the case of my son, who is now 15 years old was that within a term of going to Reception, more or less the same age as my nephew, he refused to speak in any language other than English.   Now as it happens, both my children and now my nephew go to the same school.  The school is a larger than average primary school, with very low levels of FSM and approximately 12.5 % of EAL pupils.  They generally provide a good education and in their own way promote diversity, certainly more than when I was at school but despite this the effect on my nephew was the same as it has been for me and my children.   The net result of this is that potential bilingual or even multilingual children are gradually undergoing ‘language loss’.  This phenomenon is occurring across many settled communities. At best children and young people growing up are only able to develop receptive skills in languages used within the community but are not able to use these skills productively as English becomes the dominant languages which is increasingly used in all domains.

This anecdotal story illustrates the powerful monolingual message which continues to play a dominant role in England today.  Ironically, this is in strong contrast to the message given by politicians and the media which states that communities choose NOT to speak English.  I don’t think I have ever come across anyone who has resisted the need nor discounted the importance of learning English. It is disingenuous to talk about settled communities not speaking English, especially when extensive research from different parts of the world show that many communities suffer language loss within a generation as in the case in personal example given above.  Indeed, a language survey undertaken by www.ethnicpolitics.org shows how English is now used by more bilingual communities within the home context too.  In their initial survey which was undertaken in 1997, 56% of the minority ethnic members surveyed stated that they used English at home compared to 44% who stated they did not.  There were of course underlying differences for the various different communities.  By 2010 the responses to the same survey showed that this trend has completely reversed with 64% of minority ethnic members now stating that they used English at home compared to 36% who said they did not, with these significant changes having taken place over a period of just 13 years.  

Furthermore, the critics who like making a fuss about the learning of English choose to ignore the fact that the 2011 Census showed that of the 51,005,610 English population taking part in the census (residents aged three and over) 46,936,780 of them had English as their main language.  For the remaining 4,068,830 for whom English was not their main language, 3,224,830 spoke English either very well or well, with a further 709,862 stating they could not speak English well.  Only a small proportion of the overall population, a mere 133,983 stated that they could not speak English. [2]

More importantly for me the issue is that you don’t just have to know one language. It is possible to be proficient in more than one language without it being detrimental to learning, which sadly was the WRONG view perpetuated in the days when I was growing up.    Indeed, there are many benefits that accrue from being bilingual, notwithstanding the cognitive benefits which teachers could use to aid learning in the classroom.  We really do need to ensure that our schools are more supportive of the learning of languages, both Modern Foreign languages and ‘community languages’.  Sadly, the new proposed MFL national curriculum proposes a hierarchy of status for languages in which the languages spoken by many of our settled communities are not recognised at all.   This is just plain wrong and it is such omissions in practice and policy which so powerfully give the message to all children, whether monolingual or not that languages other than English are not important, unless of course they happen to be on the ‘list’ which then are reserved for the elite few who are deemed capable of studying languages.  It’s about time we started valuing all languages, so that we move away from the deficit approach that is common in England and build upon the rich linguistic capital that exists within our communities. 

Just as a final note to ponder.  We could take a broader view of many of these so called ‘community languages’ which are spoken by millions of people in the world.  Take for example the three Indo-Aryan languages mentioned in this posting, which I like many others of my generation, are lucky to have as part of our linguistic capital – Urdu, Hindi and Panjabi.  These three languages are mutually intelligible.  According to the total number of speakers for these languages in 2007, there were 295 million speakers of Hindi, 96 million of Panjabi and 66 million of Urdu in the world.[3]  If you add these three languages together you come to a grand total of 457 million speakers, which is the equivalent of 6.89 % of the world’s population.  In the same year, the total number of speakers of English was 365 million or 5.52% of the world population.  Not so much of ‘community languages’ after all, when you take a wider global perspective.

This should certainly give us food for thought as we are increasingly required to navigate in a globalised world, where the language competencies that are required are more varied and which mean that we cannot continue to be solely reliant on English is a dominant language.  It's time for us to wake up and embrace the fact that over half of the world’s population is bilingual and it is the norm across all social groups and ages and many of the languages that could be used naturally by our children are gradually being taken away at a loss to them and society as a whole.


[1] The use of Panjabi, Urdu and Arabic within Pakistani heritage community is not explored here but will be covered in another posting later, as well as the relationship between Urdu, Hindi and Panjabi.


[2] Source Office for National Statistics, 2011 Census Proficiency in English, local authorities in England and Wales (Excel spreadsheet) http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/search/index.html?newquery=english+language+use

[3] Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

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    Equitable Education 

    Equitable Education's blog keeps you updated with the latest news and developments in closing the gaps in education.  We regularly share best practice materials and case studies of proven strategies to close the education gaps, along with the latest research from the UK and internationally.

    The blog is written by Sameena Choudry and the views are entirely her own or of her co-authors when written with colleagues.

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