The Free Dictionary online defines orthography as “the art or study of correct spelling according to established usage, the aspect of language study concerned with letters and their sequences in word, [and] a method of representing a language or the sounds of language by written symbols.” The reason I share this quote with you is due to the fact that the word “art” is used to help define what orthography and, in my mind, this is very fitting. When I took the time to write in Urdu, Gujarati, Panjabi, and Chinese I felt that the language itself was like a work of art: the way the written symbols gently curved in some instances, the way some almost seemed to create a picture, and the way in which the symbols looked quite beautiful after they were written (the textbook’s writing of course, certainly not my own crude attempt). In my opinion, when an artist is creating a work of art they often strive for perfection. This reminded me of Xiaoxiao’s discussion on our Wednesday evening class about how even altering a tiny portion of the symbol can create a whole different meaning for the reader, therefore, creating a perfect piece of writing is incredibly important in order for meaning to come across to the reader. Inevitably, this need for perfection when writing a language is incredibly daunting. I found myself feeling an anxiety about my own writing and wondering how it would look to a speaker of the language: Would they understand what I had written? Had I perhaps created a sentence that had a completely different meaning altogether?
The whole process of experimenting with different orthographies made me empathize with those ELL students coming into my classroom. How must they feel after moving to a new country and being expected to read and write entirely in the English language? Learning to write a new language, as I discovered after ten minutes of trying to write a short sentence, can be agonizingly slow. In the Canadian classroom there is a tremendous pressure on students to achieve quickly, and certainly our ELL students feel the brunt of this pressure as they struggle to learn a language that may have a completely writing system than their own.
So what are the implications for my ELL students?
ELL learners in my classroom, as I discovered by experimenting with different orthographies, would need a tremendous amount of support to learn a different writing system. I would definitely encourage consistent communication with parents so that they understand how their child is progressing with written language in L2 and how they might be able to extend the student’s learning beyond the classroom into the home environment. I would also take it upon myself to learn more about the student’s language so that I could personally understand the differences between the two writing systems and how I can best help the student succeed in my classroom. For example, if my student was an Urdu speaker I would have done research to understand that they write from left to right and that the symbols and vocabulary structure is different than the way English words are created. Lastly, Edwards discusses how, “Teachers, as gatekeepers, upholding specific norms about language and what counts as knowledge and defining literacy in terms of the practices and expectations of the dominant group” (Edwards 2009, 85). Therefore, it would be important for me to understand how and why the students write in L1: Is it purely to communicate with family and friends? Is it so they can secure a job later in life? It would be important for me, as an educator, to understand the functionality of L1 in order for me to best understand how to help the student learn L2. This experience has made me question how I perceive ELL learners in my classroom and how I can better educate them as they learn the English language in the future.
References:
Edwards, Viv. (2009). Learning to be Literate: Multilingual Perspectives. Great Britain: Multilingual Matters.
Farlex. (2011). The Free Dictonary. May 28 2011. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/orthography
