In the Western academic tradition, inquiry into the influence of literacy on human intellectual processes can be traced to the dawning of the modern science of linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916/1959) established foundational approaches to understanding what he called the semiological facts of any human society, including the distinctions of diachronic versus synchronic language studies, paradigmatic versus syntagmatic approaches, linguistic register studies, and the key distinction between written and oral language. Contrastive inquiries into the foundations of orality and literacy have been taken up in various ways by Jousse (1925), Luria (1976), Lévi-Strauss (1966), and Goody (1977), providing initial insight into the characteristic cognitive patterns of non-literate people without formal academic education and a basis for understanding the transformations engendered by the advent of literacy and academic learning. Contributing to this line of work were classics-oriented scholars like Parry (1971), Lord (1975), and Havelock (1963), who explored the structure of what was often termed “oral literature,” discovering distinctive characteristics supporting memorization, social stability goals, and mythological functions in works of high orality, and emphasizing the profound historical effect of alphabetic literacy on the functioning of mind and society. In the sociological domain, McCluhan (1964) provided a rich theoretical map of the irrevocable and unavoidable effects of the media of communication, including orality, writing, the printing press, and electronic media, on human cognitive, social, and emotional structure.
Perhaps the landmark work positing specific intellectual characteristics of orality, and how these characteristics are transformed through literacy and immersion in literate academic culture, was Walter Ong's Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (1982). The significant contributions of this work included a framework for understanding cultures as primarily, residually, or secondarily oral, a taxonomy of characteristics of oral mind and, perhaps most tellingly, the recognition that the transformation from orality to literacy can only go in one direction, is permanent, and always entails a loss: “you have to die [to orality] to continue living [in literacy]” (1982, p. 15). While some researchers focus on the limitations of the orality/literacy distinction for understanding cognitive development (e.g., Gee, 2008), scholarship in the tradition of Ong continues to the present day (e.g., Olson, 2006), and may for the purposes of this chapter be distinguished by its perspective that literacy and formal education create distinct intellectual processes manifested in distinct ways of understanding and acting in the world. Because literacy is so intertwined with formal schooling, this kind of work is foundational to explorations of the role of formal schooling in second language (L2) learning. Indeed, Watson (2010) relates the particular epistemological and axiological affordances of life in a culture of orality versus a culture of literacy to L2 education concerns, arguing that the role of literacy and literacy instruction in the world needs to be understood within the larger fabric of colonial history and western Enlightenment hegemony.
In exploring educational level and L2 learning, it is important to consider how the psychological circumstances of learners’ lives may have affected their cognitive and linguistic development. There are many models which could be reviewed here, but for illustrative purposes we may examine Piaget's stages of cognitive development model (1952). Piaget holds that all people go through necessary stages: sensorimotor (ages 0–2), preoperational (2–7), concrete operational (7–11), and formal operations (11–adult). The ages given for each stage are approximate and, crucially for the present discussion, depend on experiential stimuli that provide significant interaction and reasoning opportunities. A person must progress in order through the stages and none can be skipped, meaning that if older children or adults lack the necessary experiences to stimulate development in any stage, they do not progress cognitively beyond the stage they have acquired. This theory is echoed in Vygotsky (1978), who holds that learning occurs primarily through social interaction with others—a skilled partner is needed for a person to acquire the skills that lie beyond his or her independent ability, in the zone of proximal development.
It is during Piaget's preoperational stage, when symbolic thought begins and language development blossoms, that children in many societies are first exposed to the visual codification of language—reading and writing. During the concrete operational stage, individuals develop the classification skills prerequisite to the formal operational stage, which is characterized by the ability to solve abstract problems and think hypothetically. Non-print literate adult L2 learners, on the other hand, have not had the same experiences in oral or written stimuli, nor specific social interaction supporting literacy. Their cognitive development, it may be posited, has progressed in ways promoted by the environmental stimuli they have experienced, that is, those stimuli characteristic of oral culture. Ong (1982) describes the thought processes of orality as characterized by a primary focus on, among other things, relationship, contextual import, and the well-being of the community. These directions are notably distinct from the tradition of abstraction, classification, hierarchicalization, and hypothesis characteristic of successfully educated western adults.
While the foregoing represents a western view, scholars writing from the perspective of the colonized also bear witness to the disparateness of western academic and primarily oral education traditions, chronicling the sometimes devastating effects of literacy and western education on traditional oral knowledge and ways. It is beyond the scope of our chapter to fully review this body of work, however, we refer the interested reader to scholarship on this topic from different contexts including Africa: Achebe (1961), Irele (2001), and Mazrui (2007); India: Nandy (1983) and Visvanathan (1987), and Native America: Ross (1989), DeLoria (1970), and Battiste (2000).
Foundational to this discussion in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) is the Zweitspracherwerb Italienischer und Spanischer Arbeiter (ZISA) project (Clahsen et al., 1983). This language learning study included 45 adult learners with little formal schooling. Participants were Italian or Spanish speakers learning German. The most important outcome of this research was a proposal that learners of German go through fixed acquisitional stages in terms of grammar. However, the researchers added the caveat that “there is sufficient room for the individual to find his or her own [language acquisition] path” (Pienemann et al., 1988, p. 222) in the process. The more schooled group preferred a “standard” orientation, which prioritized accuracy, while the other group had a “simplifying orientation, favoring communicative effectiveness. This finding suggested that level of schooling has an effect on SLA in terms of the way learners approach the experience and the process. Another early study was funded by the European Science Foundation and is often referred to as the ESF project. Researchers collected data from 40 participants learning a variety of minority languages from five different countries, over ten years. The researchers reported that the participants with low levels of education seemed to make slower progress in their classes compared to literate learners (Klein and Perdue, 1992; Perdue, 1993). See also Pienemann and Keβler (Chapter 14, this volume) for an overview of research related to Processability Theory and the Multidimensional Model, both of which are related to this population and the research summarized in this section.
Since the publication of studies related to these projects, most SLA research has been carried out with educated adult participants who have native language literacy. Consequently, we know little about how the variable of degree of formal schooling influences L2 learning processes because there is so little research in L2 studies on the phenomena of limited formal schooling among adults. Therefore, most SLA theories can only be applied responsibly to highly educated individuals (Bayley and Tarone, Chapter 3, this volume, Bigelow and Tarone, 2004). The common assumption is that L2 fluency and education are reciprocal, and some research shows this (e.g., Espinosa and Massey, 1997). It is essential, however, to explore the absence of formal schooling, and presumably literacy, as a learner characteristic that influences language acquisition across all modalities (Tarone et al., 2009). Mathews-Aydinli (2008), in her review of research on adult English language learners points out that “the contextual and individual-level differences between most ESL/EFL students in higher education and adult ESL students in non-academic contexts are so great, that research with one group has often little significance or relevance to the other” (p. 210). This chapter will proceed with an exploration of some of the issues and scholarship related to limited formal schooling among adolescents or adults.
There is a substantial body of experimental research from the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience exploring how complete lack of alphabetic print literacy affects how adults perceive, repeat, and manipulate oral language in their L1 (e.g., Adrian et al., 1995; Dellatolas et al., 2003; Reis and Castro-Caldas, 1997). This research has shown that even a small amount of literacy can make a difference in certain oral skills. Adults with some print literacy could manipulate language units such as phonemes and syllables, in the oral mode, while adults without print literacy performed significantly worse on these oral skills. For example, dropping the first sound from a word and flipping syllables was much harder for illiterate adults than it was for those with alphabetic print literacy. On the other hand, participants performed similarly on oral tasks involving rhyming or generating lists of semantically related words. It seems that basic alphabetic literacy offers adults a strategy for visualizing encoded oral language in order to manipulate it phonemically. (For a review of this literature see Tarone et al., 2009.) This well-developed body of work done with adults with and without alphabetic print literacy suggests that literacy engenders phonemic awareness, not the reverse, which is the assumption among most literacy researches and practitioners who focus on children.
It is fortunate to have this solid base of research upon which to formulate hypotheses about adult L2 learners, and a thorough test of how applicable these findings are to L2 learners would contribute to the research programs across a number of disciplines such as cognitive science, literacy, and SLA. The idea that a low level of alphabetic print literacy may facilitate performance on some phonemic awareness tasks has many implications for instruction. For example, teachers should expect that adult emergent readers will have much more difficulty manipulating phonemes in oral language than adults with even minimal print literacy. Perhaps those with low literacy will perceive corrective feedback (see Loewen, Chapter 2, this volume) related to the manipulation of phonemes differently than those with more print literacy.
For adult individuals without formal schooling, a classroom learning environment can seem bizarre. Language may be used for reasons other than communication, students may be asked to interact with members of the classroom community in ways that seem unnatural, and materials used for learning may have no resemblance to any documents students have ever seen outside the classroom. Teachers are often sensitive to these issues and thoughtfully introduce literacy to L2 learners who are new to schooling and take steps to teach in ways that build on the students’ interests and strengths.
The transition to schooling calls for new skills and behaviors—beyond the different ways of processing oral language—in which lack of prior literacy or schooling seems to matter. For example, studies have shown that adults without formal schooling may perceive or interpret visual materials often used in classrooms (e.g., line drawings, two-dimensional information) in ways schooled adults do not (Bramão et al., 2007; Reis et al., 2001; Rosselli and Ardila, 2003). Again, these studies were not carried out with L2 learners, but rather with participants using their native language(s), thus pointing to another core issue which needs to be explored with L2 learners.
In cultural environments inundated with text of every imaginable type and format, massive libraries and databases, fantastical internet resources, and bookstores that in earlier ages would have looked like palaces, it would be difficult to overstate the enormity of the abyss that lies between the readers of this chapter and the preliterate L2 learners from oral cultures whose situation we are addressing. Indeed, our manner of address, made possible and academically necessary by the deeper legacies of the literate tradition, may be profoundly at odds with the values of the very people we are researching or teaching. As Smith has noted:
Literary activity itself could be seen as complicit in the current crisis of literacy. The culture of literacy, which Western culture is, has created its own crisis in the sense that a culture oriented by print is one oriented by a particular way of arriving at what should be valued, and how. (1999, p. 71)
From our side of the abyss, we can only begin to discern the chasms that people of orality must cross to achieve literacy, noting that it is impossible for us to make the trip in reverse. We may note the chasm from home to new culture, entailing culture shock and recovery from trauma. There is the chasm from L1 to L2–no mere matter of acquiring new skills but a soul-shaking matter of crossing “the abyss between how languages mean” (Becker, 1992, p. 281). The most demanding of all may be the semiotic chasm (McCluhan, 1994), that projects the learner from traditional orality to codified literacy to the digitacy of technologized culture. Even as we review available research on the issue of educational level and L2 learners, we do so with the recognition that if the learners we discuss in this chapter end up succeeding in their new culture on its terms, it is because they will have crossed a great abyss that hyperliterate academic culture cannot truthfully understand nor ever fully describe (Watson, 2010).
Although the relationships between educational level, literacy and language processing have yet to be fully explored in SLA research, there is a solid and relevant body of basic research from which to draw. For instance, there is a robust body of research on phonological processing and literacy from the field of cognitive science as well as other work that explores language/conceptual processes and literacy among adults, albeit both without regard to L2 learning (e.g., Ardila, 2004; Castro-Caldas et al., 1998; Duong and Ska, 2001; Ostrosky-Solís and Ramirez, 2004; Reis et al., 2001; Silva et al., 2004). For instance, Silva et al. (2004) examined both literacy and level of formal schooling among monolingual adults from similar socio-cultural backgrounds, except for experiences with formal schooling. The researchers asked participants to generate words that fit into categories of food and animals. Repeated measures of analysis of variance including semantic task scores and literacy found that there is not a substantial difference between literate and illiterate participants in terms of semantic memory, with the caveat that it is important to develop neuropsychological instruments free of educational and cultural influences, or where statistical procedures account for these potential pitfalls.
This line of research should be thoroughly replicated with L2 learners to examine the role of educational level/literacy in oral language development and across a range of oral language skills. For example, in the area of phonemic awareness and cognitive processing, Kurvers and van de Craats (2007) observed that adult language learners of “average literacy” performed significantly better than those with little or no literacy on a digit span task (i.e., repeating a series of number backward or forward) and a pseudo-word repetition task (i.e., repeat words from two to six syllables). Another oral task, marking word boundaries (i.e., recognizing individual words in the speech stream), is particularly problematic for adult language learners without print literacy, a finding consistent with studies cited previously on monolingual adults without print literacy (Kurvers et al., 2007). In another study by Kurvers (2007), beginning word recognition skills in a new language were qualitatively different for non-native speakers than for native speakers. Language learners with emerging print literacy start their learning process with a non-systematic visual strategy in which they try to seek correspondences between visual or context clues and meaning, gradually learning to use the strategy of sequential decoding. This finding corresponds to a number of studies cited previously showing that learning to read itself supports organizational skills needed for academic learning, that adults without print literacy are less systematic than those with print literacy in scanning the visual field (Bramão et al., 2007; Dowse and Ehlers, 2003).
In a series of studies with Somali adolescents and young adults with low print literacy (Tarone et al., 2009) researchers found that literacy level played a role in how participants carried out the oral tasks designed to elicit question forms in English. Participants with higher levels of literacy perceived recasts (targetlike reformulations of errors) and repeated these recasts better than participants with lower levels of literacy. A focal participant, Abukar, accurately imitated stress patterns and attended better to vocabulary items more than to syntactic items (cf., Dowse and Ehlers, 2003). Abukar required multiple corrections to questions such as “Why he is mad?*” or “What he try to write down?*,” seemingly unable to invert “he is” or add the auxiliary “is” to these sentences. This difficulty is reminiscent of the syllable and word inversion tasks in studies such as Adrian et al. (1995) done with monolinguals who were not print literate. Abukar preferred processing strategies that relied much more on semantic (meaning) than syntax, again reflecting findings on how adults with low print literacy process language, a finding which mirrors the studies done with monolinguals who were not print literate (Dellatolas et al., 2003; Reis and Castro-Caldas, 1997; Reis et al., 2003). These findings recall the point that scriptural cultures prioritize elaborate syntactics, while oral cultures are more concerned with pragmatics, using whatever works to communicate meaning in context (Ong, 1982, pp. 37–38).
Metalinguistic knowledge and language awareness is another area which promises to yield interesting findings in terms of educational level and L2 learning. A lack of metalinguistic training affects how learners without print literacy or formal schooling are able to think and talk about their oral language (Kurvers et al., 2006). In Gombert's (1994) early study, adult learners with no print literacy appeared to profit from explicit instruction in metalinguistic language and concepts because it gave them an additional tool to talk about language and promoted metalinguistic awareness. Second language acquisition literature often speaks directly to how learners employ, or should employ, conscious language learning techniques, or unconscious ones (that is, exposure to the language through reading, listening, and taking part in language-use activities). The adult learners of Dutch in the study by Kurvers et al. (2006) who had no print literacy had significantly more difficulty with language awareness tasks and talked about language in ways qualitatively different from the comparison groups made up of literate children and adults. This again may be related to the preference of oral folk for pragmatic, operational thought as opposed to abstract categorical thinking whose relevance to real life may be vague.
Phonological awareness may intersect with metalinguistic awareness in some ways as well. The important phonological awareness skill of identifying individual words in sentences, which in turn supports the development of concepts such as “word” and “sentence,” requires that the learner be able to perceive where words begin and end in sentences (i.e., recognize word boundaries). This task can be difficult because adults may not hear unfamiliar language sounds accurately (Kuhl, 2004). Low awareness of word length can be influenced by the phonological structure of the first (or other) language(s) (Royer et al., 2004). Language, as Kurvers et al. (2006) documented, will be concrete, and conceptualization, without abstract learning to extend it, will also seem concrete to individuals without print literacy (Biber, 1988; Biber and Hared, 1991, 1994; Biber et al., 2002).
There is some evidence that even a low level of literacy can greatly improve a language learner's ability to develop language awareness. In a study focusing on developing language awareness among adult participants of different educational backgrounds, those with the lowest levels of formal schooling benefited the most (Lindberg, 2003). One participant, a woman from Morocco with no more than two years of formal schooling, convinced her peers to use the passive voice in their joint task, without using any metalinguistic terms. Their task was to recreate a text together that they heard only orally and had the opportunity to partially write down. She used pen and paper to help her reflect upon the verb forms showing that even a very limited level of literacy is helpful in analyzing a second language. This study also points to the need to uncover linguistic and cognitive strengths among L2 learners without formal schooling. Could they, perhaps, have the potential to hold certain information acquired aurally in short- and long-term memory for longer periods of time? Are they better able to clarify and reinforce complicated information transmitted in the oral mode? Are they more attuned to contextual nuances which bear on communication?
The research exploring this issue from both policy and sociocultural perspectives is becoming more robust as researchers and advocates understand and write about the unique issues facing this population of language learners. There are always larger social structures and policies that impact education, across contexts and learner populations. The field has research showing how understanding literacy in its social context can contribute to a more complete understanding of literacy across cultures and contexts (Reder and Davila, 2005) for adolescent and adult L2 learners without print literacy. For instance, preliterate adult L2 learners’ opportunities to learn may be facilitated or hindered by factors far beyond their control. Menard-Warwick's (2005) research with Central American immigrant women shows how immigration laws, welfare policies, and the economy impeded participants’ ability to sustain their enrollment in adult literacy programs. The women's motivation was also influenced by their parents’ views of education and in materials ways, such as having the opportunity to attend school. Likewise, classrooms and programs are not neutral actors in the process of building literacy among adult L2 learners. Warriner (2007) demonstrates how transnational movement is “conflated with bureaucratic sorting mechanisms that result in heightened surveillance and arbitrary distinctions that have lasting material consequences [...]” (p. 323). Warriner's analysis of students in an adult ESL literacy program shows that while programs may be unfolding exactly as planned (i.e., to train low-wage workers), they inadvertently construct the work identities for students as contributing to, but not benefiting from, the global economy. In this sense, programs and even educators participate in a sort of policy-making enterprise which in turn plays into larger socioeconomic structures.
In some immigrant communities, adults may be hesitant to attend literacy classes because doing so may jeopardize their status in their family or cultural community. For example, the religious beliefs of the Kurdish Yezidis, according to Sarroub (2008), advocate avoiding print literacy. Similarly, Levinson (2007) described resistance to literacy among English Gypsies. A participant in Levinson's study said, “education has divorced me from my community” (p. 30). Education, for this participant, meant that he had betrayed all that his family stood for. Also revealing was that participants said that if they wished to attend adult literacy classes, these classes must be outside their community, so that even their closest relatives would not know they were attending class. Another study focusing on sociocultural issues include Klassen's (1991) ethnographic study of adult Latinos in Canada. He notes that his participants were comfortable navigating life situations in English they developed for that purpose, but felt diminished and uncomfortable only in their ESL classes, where their language was deemed deficient.
There is research which documents the assets of families without formal schooling. For example, Olmedo (1997) describes a Puerto Rican family's funds of knowledge across generations with few formal schooling opportunities “to create a new conceptualization of multicultural education, thus challenging deficit theories that lower expectations and limit possibilities for children of minority groups” (pp. 570–571). This family had many skills that they used to support their families both in Puerto Rico and then later in New York City (e.g., sewing, cabinetry, cooking, rotating credit associations). In another study, Espinoza-Herold (2007) describes how the cultural “dichos” or sayings used by a Mexican immigrant students’ mother, who had little formal schooling, supported her in achieving her educational goals. Bigelow (2007) found that a Somali mother with limited formal schooling, little English language proficiency and low native language literacy was able to do many things to help her children succeed in US public schools. For example, she divided household responsibilities among siblings and rearranged chores when children had big projects at school due, sent children to afterschool bilingual homework help, vigilantly monitored their choice of friend, and checked in with teachers to make sure their homework was completed.
In cognitive processing research with this population, data used to study educational level is gathered through the oral modes because participants with low levels of education may have low literacy which in turn delimits the sorts of research questions which can be asked and methods which can be used. As individuals acquire print literacy, researchers can explore the acquisition of literacy and the many consequences of literacy through a wider range of instrumentation, including tests and tasks administered in the reading (see Koda, Chapter 18, this volume) or writing modes across languages.
One of the first tasks for a researcher is to operationalize or consider the meaning of educational level. Some of the ways educational level has been determined are through self-report, transcripts, or by informal teacher evaluation in studies where the research was done in intact classes of particular grade levels or educational institutions. These approaches, when used in lieu of more nuanced measures of linguistic, cognitive, academic, or pragmatic skills, are problematic because educational level does not map flawlessly to any particular skill level (Loureiro et al., 2004). Another common limitation in reporting educational level is the exclusion of the meaning of educational level within specific societies. “Highly educated” is a descriptor that changes across contexts and in terms of availability of schooling and the value placed on different levels of schooling achieved. Educational level is not only located within individuals but is also situated within cultures and sociopolitical or global contexts. As such, the importance of educational level may change or take on different symbolic meaning when individuals or groups of people (im) migrate. Furthermore, it is possible to have acquired L1 and L2 literacy through community practices rather than through formal schooling (Farr, 1994). Sadly, it is also possible to attend school without becoming literate (Serpell et al., 2005). Therefore, because educational level can be interpreted differently across cultures, it must be operationalized in a way that has clear meaning and is complemented/triangulated with measures of language or cognitive skills.
Some of the elicitation measures which have been used with adolescents or adults with limited or no formal schooling, in traditional research paradigms, are the following:
| Instruments/tasks used in studies done in participants’ L1 | ||||
| Socio-demographic inventory | Silva et al. (2004) | |||
| Semantic verbal fluency tasks | ||||
| Generate words corresponding to food items that can be bought at a supermarket | ||||
| Generate names of animals | ||||
| Phonological processing tasks | Morais and colleagues | |||
| Deleting or adding phonemes to create a new word Generating words beginning with a particular first sound (e.g., /p/, /f/) | (Morais and Kolinsky, 2002; Morais et al., 1979; 1986;1988) | |||
| Identifying rhymes | Loureiro et al. (2004) | |||
| Inverting syllables | ||||
| Repetition of short/long words and nonwords | ||||
| Minimal pair phonetic discrimination | ||||
| Reading tasks: Letter, syllable, word, sentence recognition | Royer et al. (2004) | |||
| Letter and word recognition | Durgunoğlu and Öney (2002) | |||
| Phonological awareness: phoneme tapping, phoneme blending, deleting initial and final phoneme | ||||
| Spelling | ||||
| Listening comprehension task (pre-test) | ||||
| Reading comprehension task (post-test) | ||||
| Instruments/tasks used in studies done in participants’ L2 | ||||
| Native Language Literacy Screening Device | Tarone et al. (2009) | |||
| Spot-the-difference | ||||
| Story completion | ||||
| Elicited imitation | ||||
| Ethnosurvey questionnaires used to gather family demographic, social and economic characteristics; English language proficiency was self-reported on a 4-point scale | Espinosa and Massey (1997) | |||
| Pseudoword reading | Davidson and Strucker (2002) | |||
| Diagnostic assessments of reading | ||||
| Word recognition | ||||
| Silent reading comprehension | ||||
| Word attack | ||||
| Peabody picture vocabulary test | ||||
| Background questionnaire | ||||
As this type of learner is included more often in L2 research, more instrumentation will be produced, and results will be replicated. For instance, the tasks used in L1 studies must be adapted and repeated in L2 studies. Better assessments of L1 literacy are needed. Appropriate research topics may include, among others: (1) techniques supportive of holding large amounts of knowledge in memory, for instance use of assonance, linguistic redundancy, and aggregative fixed expressions; (2) syntactic patterns, for example, additive versus subordinative language; (3) analytic patterns such as situational rather than categorical reasoning; and (4) the development of the auditory sense as contrasted to the visual development characteristic of highly literate societies.
The problematics of research with adolescents or adults who have never been to school include a mismatch between how the researcher and the participants understand the research process. Some individuals may not understand the elicitation tasks because the tasks are so closely tied to culturally bound classroom practices with which they have no experience. Some participants may be hesitant to be audio or video recorded. Other difficulties may include gaining access to the learners through community or classroom venues and then earning their trust in order for them to agree to participate in a study.
We next turn to instructional relevance. From the perspective of Piaget's stage theory, it may be instructionally useful to consider the extent to which non-literate people may be lodged in preoperational or early concrete operational thought. Indeed, a survey of any manual of adult literacy instruction will reveal the insistence on using concrete objects and real-world examples from daily life. This kind of perspective is obviously a sensitive one, in that it can be misinterpreted to imply that non-literate adults are cognitively puerile. To the contrary, they have highly sophisticated skills typical of the environments in which they have lived, but which do not have the same usefulness in the target culture they now call home. It is possible, we would maintain, to draw from stage theory a constructive understanding of the schooling challenges of orally encultured people without applying it as a terminal diagnosis.
Lack of formal schooling is often accompanied by other circumstances that may affect language learning. Because we know that most immigrants and nearly all refugees entering schools in their host countries have experienced significant physical and emotional trauma, it is important to consider the effects of trauma and deprivation on such learners. The developing field of trauma studies (see, e.g., Sarat et al., 2007) has great relevance for L2 education in general, and adult initial literacy, in particular. In their applied research in countries ravaged by war, Neuner et al. (2008) have learned that trauma very negatively impacts the ability of individuals to hold new information, particularly symbolic information, in memory, often for many years following the traumatic incidents. A related finding holds that specific trauma triggers—words, places, objects, anything that recalls the original traumatic incident—act on the hippocampus region of the brain, influencing human cognition in such a way as to assign non-standard, exaggerated, or even opposite meanings to actions or linguistic signs. Clearly, interdisciplinary studies investigating trauma experiences and L2 literacy development are an important future direction for research on the instructional needs of these learners.
Of the utmost importance to the issue of educational level and L2 learning is how educators choose to teach learners with interrupted, limited, or no formal schooling. The issue is more pronounced in adolescence and adulthood because the educational gap between this population and other language learners widens with time. Young children have more years of obligatory schooling ahead of them, affording more time to close this gap. Being in a classroom learning context for the first time as an adolescent or adult can be both thrilling and overwhelming. For adolescents and adults seeking to finish a secondary school or college degree, educators are concerned about how to build background knowledge in subject areas quickly while simultaneously developing L2 literacy. A number of books for teachers of under-schooled adolescents or adults focus on this problem and offer programmatic and instructional approaches to integrate content and language learning (DeCapua et al., 2009; DeCapua and Marshall, 2010; Freeman and Freeman, 2002; Mace-Matluck et al., 1998; Short and Fitzsimmons, 2007). Limited formal schooling can be both an instructional and a programmatic challenge. Teachers must have the skills to make academic content comprehensible largely through the oral mode at first. Likewise, programs cannot separate language and content learning because students need both to make progress toward graduation. In contexts typically facing dire shortages of resources, educators are confronted with the following common problems of practice:
Other issues that seem to go unexplored in the mainstream literature related to teaching adults without prior schooling include the following:
Educational level deserves more attention across research in all areas of L2 learning. While educational level has a rich initial base of literature from which to draw, very little is known about how the lack of formal schooling and lack of background in a culture of literacy interact with the L2 learning process. This gap extends to language teacher education: Language teachers are frequently not prepared to teach adolescent or adult learners who have never been to school and do not have literacy in their native language(s).
Some of the broad issues in need of research in the area of L2 learning include the role of educational level in learning across modalities. If, as Tarone et al. (2009) found, lower levels of literacy make it more difficult to acquire some grammatical features of the L2, in the oral modes, what other modes or variational features are affected by low literacy? It is important for the fields of second language acquisition to explore the common hypotheses/theories in L2 learning (e.g., noticing hypothesis, interaction hypothesis, Processability Theory) as they apply to learners with limited formal schooling. It is also important to explore how implicit or explicit L2 learning processes unfold when the L2 learner does not possess the metalinguistic knowledge commonly used in classrooms. When L2 learners without literacy are learning in classroom environments, how does educational level/limited formal schooling intersect with investment/motivation and identity? How long does it take L2 learners with limited formal schooling to acquire enough phonemic awareness to engage a wide range of oral language processing strategies (see discussion on input processing by VanPattern, Chapter 16, this volume)? Likewise, how long does it take and what conditions are necessary for learners with limited formal schooling to move from phonemic awareness, to decoding, to meaningful comprehension of a range of relevant texts?
In the area of education and policy, many questions also remain. There is a need to examine, with qualitative and quantitative rigor, the limits and possibilities in educational programming for L2 learners with limited formal schooling. What are or could be alternative paths toward program completion, diplomas, and degrees? It is of pedagogical urgency that researchers explore how the strengths and assets of adolescent and adult learners with limited formal schooling become points of access to other skills that help them reach self-determined goals. Aims of equity and social justice in education need research that uncovers what the experience of having low print literacy as an adolescent/adult in hyper-literate societies is. As educators understand this experience, they will be better able to position themselves in the broader historical and geopolitical landscape of transnational migration. These and so many more issues would benefit from studies done across a broad range research methodologies informed by interdisciplinary perspectives.
Some of the most important dimensions of the issue of educational level and L2 learning may be those hardest for educators and researchers on the hyperliterate side of the abyss to articulate and to face. A true reckoning would remind us that the attitude of global supremacy which under-wrote imperialism in times past—with its gruesome legacy of cultural distortion and destruction— marches on still in the neoliberal agenda pursued under a banner of globalization and expressed in the conduct of business and education throughout the occidental world and beyond (Smith, 2006). It is not difficult to see that the presence of L2 learners in the classrooms of industrialized countries is a direct consequence of the exercise of political and military might, coupled with a sense of messianic right. It may be less obvious, however, that the western approach to academic schooling is also an exercise in privileging certain kinds of learning and knowing over others, sponsored by a post-Enlightenment faith in the tenets of science that define much research considered worthy: objectivity, definability of discrete phenomena, and the primacy of method.
It should not fail to impress us that this list of scientific tenets describes item for item the kind of intellectual and life habits foreign to, and fatal to, oral noesis. The scientific stance, ushered in by the objectification of alphabetic literacy (Ong, 1982, p. 112), entails levels of personal, cultural, and natural rupture, that are at the root of widespread suffering in industrialized societies, expressed as depression, loss of belonging, environmental degradation, and senseless violence. As we welcome unschooled immigrants and earnestly seek to guide them into the literacy and academic skills that they also earnestly seek, we unavoidably participate in the extinction of a way of life based on orality, relationality, memory, and context. Is it really unavoidable? Can'twe somehow proceed more reciprocally, sharing our different perspectives, rather than wielding one to eliminate the other? That thought alone would represent a true departure. So much depends on how we answer these questions, and whether we are sincerely willing to ask them at all. It may be hard, but is also necessary for the intended audience of this chapter to face such considerations, not just for the survival of the refugees and immigrants who come to learn to read, but for the survival of the highly literate and educated who need to learn to live.
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