Multilanguage learners

On the Hill: Literacy Awareness for Multilingual Learners

Teaching

Tbis post was written by Jamie Fletcher and is a reflection on her visit to Capital Hill advocating for the literacy needs of multilingual learners. Read more about Jamie at the bottom of her post.

As educators, we are often compelled to go beyond lesson plans and grading assignments to help students learn standards-based material. Sometimes, we make classroom accommodations or modifications to the content so students can connect with the instruction. Sometimes, we go beyond the classroom and attend their extracurricular events to connect with the children. Sometimes, we advocate for them and insist on equitable opportunities in the public education system. None of this is new news to those in the education field, however, some students will soon need more than just the effort of dedicated educators.

One of the largest growing demographics in South Carolina is identified as Multilingual Learners (MLs, formerly called English language learners or ELLs). “By 2025, 1 out of 4 children in classrooms across the nation will be an English language learner (ELL) student” (NEA.org, July 2020). Across the US, the growth of MLs has risen exponentially. According to the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), from 2000-01 to 2019-20 school years, there has been more than a 400% increase in ML students in South Carolina. As of April 13, 2023, there were 71,727 current or monitored MLs in our state. This means they may receive services from ML educators. Students in SC who are monitored may have met the minimum program exit requirements, but must be monitored for up to four years to determine if services are still needed. Of all these ML students, less than 38% are immigrants, meaning over 62% are US citizens. Meanwhile, from 2012-13 to 2021-2022 school years, there was a 206% increase in vacancies for certified licensed multilingual learner instructors, leading to a possible decline in services and/or an increase in long-term MLs (students who remain in the program more than five years).

One maxim states that “a teacher never knows where his or her influence stops.” So, what happens when teachers unite their voices and ascend Capitol Hill? On June 21, 2023, educators from across the United States met in the offices of US Senators and US Representatives to collectively and positively affect change. The decisions made in those offices and through the votes on the Senate and House floors have a direct impact on funding and policy that trickles down to every public school classroom in America.

Prior to meetings in Washington, DC, TESOL International held their annual Advocacy and Policy Summit in Georgetown, reviewing the policy focus and explaining the impact that personal stories and sincere conversations could have. TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) educators from Hawaii to Maine and Florida to California collaborated to learn how our states are different and alike and what is needed to offer equitable educational opportunities to all public school students. Carolina TESOL, representing North Carolina and South Carolina educators, attended the summit and met on the Hill to learn more about the process and to develop relationships with the offices of our senators and representatives.

As the SC Advocacy Coordinator, I started contacting DC offices to set up meetings two months prior to the TESOL International Advocacy & Policy Summit. Meetings with elected officials were requested, but sometimes staff members who specialize in education are delegated to speak with visitors. It is important to remember that these staffers are the ones who help advise the senators and representatives when it comes time to vote on policy and appropriations. Once on the Hill, 2023 Carolina TESOL President Tanya Franca and I traversed tunnels and congressional buildings to meet in different offices to share stories about education in South Carolina.

Did you know that South Carolina is one of two states with a complete ban on undocumented students pursuing higher education in public colleges and universities (technical, 2-year, and 4-year schools)? During the meetings on the Hill, Franca and I requested review and support for the 2023 Dream Act (S 365) and US Citizenship Act (HR 3194) to help immigrants seeking a pathway to citizenship, thus providing them with an opportunity for higher education.

We spoke about specific programs that the appropriations would be used for, including after-school programs and professional development for educators of MLs. We also discussed the limitations of higher education in South Carolina. On a federal level, voting for legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented students would improve college and career statistics, as well as graduation rates. Specifically, one student of mine who always planned to attend college moved with his family here in 2013. Beginning his junior year of high school, we were talking seriously about the SAT, ACT, and college applications and that is when we reviewed SC admissions policies. He was offered athletic scholarships and would have received academic scholarships if he was here legally. In 2020, he was accepted to North Carolina Central University where he is a starter on the football team, has the highest GPA of all players, has been nominated and earned many accolades, and is graduating in three years with a Bachelor’s degree in Business. He plans to start a Master’s program next year, but will have to remain in NC to earn the degree. This is only one example of the limitations placed on students in our state and across the country.

During our meetings, our requests for appropriations concerned ESSA Title I to support students from low-income communities; ESSA Title II, Part A to support professional learning for educators and school leaders, and ESSA Title III to improve English language proficiency and academic achievement. Other priorities for the 118th Congress include passing the Reaching English Learners Act (HR 3779) to address the critical shortage of English language teachers, as well as passing the Supporting Providers of English Language Learners Act (HR 460) to increase loan forgiveness for English language teachers.

The summit and Hill visits were meant to provide experience and build relationships. Some meetings were attended by staff members who knew the need for funding and policy updates in education; but in some meetings, we went on to explain connections between the money and the classroom, between investing in education and the cycle of poverty. The opportunities to speak with members of Congressional staff were exciting, but nothing moves quickly in DC. Carolina TESOL will continue to reach out to their offices to offer “boots on the ground” experiences in hopes of positively impacting education for Multilingual Learners. For more information about Carolina TESOL’s federal and state-level priorities in South Carolina, visit https://sites.google.com/carolinatesol.com/home/resources/advocacy/south-carolina-advocacy. Carolina TESOL is committed to advocating for Multilingual Learners (MLs) throughout the Carolinas by informing educators of national, state, and local research, issues, and policies affecting MLs and advising its membership of advocacy resources and opportunities.

Mrs. Jamie Fletcher has been teaching for over twenty years but has served the last and happiest  seven as a Multilingual Learner Program Specialist in Anderson, South Carolina.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy for Emergent Bilingual Students

Research

By: Daniel Stockwell, Clemson University PhD Student

Who Are Emergent Bilinguals, and What is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy?

I was once an emergent bilingual (EB) student. My family moved to Ukraine right before I entered first grade, and while I spoke English at home, the language of school was Ukrainian. My first experiences with public education were in a Ukrainian school roughly one month after arriving in the country. I did not speak the language, and I did not know much about the cultural norms of the classroom, but I needed to be engaged in authentic, meaningful learning. Instead, the teacher gave me toys and told me to sleep whenever I wanted to. 

Emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States are those who speak a language other than English at home and are learning English at school but are not considered proficient in English. These students are often referred to as English Language Learners (ELLs). García and Kleifgen (2010) argued that they should be referred to as emergent bilingual students to highlight their linguistic strengths, not what they lack, and I completely agree with them.

Photo by Belinda Fewing on Unsplash

The languages a person speaks are essential components of their culture, so EB students bring with them unique linguistic strengths and cultures into the classroom. To engage these students, as we should engage all students, in rigorous academic instruction and participation, educators will need to implement culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in their classrooms. The James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education Django Paris (2012) explained that CSP is part of the “struggle toward an education that honors and extends the languages and literacies and practices of our students and communities in the project of social and cultural justice” (p. 96). CSP is no single list of practices or strategies. Rather, to implement CSP, teachers must learn about and value their students’ unique cultures and ways of knowing and doing. Teaching practices that implement CSP stem from this knowledge of individual EB students.

What Questions Can I Ask Myself as I Implement Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy with Emergent Bilingual Students?

Good teachers reflect on the instruction they provide, they look at formative and summative assessment data, and they ask themselves questions as they strive to improve and work to engage students in meaningful learning. This is a never-ending process because educators are life-long learners. No list of questions (or strategies) can cover everything educators could or should think about as they implement CSP with EB students. All students are different and unique. EB students come from diverse cultural backgrounds, nationalities, and families, who all have their own ways of using language to learn. So, educators will need to keep asking questions. The list that follows is meant to help educators begin thinking about how they can implement CSP with their specific EB students. It is a start that emphasizes the hard questions we all have to ask ourselves, over and over again.

How do I view my EB students?

Do you have deficit perspectives of EB students? Do you find yourself unconsciously associating their limited English proficiency with their intelligence? Do you think their culture is somehow inferior to your own? 

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

If educators have deficit perspectives of their EB students, teachers will likely have lower expectations for their academic achievement, which has long-lasting consequences for these students.

Imagine trying to apply to college if you were tracked and placed in lower-level courses based on your perceived proficiency in a different language. Many EB students are schooled in contexts that do not give them access to advanced placement (AP) courses while they maintain the label of English Language Learners. In these settings, the language needs of EB students are placed above their academic needs. Unfortunately for these EB students, the most important predictor of student persistence in obtaining a baccalaureate degree is the academic rigor of their high school courses (Wassmer et al., 2004). EB students have a right to rigorous academic engagement. Do you think your EB students are ready for the kind of instruction they deserve?

Who does the accommodating in my classroom?

Do your EB students have to do all the accommodating necessary for learning and teaching to take place? Do they always have to change the ways they talk and think? How they interact with authority in the classroom? How they learn? How they view schooling and their role in their own education? 

EB students and their parents want to be involved in their learning and in the culture of the classroom, but they should not have to change everything about themselves in order to participate fully. Also, parents who do not speak English want to help their children with homework assignments; are you making it possible for them to be involved? 

Nieto and Bode (2018) advocate for teachers to participate in mutual accommodation. This means educators need to be willing to make some accommodations themselves to help EB students achieve academic success. Schools, parents, and students need to work together. Teachers need to make sure to accommodate their instructional practices so that they are culturally sustaining. Teachers need to affirm the languages, cultures, and ways of knowing and doing that their EB students bring into the classroom. 

What counts as official knowledge in my classroom? Who counts as knowledgeable?

How do you view your role as the teacher? Is it up to you to fill the students minds with as much content as possible? Or do you see your classroom as a place for you and your students to build knowledge together? If so, what counts as knowledge? Whose knowledge is valued and whose is ignored? 

Photo by Andrew Ebrahim on Unsplash

Teachers can plan times for their EB students to teach the class so that they can be the experts for a while. Allowing EB students to share elements of their culture, creative ways of thinking about a problem, or ways of knowing and doing that are different from the dominant group’s shows the entire class that all students have knowledge that is official and valuable. This is culturally sustaining; it communicates to EB students that their cultures are not just acknowledged by schools but are welcomed and valued.

Is my classroom “English Only”?

Do you tell your EB students to speak or write only in English in your classroom? Are they allowed to read in the language they use at home, or only in English? 

Martínez (2010) studied EB middle school students in East Los Angeles to explore how they used Spanglish daily in their English language arts and social studies classes. While some use the term Spanglish in the pejorative sense, I do not. Martínez, other researchers, and I use this term to refer to the skillful and creative use of features of both Spanish and English to communicate. Martínez demonstrated that the EB middle school students used Spanglish in ways that met the California state standards for listening, speaking, and reading. Teachers should consider allowing other languages to be used in class to give students access to rigorous academic engagement and to give them practice with using language to communicate in meaningful ways. 

Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash

Teachers can allow their students to engage in translanguaging. Researchers and educators have a few different conceptions of what translanguaging is; one understanding is that translanguaging is “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 283). When EB students can use their complete linguistic repertoires, they feel valued and that their knowledge matters. Also, this allows them to engage in higher-order thinking because they can analyze, evaluate, and create more easily when they are not restricted to one language. Furthermore, when it comes to writing, teachers should consider the purpose of writing. Who are EB students writing for? Why are they writing? Teachers know that the process of writing, not the product, is when most learning takes place (Velasco & García, 2014). Allowing EB students to translanguage as they work on their writing assignments engages them in rigorous instruction; even if their English writing skills are not at grade level, their thinking can be. Translanguaging opens up doors of opportunity for their advancement as writers. 

What are my goals for EB students? Do you have high expectations for them? Does your school measure their success with EB students based on how many are reclassified out of the English Language Learners program? Is your highest goal for them to be able to graduate from high school one day? 

A Final Question

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

This last question is about asking yourself, “What are the goals of my EB students for themselves?” If we do not know the personal goals of our EB students and their families, we probably are not teaching in ways that are culturally sustaining. 

If EB students’ linguistic skills and cultures are valued and incorporated into the official curriculum in schools, EB students will be able to pursue their own goals, and we will be better positioned to help them. 

References

García, O., & Kleifgen, J. A. (2010). Educating emergent bilingual students: Policies, programs, and practices for English language learners. Teachers College Press.

Martínez, R. A. (2010). “Spanglish” as literacy tool: Toward an understanding of the potential role of Spanish-English code-switching in the development of academic literacy. Research in the Teaching of English, 45(2), 124–149.

Nieto, S., & Bode, P. (2018). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (7th ed.). Pearson.

Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6(3), 281–307.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.

Velasco, P., & García, O. (2014). Translanguaging and the writing of bilingual learners. Bilingual Research Journal, 37(1), 6–23.

Wassmer, R., Moore, C., & Shulock, N. (2004). Effect of racial/ethnic composition on transfer rates in community colleges: Implications for policy and practice. Research in Higher Education, 45(6), 651–672.

About the Author

Daniel is a Ph.D. student in the Literacy, Language, and Culture program at Clemson University. Before entering this program, he was a high school English teacher in Greenville, South Carolina.

Listening Beyond the Accent: Valuing the Emergent Bilingual Students in our Schools

Teaching

By: Elizabeth McCauley McDonald, South Carolina Elementary School Principal

The Challenge

I still remember the moment a teacher walked “Marco” to my classroom. I went to say hello and he said, “Hola.” As he entered the room and had a seat, the teacher whispered to me, “he doesn’t speak English.” I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I was terrified. I took three years of Spanish in high school and one semester in college, but I could only remember a few words and phrases. Conjugating a verb would have been a miracle! I instantly began to panic because I did not know how I was going to help a student I could only communicate with in broken phrases. Immediately, I did what most first year teachers would probably do…I looked in my class, found my only other Latinx student in the classroom and asked her to help me communicate with Marco. He was in my classroom for approximately three months before he moved away and in the short three months of being in my classroom, he transformed my teaching practices. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

While I know that my instructional practices with Marco were not the most useful or the best practices, he always walked in my class with a smile and was willing to allow me to practice my Spanish with him. See, Marco was fluent in Spanish and could read in Spanish. He was a highly intelligent student, and even with the language difference, he often outperformed half of my English only students. In that short three month period, I saw Marco step out of his comfort zone, in small group settings, and practice speaking English with his peers. When we worked together one-on-one, I would attempt to speak Spanish and he would practice English. When we just couldn’t connect the dots between the two languages, he began to call for the student in class that spoke both languages to translate – he became his own advocate. 

I saw Marco for who he was and I valued his language and his culture which created an environment where he felt comfortable enough to practice English out loud. He went from being unwilling to speak a word to anyone in the classroom, except me, to actively engaging with his peers. As he became more vocal, more of his English only speaking peers began to engage with him and embrace his language and want to learn Spanish as well. In all honesty, to me those moments were magical. My English only students seemed to realize that Marco was not behind, or not as smart as them, simply because he spoke a different language and English with a thick accent; instead, they heard beyond the accent and saw Marco for who he was, someone who was extremely knowledgeable, smart and an emerging bilingual. My English only students wanted to also be able to speak two languages. 

Everyone noticed when Marco stopped coming to class. He and his family moved to California. While, I most certainly did the best I could – speaking slowly, using visual pictures and my hands to describe words, encouraging collaboration with peers and one-on-one conversations with me, providing tests in Spanish (thank you Google Translate), I can only imagine how much more I could have done for Marco if he was in my class after I gained my ESOL certification, or even after I had taken one ESOL course. 

Lessons Learned

While I met Marco in my first year teaching, there are a few lessons that I have kept close with me from that experience.

Allow students space to use their first language on their journey to acquire a second language.

Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash

Can you imagine an English only speaking student enters their ninth grade French course for the first time and the teacher tells them they are only allowed to speak French, which they do not know yet, and the teacher only speaks to them in French? Most parents would be in an uproar because the students do not have foundational knowledge of the language, language structure, or language vocabulary, but they are being held to a standard of fluency and proficiency. But, yet and still, we ask emergent bilingual students to do that each and every day. Instead of allowing them to use their language as a bridge, we expect them to make a leap across uncharted territory into the unknown, without support. This has to stop! 

Allow students to use resources in their first language.

One thing that was abundantly clear, is that Marco could read and speak Spanish fluently. Many of our emergent bilingual students are coming to school with skills in their first language, but how often do we, as educators, leverage that knowledge? Through the use of Google translate, I was able to allow Marco to complete his assessments in his dominant language. I would provide Marco with the English and Spanish versions of his tests and quizzes. If Marco stayed longer, I would have tried to phase our usage of the Spanish document as a support and supplement, if he was ready for it. In fact, I once taught a German exchange student, and we were able to do just that. Allow students to show you who they are and what they can do. Support them in the continued development of their first language as they acquire English. Show interest in their language, learn what you can so that you can communicate with your student in their language of comfort, before you require them to stretch to yours. 

Now, I know what some folks are thinking, but what about the state assessments that require the usage of English? Well, that’s why you have to continue the work and continue to support your emergent bilinguals in their English development. I think we could also argue that assessments given to emergent bilinguals in a language other than their first language, especially when they can read and write in their first language is problematic, but that would be a whole other blog post. 

The designation of a student as an English language learner or emergent bilingual has no bearing on a student’s intelligence. 

Too often, educators are surprised when students like Marco perform well on assessments and can understand and analyze content. The ability to speak more than one language is often seen as a value added when the first language is English and the second language is… well, not English. Too often we see students who speak two languages, but due to their primary language being a language other than English, it is seen as a deficit. This has to stop! Linguistic prejudice and linguistic racism is real and we all must do the work to self-identify the language biases we hold, and we must do that work ourselves. Furthermore, we need to see all emergent bilingual students as walking into our classrooms with additional knowledge, and that should not be determined based on the geographic location associated with their first language.

Into the Beyond

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

As students enter the classrooms in our school buildings this year, I’m calling for all educators to work on leveraging the funds of knowledge students bring with them to school each and every day. Leverage the language and the cultural practices that create the foundations on which students build their understanding. Support student development of their first language, in addition to supporting their development of English. Most of all, seek to understand your students, and not just to have your students understand you. It’s only at this point that we can move into the beyond, beyond listening to just the accent, beyond preconceived ideas of what it means for a student to be an emergent bilingual, and we can begin to center our students’ experiences in meaningful ways to help them process the language around them.

About the Author

@MrsEM_McDonald on Twitter

Elizabeth McCauley McDonald is an Assistant Principal at Northside Elementary School in Seneca, South Carolina. She holds a Bachelor’s in Secondary Social Studies from Clemson University, a Masters in Education from Anderson University and a Masters in Educational Administration from the University of South Carolina. Elizabeth is currently pursuing a PhD. in Literacy, Language and Culture at Clemson University. Elizabeth also serves as the LiD 6-12 Blog Editor.