Day 17: Attitudes to language

A few more books have come up from the stacks, and I have enjoyed a day back analysing some picturebooks, this time relating to attitudes to language.

One I’d like to share with you is Yoko Writes her Name (Wells, 2008), an anthropomorphic tale of a kitten at kindergarten called Yoko who can write her name and numbers in Japanese. Some of the children in the class make fun of here and tell her she will not graduate from kindergarten, but the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, decides that the class will have Japanese as a second language, and Yoko helps her classmates learn to write their names in Japanese Katakana script.

This story reflects many different attitudes towards bilingualism, and presents many opportunities for children to start to learn to think about what characters in the story may be feeling. At the start of the story Yoko’s mum says she is proud of Yoko for writing her name. The text states “Yoko could write her name perfectly”, and the illustrations show she is writing her name in Japanese. It is not until the third page of the book, however, when the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, exclaims “how beautifully Yoko writes her name in Japanese” that readers who don’t know what Japanese looks like know that Yoko has written her name in Japanese. So far the adults have exhibited very positive attitudes to the writing of Japanese, but it is two girls in the class, Olive and Sylvia, who suggest that Yoko’s name and numbers in Japanese are just scribble, and that this means Yoko won’t graduate from kindergarten.

Linking my analysis back to Theory of Mind which I read about in Nikolajeva (2014) there is a great deal of support for novice readers in Yoko Learns to Write to develop their understanding of what it might be like to be literate in a language which is not the dominant medium of instruction in a classroom.  The direct speech in the text and the facial expression and body language in the illustrations supports the novice reader to understand a range of attitudes about languages from the monolingual scorn of Olive and Sylvia to the respect and admiration of Mrs Jenkins and Angelo. The range of emotions presented in the text and illustrations including shame, fear and envy are not basic emotions (such as happiness and sadness), but social emotions which involve other people and must be learnt (Nikolajeva, 2014). These emotions are demonstrated in direct speech and very clearly through the facial expression and body language of the anthropomorphic characters. The aetonormativity of this story is clear: it is the adults’ understanding of the world and respect for linguistic diversity which prevails; and the novice reader is supported in understanding that the child characters’s negative attitudes towards multilingualism are not acceptable. Didacticism?......perhaps.