Teaching Reading to Afghan Women with Emergent Textual Literacy: A Plurilingual Approach

Abstract

This plurilingual intervention in a LESLLA class in the US with six adult female students from Afghanistan investigated the extent to which learner biographies presented “Rosetta Stone” style in Dari, Pashto, and English in the Latin alphabet could develop reading fluency. Our hypothesis was that learners could more fluently decode words they already knew in L1, which could scaffold L2 decoding. Over eight weekly 1.5-hour sessions, we collected each individual’s best English reading time in seconds per word. Findings for all six learners showed no changes in reading times over eight weeks. Additionally, making bi/multilingual flashcards of key vocabulary in the texts did not improve vocabulary scores over time. However, transcripts of bi/multilingual classroom talk showed that students often took the lead rather than repeating after the teacher when reading aloud, with student-centered turn-taking as learners offered spontaneous responses to texts. Moreover, one student interview suggested that reading in L1 promoted comprehension of the text in English. We conclude that plurilingual pedagogies are unlikely to lead to reading fluency in themselves without systematic phonics instruction and extensive out-of-class reading practice, but such pedagogies have affordances for students’ cognitive and affective engagement, which can indirectly benefit SLA.