ABSTRACT
Aykut was very reluctant to speak because he knew very little English and also because he was the only bilingual child in the class. The children thought that he could not speak. He said almost nothing in their reception class which he joined in the latter half-term of the summer term, arriving in England from Turkey only a few days before. He had to spend time to listen and learn to speak the language. Mills and Mills (1993) indicate that: ‘this apparent silence is a strategy which bilinguals develop to watch their peers intently and follow their behaviour’. I explained to the children that this child could speak very well in Turkish, but that he needed some help with his English. He could use some English phrases before he came into our class. He said things like ‘toilet, please’, ‘drink water’ and ‘draw cat’. I had to raise the status of talk within the classroom. The children were made to view talk as valid work in all areas of the curriculum. For example, they would explain how a three-dimensional model was built using polyhedrons, identify features on a map of the playgroup and make predictions for a science experiment on heating and cooling.
