Abstract: This article examines the role of mainstream teachers in supporting children’s biliteracy development and bilingualism in a public primary school where English is the medium of instruction. It reports a research conducted in a public primary school in Australia. The research employs a longitudinal ethnographic approach to collect data on how the teachers perceive biliteracy and the extent to which the approaches they adopt impact on their

biliteracy and bilingualism development. The research result demonstrates that the more supportive the teachers for biliteracy development and bilingualism are, the more constructivist their teaching approach is and the more varied the activities they encouraged in their classrooms to create op-portunities for biliteracy and bilingualism engagement and learning are.
Keywords: Teacher perception, bilingualism, literacy activity, impact

“Mami…Mami…Mami…guru saya bisa bahasa Indonesia (Mum…Mum…Mum… my teacher can speak Indonesian”) proudly commented a smiling Fasya, a boy from Indonesian family background who had just come back from his local primary school where officially instruction is conducted in English. This experience marked the beginning of him feeling comfortable in his Australian school where he had just gone to for three weeks. He was very happy to see that his teacher had learn to speak to him in some words of his home language, Indonesian. In his first couple of weeks at the school, Fasya kept silent in the classroom and was only able to watch other children doing their daily activities because of having no understanding at all of English.

The situation of language minority children in mainstream schools has attracted an increasing number of researchers over the last three decades, reflecting what Suarez-Orozco (2001) has highlighted that migration or as Papaster-giadis called ‘global people flows’ (2000) is one of the distinctive defining features of globalization. McLeod (1994) argues that a rising number of language-minority students have given greater attention on the topic of language differ-ences in the classroom. Hornberger (2003:3) identifies the need for those in public school systems to have an understanding of biliteracy because of the growing number of minority language children in their classes. Kenner (2000) demonstrates that failing to take into account the potential of individual bilingualism in the way that the school curriculum is structured at an institutional level is a significant deficiency in current educational policy in English dominant countries, such as the UK and Australia. (This article summary only, to get the full text please login or register and contact admin web

TEFLIN Journal, Volume 21, Number 2, August 2010

Muhammad Basri Jafar (muhbasri@yahoo.com) Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia

 

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