KE: First, let me ask you about your life before you came to Finland. Where were you born, went to school and so on? What kind of childhood did you have?
LW: I was born in Wiltshire in the U.K. That is the county where one can find Stonehenge. My father was a farmer, so we lived exactly in the middle of no where on the edge of the army training region.
I went to local village schools, which in the U.K. means they are run by the Anglican church. I hated school with a passion. The subjects I hated most included French and German (the only languages I learned before I came to Finland).
My mother, however, was a remarkable teacher and my father was very knowledgable about history and the classics. Between the two of them at home with my three natural siblings and many foster siblings, they taught me all the things I "should" have learned from school.
I decided to become a teacher because no-one should have to accept the kinds of teaching I experienced as a child. I vainly believe I can do better.
KE: What degrees have you passed up till now?
LW: My first degree was in English Literature and Drama, which qualified me to teach 7-14 year olds.
My second degree was my licentiate from Åbo Akademi, which was concerned with the way in which Finnish-speaking children in an English nursery school incorporated stories into their speech.
My third degree was my doctorate, also from Åbo Akademi. This looked at how children learn to read in a foreign language.
KE: How did you come to Finland? They always ask this, don't they?
LW: Yes, they always ask and I hate answering it.
In brief, I had worked with bilingual children in Belgium (French/English) and this was my first experience of understanding both languages bilingual children were speaking. I had worked with bilinguals before I went to Belgium, but the children's languages were something like Urdu, Chinese or Hindi. Until I worked with children who spoke two languages I understood, I didn't fully understand what a wonderful gift bilingualism is.
I hated that particular job in Belgium, and I disliked living in that country, but I knew I wanted to work with bilinguals. I had always hoped to live in a Nordic country. Finland offered me the chance to work with bilingual children in a bilingual environment. I came for ten months and now I've been here ten years.
KE: Tell me about you teaching work with children. What do you think about English immersion programmes in Finnish schools? Are they a success?
LW: There is a huge difference between what is meant by "immersion" in different parts of the country. Vaasan Yliopisto (where I have my permanent teaching position) has been the key to introducing full immersion programmes into Finnish schools.
Immersion was originally intended for two native languages. Vaasa has some excellent examples of Finnish/Swedish schools. These are somewhat different as the teachers are all teaching in their native language, they are familiar with the culture and appropriate teaching materials can be obtained.
The success of these schools encouraged weaker variants of immersion programmes, sometimes simply referred to as bilingual education. Almost all the English immersion programmes are of this weaker type. In the Turku region, all the immersion programmes are of the weaker type. One of the key differences is that reading in the native language is introduced before reading in the target language. My research looked at how learning to read in Finnish confused children when they tried to read in English.
I have been severely criticised by the people in Vaasa for using the term immersion, but that is because there is a difference between how it is understood in different contexts. The weaker types that I examined are far more common in this country than full immersion programmes when it comes to English.
I began my research because I was concerned about the quality of such teaching. I had taught a little myself in similar systems and much of my early enthusiasm waned in the face of day to day reality.
Whether or not they are a success depends on what you are looking for as criteria for success. Some children are able to communicate fluently in two languages already at the age of eight. Others feel like failures because they don't speak so well.
I haven't tested enough different schools to give an empirically supported opinion. I can say that if I had children of my own, I would not send them to such a programme.
KE: In your experience of teaching young children to read, do you think that spelling systems matter? Is Finnish-language spelling that much easier to acquire that it would make a difference in learning results? What are your ideas about orthographic reform in English? Is it feasible at all?
LW: Yes, spelling systems matter. The more regular patterns of Finnish orthography have no doubt contributed to the high levels of literacy in this country. I do think that the regularity has encouraged an unwillingness to consider some of the more political implications of how reading is taught. For instance, whole class drilling of sound-letter associations does encourage a very autocratic environment in the classroom. But, for getting people to read, the Finnish system is very successful.
Spelling reform in English is happening gradually anyway, especially in American English. Imposing a reform would simply not work, but the gradual acceptance of, for example 'z' instead of 's' in words such as "customize" and other gradual changes make a difference.
It will be interesting to see what will happen with Finnish as more and more publications are appearing in dialect.
KE: These days, there is a boom of English-language teaching in this country. Should English be thought primarily by native teachers? Are there any benefits when English is taught by non-native speakers?
LW: In order to teach a language well, the teacher must know the language of the children. One of the biggest problems with these English kindergartens is that the teachers often can't understand the children's native language. All teaching builds on what one already knows, foreign-language teaching must build on what the children already know about their own language. It is a basic rule of good education.
KE: What do you think about teaching different subjects in English by teachers that have no formal training in English-language teaching whatsoever?
LW: I find this so frightening, nauseating and troublesome that I am unable to express myself clearly on this point. What can I say? It is utter madness and it amazes me that a country like Finland that has such a good education system, that values education so highly should allow this kind of ridiculous situation to arise.
Imagine if this line of thinking spread to medicine and we suddenly found gynaecologists performing brain surgery...
KE and LW-24 May 1999
The ability to read in a non-native language is becoming increasingly important. With the spread of various forms of bilingual schooling throughout the world, the age at which individuals are expected to read proficiently in a non-native language is falling. In some systems, children are expected to learn to read in their second language before they learn to read in their first language. In other systems children are introduced to both reading systems simultaneously and in yet others, the gap between learning to read in the children's first language and second language may be a matter of less than a year (see Johnson and Swain 1997 for an overview).
Foreign-language reading involves a complex interplay of background knowledge of the subject matter, familiarity with the script form, knowledge of the target language, transference from first-language reading skills, the demands of the particular text as well as a range of more subjective aspects such as motivation and attitudes towards reading. How exactly these features relate to one another will doubtless be the subject of research for many decades to come. In this article, I shall consider whether the factors involved are the same whether one reads in one's native language or in a foreign language. My comments are based on a mixture of several years of teaching experience in English immersion programmes in Finnish schools as well as extensive research reported in Williams (1998).
The reading universals hypothesis, first articulated by Kenneth Goodman in 1973, proposes that: "the reading process will be much the same for all languages". Goodman extended this hypothesis to claim that there is no significant difference between beginner reading and mature reading, they are both a process of gaining meaning. This statement forms the basis of Whole Language: that reading is learned from whole to part, that the search for meaning in a text is what leads to the understanding of small parts such as individual letter-sound associations.
Within traditions of teaching English speaking children to read in their native language, Whole Language has had a major impact on teaching methodology. Until the late sixties, teaching children to read in English was heavily influenced by behaviourism. Children spent significant amounts of time staring at individual letters and words out of context. They practiced many combinations of letter-sound associations before they were allowed to start "really reading", i.e., reading whole stories and other meaningful texts. Thus when the Whole Language movement was born in the late sixties, it seemed to be the answer to a prayer. Dull, repetitive scheme books were thrown out of the classroom and replaced with the best examples of easy-to-read children's literature written for the purpose of entertainment. Whole class teaching was replaced by group work and reading conferences with individual children. Children's writing became more meaningful as audiences other than the teacher were sought. Whole Language assumes that meaning making is the basis of all written language communication. Consequently, activities that encourage the separation of meaning from the act of reading, for example reading discrete syllables, are frowned upon.
I was originally trained to teach English to native English speakers. Thus when I emigrated to Finland and began working in Finnish language schools, I found myself having to develop a different mind-set for understanding how reading in Finnish was taught. For here was a system that relied on heavy phonic drills, whole class teaching and the reading of meaningless syllables - all the activities I had been trained to avoid - and yet the children could read well. In 1992, the International Reading Association's report declared nine year old Finns to be the most competent readers of that age in the world (Elley 1992). It was clear that teaching children to read in Finnish was considered a very different activity from reading in English. The usual reason given for the success of these practices is that Finnish spelling is very regular.
Research by Watson (1994), Clarke (1987), Juel (1995), Fisher (1989), Gwin (1990) and Garton and Pratt (1988), to mention a few, demonstrates that phonic drills, whole class teaching and reading scheme books are not appropriate for teaching children to read in English. Thus the claim that that "the reading process will be much the same for all languages" has to be reconsidered.
Whether or not reading is the same in all languages is an issue that lurks at the back of all second language reading research. Since the translation of Lev Vygotsky's work Thought and Language from Russian into English in 1962, the related question of how early reading experiences are related to mature reading has troubled many teachers in the West. Let me put this question in practical terms. Children as young as two commonly perform such actions as turning over the pages of a newspaper and claiming to read it, retelling familiar stories, quoting sections they have learned by heart. They know which way to hold a book and the order in which the pages are turned. The question is: are these activities related to the activity that goes on inside the heads of a mature readers reading silently to themselves?
The Whole Language answer to this question is Yes. Early experiences of print develop skills that gradually develop into mature reading. The more traditional answer is a modified 'no'. Whilst no-one who has ever worked with young children would deny the importance of early contact with print, traditional teachers of reading would distinguish between these so-called 'pre-reading' experiences and 'real reading' which refers to the child's ability to decipher the written code.
The term 'pre-reading' assumes that the ability to read develops in discrete stages, which implies a qualitative distinction between readers and non-readers. Whole Language advocates have not agreed upon a term that describes a gradual development, but which also indicates that this development is not necessarily either steady or linear. Terms such as 'phase', 'level', 'stage' and 'period' are used reluctantly since they indicate a type of linear development that is alien to Whole Language philosophy. A difficult text or merely boredom can send the reader back and make him or her appear to be a novice reader. This 'short-circuit' to use Clarke's term which has now become standard amongst second language reading researchers can be found at all levels of the reading process. For instance, most of us who are not lawyers find it difficult to understand legal texts, even when written in our native language. If the process of reading is much the same in all languages, then the main problem novice second language readers will face will be a language problem rather than a reading problem. Superficially, this does not seem to be much of an issue, of course second language readers' lack of familiarity with the target language will affect their ability to read. However, the issues are more complex than they seem. In an influential article written in 1984, Alderson developed the following two hypotheses which need to be addressed if this issue is to be resolved.
Alderson's first hypothesis suggests that poor reading in a foreign language is due to poor reading ability in the first language. And, vice-versa, people who read well in their first language will read well in their second language. The slightly weaker version of this hypothesis is that poor foreign language reading is due to inappropriate strategies for reading in that particular language. This hypothesis implicitly assumes there are qualitative differences between the ways in which people read in different languages. Nevertheless, most reading skills transfer positively which is why most children who read well in Finnish also read well in English. Problems in reading in English could be attributed to the use of strategies that are appropriate for Finnish, but not for English.
Alderson's second hypothesis is that poor reading in a foreign language is due to inadequate knowledge of the target language. The nuance of this hypothesis is that poor foreign language reading is due to reading strategies in the first language not being employed in the foreign language until the reader has passed a threshold of competence in the target language. This would mean that once the children spoke English well enough, their Finnish reading habits would not affect their English reading negatively. Evidence that supports this second hypothesis indicates support for the universal's hypothesis, that is, that all reading involves fundamentally the same processes. Both sets of hypotheses are designed to question whether native language and second language reading are different in kind or in degree.
The main problem that arises when attempting to test either of these hypotheses is that the tools for examining what happens when a reader reads are relatively crude. Since one cannot enter the mind of another human being, reading research rests on inferences drawn from observed behaviour. This has led to essentially two forms of research: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research uses methods such as test-time response (i.e. how quickly people are able to respond to written stimuli by reading aloud or pressing a button or something), cloze procedures (i.e. when a gap is left in a sentence and the reader has to fill it in, e.g. The man who _______ today wore a yellow hat), eye-movement studies and incongruence tests, for instance, the replacement of one homophone with another. Qualitative research, on the other hand, attempts to examine readers' understanding of texts through questions and interviews after and during reading. Both types of research are necessary. Qualitative research gives us values and direction, whereas quantitative research protects us from letting the strengths of our beliefs blind us to their limitations.
Miscue analysis, pioneered by Goodman and employed by me in an abridged form in my doctoral dissertation (Williams 1998), attempts to find a middle ground between these two forms of research. Miscue analysis arose from Goodman's early observations of what readers actually did when they read passages of connected prose aloud. He noted that even highly skilled readers do not read exactly what is written on the page. In behaviourist terms such differences are referred to as 'mistakes' or 'errors', but Goodman suggested that these so-called 'errors' were too frequent and too regular to be dismissed. Instead, he suggested that "whatever the readers do is not random but is the result of the reading process, whether successfully used or not". Consequently, these 'errors' were redefined as 'miscues'. Goodman analysed the types of substitutions readers made in order to detect the source of difficulty. He proposed that miscues arise from some problematic element within the text as the reader sought to understand it.
One of the most significant things I found with my adapted and simplified version of miscue analysis was that, contrary to Goodman's assumption that readers all seek to make sense, many of the children in the study school were prepared to sit and mouth sounds. I attributed this acceptance of non-meaning to negative transfer from their reading in Finnish. In their Finnish classes, the children had become used to reading lists of meaningless syllables. As a result, they were quite willing to try to make sounds when faced with an English text. This finding offers tentative support for Alderson's first hypothesis that foreign-language reading problems are primarily reading problems not language problems.
However, in the same classes as children who were willing to merely mouth sounds, there were also children who read very competently, making meaningful substitutions and appropriate changes in their intonation. The fact that children in the same class could read so well suggests that this aspect of negative transfer from Finnish reading education was not all consuming. Indeed, the diverse range of reading abilities could be regarded as providing support for the claim that foreign-language reading is primarily a language problem. Once the reader has reached a certain threshold of proficiency, reading transfer no longer causes difficulties.
To summarise the discussion so far: there are no discernible differences in the ability of mature adults to create meaning from text when reading in the native language. However, in the early stages of learning to read, certain differences between educational reading practices suggest that there may be differences between novice readers. It is tempting to neatly categorise these differences as differences in kind, but this would be overly simplistic. It is not the case that foreign-language reading is either a reading problem or a language problem; it is a complex interplay of many different factors. But is reading basically the same for all languages or not? The reason it is so difficult to answer this question is that novice readers' reading skills are uncoordinated.
The novice reader's most significant difference from the mature reader is that novices are less co-ordinated in their ability to make these different actions and different sources of information interact with one another. If we draw an analogy between learning to read and learning to drive a car, this lack of co-ordination may become easier to understand. Novice drivers faced with learning to control the wheel, the gears, the clutch, the brake, the gas pedal, the rear and side view mirrors, the lights, the windscreen wipers and the indicators often feel the need for at least one extra set of eyes, a spare leg and a third arm, especially when driving in heavy traffic. Everything about the novice driver, or the novice reader, is uncoordinated in the sense that he or she cannot immediately sort out priorities, cannot determine the order in which things need to be done, cannot work out how they relate to one another which tends to limit the range of what they actually do. The novice driver concentrating on how to change gears, watch the traffic and slow down at a crossroads is likely to forget to check the mirror and indicate. Novice readers concentrating on individual letters may lose track of the total text they are reading and not understand what they have read. This inability to co-ordinate leads to over-reliance on a limited range of strategies.
This lack of co-ordination is precisely that which encourages different teaching practices designed to enable learners to chunk together different aspects of the reading process. Which aspects are chosen for this purpose, depends on the language. Just as novice drivers go to deserted car parks to practice threading the wheel through their hands, novice readers may carry out exercises designed to improve just one aspect of their reading. How these activities are linked to the whole process - driving or reading a book - varies widely as we saw in the contrast between the traditional methods of teaching children to read in Finnish and the methods by which most children are taught to read in English.
An extreme Whole Language system insists that the reader face all problems at once, to use our car analogy, that the driver must learn to co-ordinate everything at once albeit on side roads. The extreme in the opposite position suggests that all separate skills, gear changing or word recognition skills, be taught separately and only be integrated once they have been practised. There is obviously a middle ground in both these situations: the reader reads, the driver drives and the teacher occasionally interrupts the process to work on one specific aspect of their lack of co-ordination in an exercise which is immediately related back to the larger task. Instead of training the novice driver to drive on an obstacle course, the driving equivalent of the scheme book, the teacher may encourage the novice to practice on country roads and back streets. In reading terms this relates to predictable texts preceding novels with an unusual time reference or lexically dense information books.
When learning to read in a second language, the reader has to integrate existing skills with new skills. Lack of co-ordination between new and old skills leads novice readers to over-emphasise some skills at the expense of others. Even though mature reading draws on the same range of skills regardless of the language, foreign language reading re-introduces the lack of co-ordination experienced by novice readers. When, as in this study, the children are still novice readers in their native language, their inability to co-ordinate the various sources of information in a foreign language is unsurprising. But note that the difference is not one in kind, only in degree. Lack of co-ordination is a more useful means of describing the differences between novice and mature readers or native and foreign language readers than dichotomous distinctions between these categories of reader. LW-24 May 1999
References
Alderson, J. C. 1984 Reading in a Foreign Language: A Reading Problem or a Language Problem? in Alderson, J. C. and Urquhart, A. H. (eds.) Reading in a Foreign Language Longman: London and New York pp 1 - 24
Clarke, M. 1987 Don't Blame the System: Constraints on 'Whole Language' Reform Language Arts No. 64 pp. 384-396
Elley, W. B. 1992 How in the World do Students read? The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement: Hamburg
Fisher, R. 1989 Bibliophiles in the making - an informal assessment of children's progress in learning to read using the storybook approach English in Education 23 (1): 8-13
Garton, A. and Pratt, C. 1989 Learning to be Literate: The Development of Spoken and Written Language Oxford: Cambridge
Gwin, T. 1990 Language Skills through Literature English Teaching Forum Vol. 28 No. 3 pp. 10-17
Johnson, R. K. and Swain, M. (Eds.) 1997 Immersion Education: International Perspectives Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Juel, C. 1995 The Messenger may be wrong, but the message may be right Journal of REsearch in Reading Vol. 18 No. 2 pp. 146-153
Watson, D. J. 1994 Defining and Describing Whole Language The Elementary School Journal No. 90 pp. 129-141
Williams, L. 1998 Young EFL Readers and Their Books: Learning to read in English immersion programmes Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press
Related links (reading, bilingual
education, Whole Language) for further reading
compiled by Kari Eveli - 24 May 1999
Lydia Williams: Accounts of Reading A chapter from her thesis.
Research at Åbo Akademi Select ChiLPA to find out more about the project in which Lydia Williams works.
University of Vaasa (Finland) Immersion Project Mainly in Swedish.
University of Oulu (Finland) Teacher Education Research Mainly in Finnish.
Van der Voort, Universiteit Leiden, Afdeling Algemene en gezinspedagogiek References to Professor Tom H.A. van der Voort's (Leyden University) studies on the impact of television on children's reading. In English.
The National Clearinghouse
for Bilingual Education (NCBE) Home Page
Bilingual
Reading Instruction
Bilingual Education/ESL
- links to bilingual education-related sites
Curriculum
& Instruction
John Fitzgerald: Language and Social Education
Betty Jane Wagner: Integrating the Language Arts
Sandra Elam: What To Do When You're Told: We Do Teach Phonics
Robert W. Sweet, Jr. : Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Education Malpractice?
Arizona Parents for Traditional Education: What is Whole Language?
Mark Caprio: Second Language Literacy Through Student-Centered Learning
Linnea C. Ehri: Phonemic and/or Graphemic Awareness - Which is Essential? How They Fit Together
Bonnie Grossen (University of Oregon): The research base of Reading Mastery
Kerry Hempenstall: Miscue analysis: A critique
Miscue Analysis An introductory bibliography. ERIC, Indiana University.
Whole Language vs Phonetic Reading Instruction An introductory bibliography. ERIC, Indiana University.
The official EU standpoint on the euro sign and its abbreviation is as follows: "The graphic symbol for the euro looks like an E with two clearly marked, horizontal parallel lines across it. It was inspired by the Greek letter epsilon, in reference to the cradle of European civilisation and to the first letter of the word 'Europe'. The parallel lines represent the stability of the euro. The official abbreviation for the euro is 'EUR'. It has been registered with the International Standards Organisation (ISO), and will be used for all business, financial and commercial purposes, just as the terms 'FRF' (French franc), 'DEM' (Deutschmark), 'GBP' (pound sterling) and 'BEF' (Belgian franc) are used today."
Even though the official EU standpoint is clear, there seems to be some confusion as to the origins of the symbol. In fact, even most typographers seem to ignore the true origin of the euro symbol. It is presented as being based on the Epsilon glyph. This is indeed the case, but one needs to be somewhat versed in paleography, i.e. the study of ancient scripts, in order to trace the glyph back to its true origins. The euro glyph looks like a capital C with two horizontal crossbars. In ancient Greek a capital epsilon was first written as a square-shaped "E" just like in modern Greek. Later on a cursive capital epsilon became used in texts written on papyri and parchments. A cursive epsilon which imitates handwritten shapes is also found carved in stone. This glyph looks like a capital "C" with one horizontal bar struck through. This shape is not so uncommon: it is found in many alphabets around the world, e.g. the Russian alphabet, which is directly derived from the Greek, uses its mirror image for the letter E (old Slavonic had the Greek C with a horizontal stroke shape).
Most important currency symbols are capital letters with a bar or two bars struck through them, e.g. pound, dollar, yen. The glyph used for cent has normally a slash struck through. The Romans indicated abbreviated words either by a point or by a strike-through. The pound symbol is a prime example of this: £ is a cursive capital L struck through to indicate abbreviation (from Latin libra, 'pound weight'). The dollar and yen glyphs can be explained in similar fashion. Shillings, notably the famous Massachusetts Pine-Tree Shillings, were the first 17th century colonial coins minted in New England. I think the S in the dollar glyph stands for Shilling, even though there is a theory that the dollar symbol is formed by superposing the letters US. The yen symbol ¥ comes ultimately from the Chinese word yuán [jyán] 'round', hence the meaning 'a round piece of money', 'a coin'. The strike-through follows the example of the pound and dollar symbols, and therefore boasts a Latin heritage.
Having examined the origins of the euro symbol, we are better able to deal with the everyday practical problems its introduction poses. Typewriters do not have the symbol and some computer systems will not get it ever, especially DOS-based or other user-supported systems. What symbols should we use instead or in the meantime, before we have replaced all our equipment or all our fonts have the new character?
Because the euro sign IS actually a capital Epsilon struck through and the Greek typewriter equivalent of this looks just like our capital E, we should use the letter E for euro. This works well in all countries concerned. "9,95 E" looks familiar to the French, which are used to F for franc, or to the Germans, which are used to DM for Deutsche Mark. The British can change the order according to their custom: E9.95 or E9-95. Specifically, one cannot use a lowercase 'e', although this has been erroneously recommended by the Bureau for the Finnish language (kielitoimisto), official organ for the maintenance of the Finnish standard language, because this is the symbol for approximate weight the EU created for the packaging industry. Besides, all the other main currency symbols are capital letters, as we have seen already. As for eurocents, there is no need for a new symbol or abbreviation: why not use ¢? This can be easily implemented in typewritten text by using a small c, backspacing and typing a forward slash.
Thus, the new international abbreviations I recommend for the eurocurrency are: E and ¢.
Kari Eveli - 4 January 1999. The writer is a trained linguist, lexicographer, and publisher.
Windows 98 and NT 5 have euro symbol support. You can download support for Windows 95 or NT 4 (Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4) from Microsoft. The Windows euro symbol is located as ANSI character 128 decimal (80 hexadecimal). The euro symbol is input by pressing AltGr+e (or by holding Alt down and keying in 0128 on the numeric keypad). Printer output works if you choose print fonts as graphics. Bear in mind that there are no resident euro symbols in older printers. And if you use DOS or something even more exotic, you are left to your own devices. But you can always use E and ¢. So, who needs a euro symbol?
You may want to look through Microsoft's The euro currency symbol page. When the euro sign design was submitted to the EU Heads of State meeting in Dublin, professional typographers complained that the symbol appeared in one set style only, i.e. it was treated as a logotype. Currency symbols are normally interpreted according to the font. Today, this "one shape fits all" situation has changed and you may want look at the variety of shapes that Mindaugas Strockis and Alexander Svensson have sketched (Now available also as a downloadable file - 6.1.02). For those of us who do not use Microsoft's TrueType fonts, there used to be free Adobe euro fonts (this service has been discontinued). These are Type 1 PostScript fonts presented as sans serif, serif and monospaced character sets. All the characters in these fonts are euro symbols, so you only have to choose a euro font and press any key to input a euro symbol. A bit wasteful, but it works if you have a Mac or a PC with ATM and Windows 3.1x or Windows 95-98 operating system. In addition, there are by now many commercial font solutions from traditional type houses, e.g. Linotype and Monotype, that you may want to consider.
The names of currencies and their abbreviations can be found at the Currencies of the World site, which features The EURO - Europe's New Currency with ample links at the bottom of the page. Northern Light Special Edition: European Economic and Monetary Union contains links to in-depth sources in English. The portal Dino has great euro coverage in German. KE-4.1.99 (Links (MS NT 4.0 SP 4; Dino) and text (Northern Light) updated 11.1.99 and 6.1.02). Andreas Stoetzner has kindly made me aware of his contribution to the study of the euro and other monetary signs: Signa - BEITRÄGE ZUR SIGNOGRAPHIE, Nr.3. (Added 7.12.2005).
Lexitec Online Magazine's Finnish-language edition covers the same topic more in detail in Finnish: Eurovaluutan merkitseminen.
Want to talk back? Send mail to: online@lexitec.fi