Teaching in multilingual schools
Baines, L, & Wickham, A. (2018, July). Teaching in multilingual schools English Journal 107(6), 14-19.
Imagine you are a student who is moving with your family to a new country and you are enrolling at a public school in a big, foreign city.
Your family is struggling financially, you barely speak the language, and you are worried about dangerous parts of your neighborhood, finding friends, and how you will survive. When you walk into a classroom on the first day, is your first thought, I hope that this teacher's curriculum is aligned to the standards? No.
Is your first thought, I cannot wait to sabotage this class? No.
Instead, your first thought likely would have to do with your personal safety and the general level of friendliness of the people that you meet. Who is a friend, and who might be a foe?
Having a teacher who welcomes you with a genuine grin, open arms, and an active interest in your well-being would be an immediate indication that life at school might not be hell. On the other hand, having a teacher exclaim, "Not another one!" would not lead to feelings of peace or endearment.
Teaching in multilingual classrooms is the new normal. Thousands of distinctive pockets of language and culture exist across the United States. A few years ago, a friend and bilingual first-year teacher named Griselda, fluent in both Spanish and English, took a job at a high school in Corpus Christi, a city of more than 300,000 located along the Texas gulf coast. While Griselda could easily converse in Spanish and English with her future students, she was not ready for the thousands of students in Corpus Christi schools who spoke Vietnamese. Today, Corpus Christi, Texas, is home to dozens of Vietnamese restaurants, a Buddhist temple, and many Vietnamese "villages," communities of Vietnamese emigrants (Sweets).
After her first year of teaching in Corpus Christi, Griselda later confessed, "I think I did a pretty good job with everyone except maybe the Vietnamese students. But, most of them could not speak or read any English at all. I mean, Vietnamese uses a completely different sound system and grammatical structure. What was I supposed to do?"
This article provides a sense of the multilingual nature of public schools and helps answer Griselda's question of "What was I supposed to do?" by providing practical suggestions for interactions in multilingual classrooms based on the theories of the ethic of care and the Comprehension Hypothesis.
The Multilingual Nature of Public Schools
Here is a startling statistic: in the United States, more than 1 in 5 students lives in a household where English is not spoken. In other words, a teacher with a class of 30 students can expect at least six to have parents who do not speak English at home. Of course, six is the mean. In urban schools and in some schools in the Southwest, for example, half or more of the student body might speak a language other than English (Ryan).
The dramatic transformation of the demographics of the United States is reflected in the growth of languages outside the traditional triad of SFG-Spanish, French, and German. The six fastest growing languages in the United States from 1980 to 2009 and their relative growth rates are as follows (Shin and Ortman):
1. Vietnamese, 5 3 3 percent
2. Russian, 409 percent
3. Chinese, 312 percent
4. Korean, 290 percent
5. Arabic, 289 percent
6. Tagalog, 219 percent
The multilingual environments of schools affect not only the use of English and the comprehensibility of the curriculum but also the foundation for social interactions. While the languages and cultures of a school would seem to be of primary import, the complications that naturally ensue with teaching English learners (ELs) often go unacknowledged.
Planning for Multilingual Classrooms
One of a teacher's chief concerns is the planning of lessons over the year to achieve specific predetermined objectives, often established by the state and school district. Such an approach is appropriate when all of the following assumptions hold true:
-The student body is monolingual.
-Students have established their competence in the content areas.
-Students can readily read, write, listen, and speak in English.
-Students have access to a stable family life, friends, and money.
-Students share enthusiastic, positive dispositions toward school.
Few American classrooms today outside of elite, private schools can promise that their students meet these assumptions. In contrast, consider the students who attend American public schools:
-One in 2 identify as a race other than white (Hispanic, 26 percent; Black, 15 percent; Asian, 5 percent; Native American, 1 percent; multirace, 3 percent).
-One in 2 are white.
-One in 2 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
-One in 4 are rated as "below basic" in English and mathematics.
-One in 5 are English learners.
-One in 7 are in special education.
-One in 20 are classifiable as "gifted and talented" (National Center for Education Statistics).
While these demographics reveal the diversity of American schools in terms of language, ethnicity, economic wealth, and ability, urban schools are even more diverse. The Council of the Great City Schools estimates that 81 percent of students in its urban schools are nonwhite; 71 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch (Council of the Great City Schools).
Care Is Paramount
Nel Noddings's ethic of care, which asserts that "care must be taken seriously as a major purpose of schools," has been a foundation for numerous subsequent studies on the fundamental importance of teacher-student connections (687). In terms of successful interventions for increasing student achievement and for fostering positive attitudes toward learning, teacher care tops the list (Ancess; SuarezOrozco et al.; Tellez and Manthey). Caring highly correlates with engagement and engagement highly correlates with achievement (Csikszentmihalyi).
In a study of how a teacher's caring disposition influenced achievement among ELs, it was found that "caring teachers bolstered can-do attitudes" (Lewis et al. 2). In a study of underachieving African American males who were deemed "at risk" of dropping out of school, Kimberly J. Stormer found that students who stayed in school attributed their persistence to a positive relationship with a teacher.
Making the effort to get to know students as individuals, learning something about their families, becoming acquainted with aspects of the students' culture, and understanding the significance of their traditions fosters positive relationships. Without a strong relationship with the teacher, it is difficult for ELs to muster sufficient motivation to succeed (Dixon et al.). Dropout rates for ELs are more than double those of native speakers of English, which may be attributable to weak support networks at school (Duffy et al.).
The wide range of student knowledge and abilities in most American classrooms means that a uniform approach may not be optimal. The prevalence of ELs, multilingual speakers, and students who may lack strong study skills suggests that instruction be both adaptable and highly personalized. When teaching ELs, it is useful to follow three basic rules.
1. Begin where students are rather than where they "should be."
2. Be language-conscious.
3. Explicitly teach how to start.
Begin Where Students Are Rather Than Where They "Should Be"
If you happen to land a job teaching ninth grade at Glendale High School in California, where more than half of the students are from Armenia, an appropriate initiative would be to assess the level of education among them-both in terms of academic knowledge and competency in English. Some students already may be brilliant intellectuals, but if they have never spoken a word of English, their brilliance may not be readily discernible.
That many teachers today struggle with teaching students who are in the process of learning English is nothing new, nor is the situation likely to change in the near future. While theories of language learning and acquisition have shifted from the Skill-Building Hypothesis to the Comprehension Hypothesis (Krashen), the approaches practiced in the classroom have lagged behind. According to the Comprehension Hypothesis, language learners subconsciously acquire a new language when they have input, such as books and speech at a level that matches the learners' abilities. This hypothesis leads to a reexamination of the expectations we hold for English learners, in that targeted, comprehensible interaction with teachers and peers is vital. Language learners need to be in language-rich environments with ample opportunity to encounter
language that they can comprehend in speech and writing.
Many studies have found that mixing 12 speakers with 11 speakers offers the best rate of growth for each group, so one effective tactic might be matching a "buddy" (someone who has already mastered English) with new arrivals who have poor or no language skills (August; Echevarria et al.; Peck; Williams). However, simply pairing students does not guarantee success as "careful consideration must be given to the design of the tasks that students engage in, the training of non-ELs who interact with ELs, and the language proficiency of the ELs themselves" (Genesee et al. 368).
A teacher would also do well to learn a few, key phrases in the dominant 11 of students. In Glendale, this might mean learning some basic phrases in Armenian. For teachers, ten useful words/phrases might include the following:
1. Please.
2. Thank you.
3. Excuse me.
4. Do you need help?
5. Do your best.
6. Bravo!
7. Where is
8. Listen.
9. Speak/Do not speak.
10. This is important
Writing phonetic translations of these basic phrases on an index card and using them in the first few months with students who have yet to master English would not only dramatically improve the quality of communication, it would also help validate the student's L1 (Pennington and Richards; Porter et al.). While it is essential to provide comprehensible input in the target language, using the student's 11 as a bridge, on occasion, can help expedite learning English as an 12 (Horst et al.).
Students in an immersive English environment tend to pick up language relatively quickly, but mastery does not happen overnight. According to JeffMacSwan and Lisa Pray, no research indicates that the majority of 12 learners can gain sufficient English proficiency to succeed in a mainstream classroom after only one year. Research indicates that it takes between three and seven years for a student to attain proficiency (Hakuta; Hakuta et al.).
A teacher of ELs should be cognizant that, if a student knows only a few words in English, what a student says may not be indicative of what a student means. A teacher must be resolute in placing a focus on meaning, with only secondary consideration given to correctness. When correctness is allowed to become the chief concern, stress increases, experimentation decreases, the rational mind retreats, and students tend toward an instinctive response, usually fight, flight, or freeze (Kahneman; Webb).
Be Language-Conscious
A teacher of ELs must actively self-monitor his or her use of language. While there is little advantage in speaking louder, it may be useful to deliver messages that are clear and relatively free of idioms, which might not be comprehensible. Consider the following exchange overheard in a local high school:
Teacher: Tonight, I want you to hit the books.
Student: Strike our books?
Teacher: I mean, that with regard to studying, the ball is in your court.
Student: What court?
Teacher: You should not cut any corners.
Student: No cut.
Directions for assignments should be stated orally as well as written down so that students can see them. Do not use a small font. If students can copy what is on the board, then they can figure it out later, either by asking friends or consulting Google Translate or some other mechanism.
Sensory supports, such as visual and auditory clues, can help fill in the gaps and eliminate confusion. Don't do this: Announce in the last minute of class, "Read the article and answer the two questions on the board." Instead, have students place their hands on the article and read your directions aloud while pointing to the written directions on the board. You may consider such tactics elementary, but a student who does not understand the directions is unlikely to complete the assignment.
The research on learning language overwhelmingly supports the use of "language notebooks," so ELs should be encouraged to jot down new words and phrases and make notes to themselves in a journal expressly dedicated for this purpose (Rassaei). Jim Cummins is famous for differentiating between Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and Basic Interpersonal Communications Skills (BICS). Whereas ELs will learn BICS as a matter of course by studying alongside American students seven hours per day, five days per week, CALP refers to the language of specific content areas, such as English, social studies, mathematics, and science. Attaining mastery over academic language is key for ELs, especially for those who want to go to college and gain access to higher-paying jobs. A language notebook will go a long way toward helping ELs retain the meanings of words frequently used in academic English, words that they may not hear when chatting with friends.
In a study of individuals who gained fluency in a language, it was found that a key component of success was the individual's ability to self-regulate learning (Rahouti and Baines; Santangelo and Graham). A student knows, better than anyone, what he or she knows and does not know. To maximize learning, a student must enter into the zone of proximal development (ZPD), that area of learning that is just beyond current abilities but attainable with help (Vygotsky). Learners progress in learning language by comprehending input that is just slightly more advanced than their current level. The gist of the Comprehension Hypothesis, as described by Krashen, is captured in the equation i + 1, where i is the student's current level and 1 is a slightly higher level of proficiency.
While a teacher of ELs might do everything possible to promote learning, the end goal is for students to become sufficiently invested so that they eventually take over and become independent, motivated learners. After all, motivation makes the "largest difference in 12 outcomes" (Dixon et al. 41).
Explicitly Teach How to Start
The third of the "big three" important practices for working with ELs must be purposefully implemented because it is so unnatural. If you are teaching a class comprised of ELs who may be relatively recent immigrants and you assign them to "describe the scientific method" or "summarize the Bill of Rights," be prepared to read papers chat have been copied and pasted from all corners of the Internet. Teaching "how to start" means reviewing the cognitive and mechanical steps that lead from idea generation to a finished paper.
For many teachers, chinking and reflecting are automatic, reflexive responses. To show students how to start, a teacher might begin by explaining how he or she would approach a particular assignment, co show students how the teacher thinks. Some educational researchers have made a brouhaha over think-alouds, but they can be a straightforward way to elucidate chinking (Fonteyn et al.). Discussing your cognitive processes during "start-up" only cakes a few minutes and provides significant help for a majority of students (Durning et al.; Vandevelde et al.).
Conclusion
The multicultural reality of today's classrooms offers opportunities for teachers to explore strategies that enhance learning for ELs while elevating the learning environment for all students. The ethic of care and the comprehension hypothesis can translate into practices chat center on building reciprocal relationships with students in which they understand and are understood. The "big three"beginning where students are rather than where they "should be," being language-conscious, and explicitly teaching how to start-are strategies teachers can use to establish a strong foundation in working with ELs and help create a positive, highly interactive learning environment.
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Your family is struggling financially, you barely speak the language, and you are worried about dangerous parts of your neighborhood, finding friends, and how you will survive. When you walk into a classroom on the first day, is your first thought, I hope that this teacher's curriculum is aligned to the standards? No.
Is your first thought, I cannot wait to sabotage this class? No.
Instead, your first thought likely would have to do with your personal safety and the general level of friendliness of the people that you meet. Who is a friend, and who might be a foe?
Having a teacher who welcomes you with a genuine grin, open arms, and an active interest in your well-being would be an immediate indication that life at school might not be hell. On the other hand, having a teacher exclaim, "Not another one!" would not lead to feelings of peace or endearment.
Teaching in multilingual classrooms is the new normal. Thousands of distinctive pockets of language and culture exist across the United States. A few years ago, a friend and bilingual first-year teacher named Griselda, fluent in both Spanish and English, took a job at a high school in Corpus Christi, a city of more than 300,000 located along the Texas gulf coast. While Griselda could easily converse in Spanish and English with her future students, she was not ready for the thousands of students in Corpus Christi schools who spoke Vietnamese. Today, Corpus Christi, Texas, is home to dozens of Vietnamese restaurants, a Buddhist temple, and many Vietnamese "villages," communities of Vietnamese emigrants (Sweets).
After her first year of teaching in Corpus Christi, Griselda later confessed, "I think I did a pretty good job with everyone except maybe the Vietnamese students. But, most of them could not speak or read any English at all. I mean, Vietnamese uses a completely different sound system and grammatical structure. What was I supposed to do?"
This article provides a sense of the multilingual nature of public schools and helps answer Griselda's question of "What was I supposed to do?" by providing practical suggestions for interactions in multilingual classrooms based on the theories of the ethic of care and the Comprehension Hypothesis.
The Multilingual Nature of Public Schools
Here is a startling statistic: in the United States, more than 1 in 5 students lives in a household where English is not spoken. In other words, a teacher with a class of 30 students can expect at least six to have parents who do not speak English at home. Of course, six is the mean. In urban schools and in some schools in the Southwest, for example, half or more of the student body might speak a language other than English (Ryan).
The dramatic transformation of the demographics of the United States is reflected in the growth of languages outside the traditional triad of SFG-Spanish, French, and German. The six fastest growing languages in the United States from 1980 to 2009 and their relative growth rates are as follows (Shin and Ortman):
1. Vietnamese, 5 3 3 percent
2. Russian, 409 percent
3. Chinese, 312 percent
4. Korean, 290 percent
5. Arabic, 289 percent
6. Tagalog, 219 percent
The multilingual environments of schools affect not only the use of English and the comprehensibility of the curriculum but also the foundation for social interactions. While the languages and cultures of a school would seem to be of primary import, the complications that naturally ensue with teaching English learners (ELs) often go unacknowledged.
Planning for Multilingual Classrooms
One of a teacher's chief concerns is the planning of lessons over the year to achieve specific predetermined objectives, often established by the state and school district. Such an approach is appropriate when all of the following assumptions hold true:
-The student body is monolingual.
-Students have established their competence in the content areas.
-Students can readily read, write, listen, and speak in English.
-Students have access to a stable family life, friends, and money.
-Students share enthusiastic, positive dispositions toward school.
Few American classrooms today outside of elite, private schools can promise that their students meet these assumptions. In contrast, consider the students who attend American public schools:
-One in 2 identify as a race other than white (Hispanic, 26 percent; Black, 15 percent; Asian, 5 percent; Native American, 1 percent; multirace, 3 percent).
-One in 2 are white.
-One in 2 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
-One in 4 are rated as "below basic" in English and mathematics.
-One in 5 are English learners.
-One in 7 are in special education.
-One in 20 are classifiable as "gifted and talented" (National Center for Education Statistics).
While these demographics reveal the diversity of American schools in terms of language, ethnicity, economic wealth, and ability, urban schools are even more diverse. The Council of the Great City Schools estimates that 81 percent of students in its urban schools are nonwhite; 71 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch (Council of the Great City Schools).
Care Is Paramount
Nel Noddings's ethic of care, which asserts that "care must be taken seriously as a major purpose of schools," has been a foundation for numerous subsequent studies on the fundamental importance of teacher-student connections (687). In terms of successful interventions for increasing student achievement and for fostering positive attitudes toward learning, teacher care tops the list (Ancess; SuarezOrozco et al.; Tellez and Manthey). Caring highly correlates with engagement and engagement highly correlates with achievement (Csikszentmihalyi).
In a study of how a teacher's caring disposition influenced achievement among ELs, it was found that "caring teachers bolstered can-do attitudes" (Lewis et al. 2). In a study of underachieving African American males who were deemed "at risk" of dropping out of school, Kimberly J. Stormer found that students who stayed in school attributed their persistence to a positive relationship with a teacher.
Making the effort to get to know students as individuals, learning something about their families, becoming acquainted with aspects of the students' culture, and understanding the significance of their traditions fosters positive relationships. Without a strong relationship with the teacher, it is difficult for ELs to muster sufficient motivation to succeed (Dixon et al.). Dropout rates for ELs are more than double those of native speakers of English, which may be attributable to weak support networks at school (Duffy et al.).
The wide range of student knowledge and abilities in most American classrooms means that a uniform approach may not be optimal. The prevalence of ELs, multilingual speakers, and students who may lack strong study skills suggests that instruction be both adaptable and highly personalized. When teaching ELs, it is useful to follow three basic rules.
1. Begin where students are rather than where they "should be."
2. Be language-conscious.
3. Explicitly teach how to start.
Begin Where Students Are Rather Than Where They "Should Be"
If you happen to land a job teaching ninth grade at Glendale High School in California, where more than half of the students are from Armenia, an appropriate initiative would be to assess the level of education among them-both in terms of academic knowledge and competency in English. Some students already may be brilliant intellectuals, but if they have never spoken a word of English, their brilliance may not be readily discernible.
That many teachers today struggle with teaching students who are in the process of learning English is nothing new, nor is the situation likely to change in the near future. While theories of language learning and acquisition have shifted from the Skill-Building Hypothesis to the Comprehension Hypothesis (Krashen), the approaches practiced in the classroom have lagged behind. According to the Comprehension Hypothesis, language learners subconsciously acquire a new language when they have input, such as books and speech at a level that matches the learners' abilities. This hypothesis leads to a reexamination of the expectations we hold for English learners, in that targeted, comprehensible interaction with teachers and peers is vital. Language learners need to be in language-rich environments with ample opportunity to encounter
language that they can comprehend in speech and writing.
Many studies have found that mixing 12 speakers with 11 speakers offers the best rate of growth for each group, so one effective tactic might be matching a "buddy" (someone who has already mastered English) with new arrivals who have poor or no language skills (August; Echevarria et al.; Peck; Williams). However, simply pairing students does not guarantee success as "careful consideration must be given to the design of the tasks that students engage in, the training of non-ELs who interact with ELs, and the language proficiency of the ELs themselves" (Genesee et al. 368).
A teacher would also do well to learn a few, key phrases in the dominant 11 of students. In Glendale, this might mean learning some basic phrases in Armenian. For teachers, ten useful words/phrases might include the following:
1. Please.
2. Thank you.
3. Excuse me.
4. Do you need help?
5. Do your best.
6. Bravo!
7. Where is
8. Listen.
9. Speak/Do not speak.
10. This is important
Writing phonetic translations of these basic phrases on an index card and using them in the first few months with students who have yet to master English would not only dramatically improve the quality of communication, it would also help validate the student's L1 (Pennington and Richards; Porter et al.). While it is essential to provide comprehensible input in the target language, using the student's 11 as a bridge, on occasion, can help expedite learning English as an 12 (Horst et al.).
Students in an immersive English environment tend to pick up language relatively quickly, but mastery does not happen overnight. According to JeffMacSwan and Lisa Pray, no research indicates that the majority of 12 learners can gain sufficient English proficiency to succeed in a mainstream classroom after only one year. Research indicates that it takes between three and seven years for a student to attain proficiency (Hakuta; Hakuta et al.).
A teacher of ELs should be cognizant that, if a student knows only a few words in English, what a student says may not be indicative of what a student means. A teacher must be resolute in placing a focus on meaning, with only secondary consideration given to correctness. When correctness is allowed to become the chief concern, stress increases, experimentation decreases, the rational mind retreats, and students tend toward an instinctive response, usually fight, flight, or freeze (Kahneman; Webb).
Be Language-Conscious
A teacher of ELs must actively self-monitor his or her use of language. While there is little advantage in speaking louder, it may be useful to deliver messages that are clear and relatively free of idioms, which might not be comprehensible. Consider the following exchange overheard in a local high school:
Teacher: Tonight, I want you to hit the books.
Student: Strike our books?
Teacher: I mean, that with regard to studying, the ball is in your court.
Student: What court?
Teacher: You should not cut any corners.
Student: No cut.
Directions for assignments should be stated orally as well as written down so that students can see them. Do not use a small font. If students can copy what is on the board, then they can figure it out later, either by asking friends or consulting Google Translate or some other mechanism.
Sensory supports, such as visual and auditory clues, can help fill in the gaps and eliminate confusion. Don't do this: Announce in the last minute of class, "Read the article and answer the two questions on the board." Instead, have students place their hands on the article and read your directions aloud while pointing to the written directions on the board. You may consider such tactics elementary, but a student who does not understand the directions is unlikely to complete the assignment.
The research on learning language overwhelmingly supports the use of "language notebooks," so ELs should be encouraged to jot down new words and phrases and make notes to themselves in a journal expressly dedicated for this purpose (Rassaei). Jim Cummins is famous for differentiating between Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and Basic Interpersonal Communications Skills (BICS). Whereas ELs will learn BICS as a matter of course by studying alongside American students seven hours per day, five days per week, CALP refers to the language of specific content areas, such as English, social studies, mathematics, and science. Attaining mastery over academic language is key for ELs, especially for those who want to go to college and gain access to higher-paying jobs. A language notebook will go a long way toward helping ELs retain the meanings of words frequently used in academic English, words that they may not hear when chatting with friends.
In a study of individuals who gained fluency in a language, it was found that a key component of success was the individual's ability to self-regulate learning (Rahouti and Baines; Santangelo and Graham). A student knows, better than anyone, what he or she knows and does not know. To maximize learning, a student must enter into the zone of proximal development (ZPD), that area of learning that is just beyond current abilities but attainable with help (Vygotsky). Learners progress in learning language by comprehending input that is just slightly more advanced than their current level. The gist of the Comprehension Hypothesis, as described by Krashen, is captured in the equation i + 1, where i is the student's current level and 1 is a slightly higher level of proficiency.
While a teacher of ELs might do everything possible to promote learning, the end goal is for students to become sufficiently invested so that they eventually take over and become independent, motivated learners. After all, motivation makes the "largest difference in 12 outcomes" (Dixon et al. 41).
Explicitly Teach How to Start
The third of the "big three" important practices for working with ELs must be purposefully implemented because it is so unnatural. If you are teaching a class comprised of ELs who may be relatively recent immigrants and you assign them to "describe the scientific method" or "summarize the Bill of Rights," be prepared to read papers chat have been copied and pasted from all corners of the Internet. Teaching "how to start" means reviewing the cognitive and mechanical steps that lead from idea generation to a finished paper.
For many teachers, chinking and reflecting are automatic, reflexive responses. To show students how to start, a teacher might begin by explaining how he or she would approach a particular assignment, co show students how the teacher thinks. Some educational researchers have made a brouhaha over think-alouds, but they can be a straightforward way to elucidate chinking (Fonteyn et al.). Discussing your cognitive processes during "start-up" only cakes a few minutes and provides significant help for a majority of students (Durning et al.; Vandevelde et al.).
Conclusion
The multicultural reality of today's classrooms offers opportunities for teachers to explore strategies that enhance learning for ELs while elevating the learning environment for all students. The ethic of care and the comprehension hypothesis can translate into practices chat center on building reciprocal relationships with students in which they understand and are understood. The "big three"beginning where students are rather than where they "should be," being language-conscious, and explicitly teaching how to start-are strategies teachers can use to establish a strong foundation in working with ELs and help create a positive, highly interactive learning environment.
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