On “”Writing Development and Biliteracy” by Danling Fu and Marylou Matoush

The chapter focuses on the writing development of Chinese immigrant children as they cross the borders of two languages, two cultures and two literacies. Crossing such borders is not an easy matter let alone when the individual is under the compulsion of school requirements whereby s/he is obliged to develop literacy skills especially writing that is the key to school and academic success.

I personally consider the chapter as a call for consciousness raising of not only writing teachers but also professionals in the field of second language learning and educational policies. The chapter has a lot of implications not only for the teaching of second language writing but also second language research.

The chapter deals with the development of writing in middle school-aged Chinese speakers in Chinatown, NY. The results reported in the chapter stem from an innovative project in teaching writing to these students. Although the chapter dealt with the development of the writing skills, the parallel between the development of writing and speaking was clear. As a multilingual speaker, I could connect with the developmental pattern they described. The four stages they described as “First Language Usage”, “Code Switching”, “Trans-Language Usage”, and “Approaching Standard English” or any other language being learned is the way I developed oral literacy in the different languages I learned and I’m pretty many people can agree with this pattern. We start by using the first language we master, then code switch, move through different stages of interlanguage development whereby we mostly strive to use the vocabulary items of the target language being learned with often times the structure and grammar of the source language (being the first or second language we speak). Later, the more we move and advance in the target language learning continuum the more we approach the standards of the target language. Hence, I think that the main proposition of Fu and Matoush’s research finding is that as long as this is the normal pattern of developing oral literacy when we learn an additional language, why do we expect the written development to be different or worse consider it deficient.

In their project, Fu and Matoush reported on teachers allowing their students to scaffold their acquisition of English written literacy with their native Chinese language writing skills. In other words, they allowed students to use their already existing “funds of knowledge” and did not consider it as a hindrance in their L2 writing development. The teachers were valuing students’ expressive abilities in Chinese. In the writing excerpts they used, students were using their bilingual understanding in order to choose the structure, or language that best transmits their intended meaning. So the code switching was not a marker of a language deficiency but rather a marker of judicious linguistic choices. As a multilingual speaker, I always say that the different languages we speak best fit specific domains because of the cognitive and conceptual developments that each language triggered or brought about. The example Fu and Matoush gave for vocabulary items and their underlying concept, such as “flea market” and “yard sale”, show that for this age group of learners they could pay attention to word choice. In other words, their code switching was a n intelligent guess at what works best in this particular writing context. “Such usage not only reflects rather sophisticated bilingual understandings pertaining to each language but can also lead to insight concerning the importance of word choice and the special voice a language/culture contains” (Fu &Matoush, 2006, p. 17).

At last, as language teachers, “[we] should accept and value this necessary transition and natural development stage, rather than looking at it as deficit or incorrect usage of English language” (Fu &Matoush, 2006, p. 18). We should recognize and value the advantages of biliteracy.