Salman Al-Azami

Bilingual Learning for Second and Third Generation Children.

Throughout the English-speaking world, children from bilingual backgrounds are being educated in mainstream classrooms where they have little or no opportunity to use their mother tongue. Second and third generation children, in particular, are assumed to be learning sufficiently through English only. This study investigated how British Bangladeshi children, learning Bengali in after-school classes but mostly more fluent in English than in their mother tongue, responded when able to use their full language repertoire within the mainstream curriculum. Through action research with mainstream and community language class teachers, bilingual literacy and numeracy tasks were devised and carried out with pupils aged seven to eleven in two East London primary schools. The bilingual activities were video-recorded and analysed qualitatively to identify the strategies used. The following cognitive and cultural benefits of bilingual learning discovered by researchers in other contexts were also found to apply in this particular setting: conceptual transfer, enriched understanding through translation, metalinguistic awareness, bicultural knowledge and building bilingual learner identities. The findings suggest that second and third generation children should be enabled to learn bilingually, and appropriate strategies are put forward for use in the mainstream classroom.

Transliteration as a bridge to learning for bilingual children

Abstract This paper examines how transliteration can be used as a bridge to learning for children who are studying more than one script. The focus is on second and third generation British Bangladeshi children aged 7–11, attending London primary schools and learning to write in Bengali at community-run after-school classes. An action research project explored how Bengali could be used as well as English to enhance learning at mainstream schools. Transliteration of Bengali into Roman script was found to aid this process in the following ways: as a communicative bridge between children, parents and teachers; as a conceptual bridge, promoting reflection on meanings and metalinguistic awareness; as a bridge to the Bengali script itself, mediating between oral and written representation; and as a bridge to new learner identities, enabling expression of ideas and building childrens confidence as bilingual writers.

Introduction—Language, Religion, and Media: A New Approach

The first chapter sets the context of the study and highlights scholars who have studied religion and media, language and media, language and religion, and audience responses to religion in the media; however, no single academic work combines all of them. The literature review section includes major works in the areas mentioned above and studies about representations of the three Abrahamic religions. these studies identify the gaps in literature that this book tries to fill. The chapter also includes a brief discussion of the innovative and methodological approaches that this study undertakes. Other short sections in this chapter include key terms used in the book, media characteristics and media discourse, the scope of this study, and a short summary of the chapters.

Conclusion—Towards a New Interdisciplinary Field

The final chapter of the study first summarises all the findings in Chaps. 2 and 3 to find common trends and build a coherent theme coming out of the research. It is followed by the testing of the five hypotheses to examine whether they were correct, incorrect, or partially correct using the encoding/decoding model. The chapter then discusses some key contributions of this book in academia, particularly on developing a new interdisciplinary field of research, and the impact this study may have on areas beyond academic research, such as bringing different religious and non-religious groups together, and the media realising its role in building a cohesive society. Finally, recommendations for future studies as well as some limitations of the research are highlighted.

Media Representation: Audience Response

In this chapter, the same media materials analysed in Chap. 2—excluding the TV dramas—are used in an audience response study to investigate how the three religious groups and those with no religion react to the way the media represents these religions. Hall’s (1980) Encoding/Decoding model has been applied on participants’ comments in six separate focus group meetings with Muslims and Christians in London, Birmingham, and Manchester, a mixed focus group between Christians and Muslims in London, two focus groups with non-religious people in Manchester and Liverpool, separate interviews with two Jewish individuals in Liverpool, and 15 Jewish responses to an online questionnaire. Finally, a comparative analysis between the language used in online comments on newspaper articles and face-to-face conversations was conducted.

Media Representation of Religions: A Critical Discourse Analysis

In this chapter, Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) of media representations of the three religions are conducted after discussing theories of discourse analysis and CDA at the beginning of the chapter. Six newspaper articles from the Daily Mail and The Guardian, two each on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are analysed. These are followed with an analysis of two documentaries, each on Islam and Christianity, which were broadcast on Channel 4 and the BBC, respectively. Next is a documentary on the Jewish community in Manchester, which was shown on ITV. The final section includes analyses of language used in TV dramas, one for each religion, including two episodes of a BBC spy drama representing Christianity and Islam, respectively, and an episode of an adult American animation series shown on the BBC.

From Bengali to English: sequential bilingualism of a second-generation British Bangladeshi

The paper discusses sequential language acquisition of the researchers daughter Safa who transformed from a monolingual Bengali speaker to an almost monolingual English speaker in a few months after moving to the UK. Safa was born in Bangladesh and was a monolingual Bengali speaker until she was three years and nine months when the family moved to the UK. Unlike most research on sequential bilingualism, Safas transition from Bengali to English went through a period of an invented language, which she developed and used for a few months. Safa then underwent language shift as Bengali became her passive language. Safas loss of fluency in Bengali was mainly due to the absence of Bengali linguistic environment, because her family lived outside the community. Safas mothers indifference to Bangladeshi ethnicity and her parents’ positive attitude towards Britishness meant that her decline in Bengali did not cause them much concern. Despite the lack of proficiency in Bengali, Safa still retains a strong ethnic Bangladeshi identity. Tabors and Snow’s four-stage developmental process of sequential second-language acquisition has been applied to find the similarities and differences in Safas case, while language maintenance and shift theories have contributed to the analysis of the process of her language shift.