As a teacher with no small interest in the ways that multiple cultures interact in classrooms, I have recently started researching how I might effectively implement policies that respect languages other than English in my future classroom.
Previously I taught English to students of all ages in China. In that setting, I used a fairly strict English-only policy because total immersion is generally touted as paramount to second language acquisition, using English to teach English as the saying goes. While an English-only policy may be appropriate with Chinese students for whom the classroom may represent the only opportunity for any significant degree of immersion, now that I am facing teaching in the US, I am concerned about showing respect to other languages and ensuring that the colonialist attitudes that have historically devalued other languages do not persist in my classroom.
During my field experience at a local elementary school with a relatively high number of ELLs, I have already observed how easily I am able to gain students' trust and inspire their confidence by speaking even a few words of their own languages. In some instances, on the occasions when I have used another language (typically Chinese), it has been to clarify an instruction, but more often I have used the other language simply to demonstrate to an ELL, as well as to others, that his or her language has value in the classroom.
This will be of particular importance in the Navajo Nation where I will do my student teaching. Historically, English-only policies in boarding schools have done much to disrupt the transmission of Navajo language and culture. The colonialist attitude of the white educators at the time (until fairly recently, in fact) invoked the mantra "kill the Indian to save the child" as a way of justifying its own racism, and Navajo language was a principal target of the killing.
Furthermore, as a language learner myself, I am keen to practice my own Spanish in a way that honors Spanish-speaking culture in the American southwest, potentially in a bilingual school. With that in mind, I read Iliana Reyes and Patricia Azuara's "Emergent Biliteracy in Young Mexican Immigrant Children" in Reading Research Quarterly.
This article focuses on the first year (preschool) of a 3-year longitudinal study of 12 children living in Tuscon, Arizona. The authors, themselves bilingual in Spanish and English, used multiple methods including in-school assessment tasks and at-home interviews with students and their families. The in-school activities included children's analyses of environmental print such as food labels and of book print concepts such as directionality and sound-letter correspondence. Additionally, the authors identified children's metalinguistic understandings of their own and others' language use. At the children's homes, the authors observed the children during various types of naturalistic literacy activities with family.
One of this study's more relevant implications for the classroom is that biliteracy development is highly situated, relying much more on the environment (particularly the social environment) in which literacy takes place than on mere exposure (p. 392). Of particular interest is that the children in this study often switched roles of literacy "novice" and "expert" depending on the language being used (p. 392). When experiencing a literacy event in Spanish, a monolingual parent may be the expert and the child the novice, but upon switching to English the children may well find themselves in the role of expert, explaining for their parents. The authors suggest that these interactions produce higher-order thinking and that by differentiating between one language and another children developed better metalinguistic awareness (p. 392).
All of these points could be used to argue for a more situated type of literacy activity in the classroom (like the one mentioned in a previous post). If in-school literacy activities can be made to more closely resemble the socially mediated literacy events the study's authors have claimed to be at the heart of acquiring biliteracy, then paying particular attention to our ELLs could be a rising tide to lift all boats. That is, from a universal design perspective, a situated literacy curriculum that accounts for how bilingual students learn best may benefit all of our students.
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