Unspoken Truths: The Value of Developing Bilingualism, Deeper Learning, and ... · 2013-11-11 · Developing Bilingualism, Deeper Learning, and Interculturalism from an ... our nation

© WestEd, Teacher Professional Development, 2013

Unspoken Truths: The Value of Developing Bilingualism, Deeper

Learning, and Interculturalism from an Early Age

Fourth Annual Dual Language Conference

San Antonio, Texas, November 7, 2013

Aída Walqui, Ph. D. Director, Teacher Professional Development Program,

WestEd, San Francisco [email protected] www.wested.org/qtel


This Presentation Will Explore Four Important Notions:

•  The need to develop deep, rich, generative literacies in all our students to help them succeed in life

•  The importance and benefits of cultivating in our children at least two languages for life

•  The support multilingualism and multiliteracies provide for each other, and the centrality of interaction in the development of both

•  The diverse actors and roles that need to be involved if the goal -bilingualism and multiliteracy- is to be successful


The presentation uses three sources of information

1.  Professional literature: sociolinguistics, sociocultural theory, systemic linguistics, education, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, evaluation studies

2.  Literary texts: memoirs, short stories, personal accounts

3.  Personal experience


Education takes place against the backdrop of an ever changing context:

•  Success in life requires increasingly demanding levels of literacy.

•  As the value of education increases, the individual and societal cost of high school graduates not having sophisticated literacies gets heftier.

•  The United States -as well as other industrialized nations- are undergoing significant changes not devoid of tensions. How we resolve these tensions will determine the future of our nation and the planet as a whole.

NYT, 10/24/2013

NYT, 10/24/2013


Literacy ---> Multiliteracies

» The ability to produce and interpret a wide variety of texts, understanding their message, the messenger’s point of view, the relationship of the interpreter to the message, and deciding how to respond in appropriate ways.

» Because school knowledge becomes increasingly specialized, literacy becomes discipline-specific, and the language required to engage in literacy events takes on specialized features different from everyday uses of language.

» Literacy includes all the elements of speaking, listening, reading, writing, critical thinking, and the habits of mind that foster effective civic participation.


New Standards: Focus on Language

•  “Students can, without significant scaffolding, comprehend and evaluate complex texts across a range of types and disciplines and they can construct effective arguments and convey intricate and multifaceted information” (ELA student portraits, p. 7)

•  Mathematically proficient students understand and use stated assumptions, definitions, and previously established results in constructing arguments. They make conjectures, and build a logical progression of statements to explore the truth of their conjectures” (Math practices, pp. 6-7)


Becoming literate in an L1, an L2, or both…

•  Is a long-term developmental process. One does not learn the academic uses of a language at once nor does one always encounter the same level of academic texts.

•  The process consists of constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with a wide variety of texts.

•  Building academic repertoires requires conscious and deliberate investment by teachers and students in both languages.

•  The more that readers bring to a text in terms of knowledge and interpretive skills, the more they will derive from their literacy encounters.


An example of how language use varies across the school years

Text 1 The extended drought caused the crops to fail resulting in a widespread famine and many deaths, especially among the children and elderly.

Text 2 There was no rain for a very long time. The farmers had planted crops like maize and wheat and corn, but because it didn’t rain, all the crops died. Because there were no crops there was nothing for the children to eat, and they became very hungry. Because they didn’t have enough to eat, many of them died, especially the children and old people.

• 

• 

Hammond and Gibbons, 2006


Oral engagement supports the development of academic uses of a language

– It enables students to move between everyday and specialized ways of interpreting new knowledge under development.

– It allows learners to make reasoning in subject matter areas visible and test hypotheses .

– It helps students appropriate disciplinary knowledge and initial ways of expressing it in conversational registers.

– It helps learners develop their discourse ability and personal voice.

– It serves as auto-input.


The role of teachers •  To construct invitations that deliberately maximize opportunities for students to actively engage in discipline-specific talk both in their L1 and their evolving L2.

•  To help students become aware of and reflect on how authors use language to convey their points of view or interpretive perspectives (Hammond & Gibbons, 2007; Gibbons, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2009)

•  To respond initially by focusing on oral fluency and students’ appropriate use of the genre and ideas involved; to then spiral back to issues of accuracy and complexity


The role of vocabulary development

Academic uses of any language entail more than simply learning vocabulary:

•  Word meaning is determined by the contexts in which words occur and by the grammatical and lexical features of texts.

•  Across different disciplines words in academic lists mean different things and vary in range and frequency (Hyland & Tse, 2007).

–  Vocabulary development is predicated on students having multiple opportunities to listen to, read, and use new words in meaningful ways (Corson, 1997).


Academic uses of language

•  These involve constellations of features that together construct texts that are difficult for students because of:

–  the fields of knowledge they appeal to –  the tenor of the interpersonal relationships they

construct –  the modes in which students encounter them

•  These multiple variations result in academic language registers, or the linguistic variation that results according to contexts of use.


CULTURE

GENRE (Purpose)

REGISTER

TEXT

The Channel (Mode)

The Subject Matter (Field)

Derewianka, 1990

SITUATION

Who is involved? (Tenor)


Most spoken Most written

Academic Uses of English Development Continuum

This development should be tracked over a unit of work that takes place over several classes.


Two examples of points in this continuum

Tony DeFazio’s 5-week linguistics unit International High School, La Guardia Community College Day 3 of first week

Alice Cohen’s 1-week unit on Robert Frost Ridgewood Intermediate School, New York City Third day of a four-day unit


Why is it important to develop the L1 on the road to acquiring the L2?

•  It is important for parents to apprentice their children into the skills and proficiencies that they possess.

•  It is an established fact that proficiency in L1 helps students develop L2s (Genessee et al, 2006)

•  Bilingualism confers cognitive advantage (Byalistok, 2001; 2007)

•  Learning how to read in an L1 promotes higher levels of literacy development in the L2 (August and Shanahan, 2006).

•  Bilingual citizens are a societal resource (Saiz & Soido, 2005)


What does It mean to command a language?

•  Everyone learns the language of the speech communities they are born into, and every speech community has evolved way of using language that are functional for that community’s needs.

•  Every speech community has complex ways of using language and elaborated registers, genres and speech events

•  As children encounter new situations and interlocutors, they develop different registers of language.

•  Competent speakers of a language are multi-register users


What is the role of parents and families in this endeavor?

•  Parents provide children with anchors to life, ways of interpreting the way things around them work. Parents are the first and most important socializers of children

•  Early family socialization provides individuals with strong lessons and memories that remain with them for the rest of their lives (Dickinson, Darrow, and Tinubu, 2008)

•  Language is central in these interactions. Parents need to be encouraged (and guided) to talk to their children substantively whenever possible, and to defend their right to a quality education


Fight stereotypes:

“Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.”

“And I did! I became the nation’s Secretary of Labor!”

NYT, July 5, 2009


What is the role of educators?

To educate themselves and then to educate others on the importance of understanding and promoting multilingual, multidialectal use:

•  The value of developing two languages for life, not just developing the L1 as a bridge to the L2

•  The development of multiliteracies

•  Combat misconceptions about language and sociolinguistic use that harm students, their communities, and society as a whole


Some misconceptions that we need to address:

•  All ELLs are immigrants

•  If we could only close our borders, the problem will disappear

•  Prior immigrants learned English much faster than new immigrants do today

•  If students learned English, American education would be successful better


Projected Growth of the ELL Student Population through 2025... Unless Things Change Dramatically

500

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

3,000

3,500

4,000

4,500

5,000

5,500

2000 2005* 2010 2015 2020 2025

Pct. growth from 2000

58%

83%

36%

All LEP

2nd gen

3rd gen

1st gen

Source: Jeffrey Passel, Pew Hispanic tabulations from Census 2000


Average scale score of 8th graders in reading by status as English language learners and state: 2007

Proficient Proficient level

score: 281

Basic level Score: 243

level score: 243

Source: The Nation’s Report Card, Reading 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress at Grades 4 and 8, IES, NCES


The truth:

•  Distinction “Old” and “New” immigrants dates to the early 1900s, a concern based on the changing patterns of immigration from Europe

•  Dillingham Commission set up by Congress in 1907 to investigate the changes

Bias and discrimination are not a new American phenomenon. Francis Walker, president of M.I.T. wrote:

“These immigrants are beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence… Europe is allowing its slums and its most stagnant reservoirs of degraded peasantry to be drained off upon our soil”

Hakuta, (1986)


What can teachers do? •  Validate the linguistic varieties students bring to school

•  Explain the importance of commanding appropriately many varieties of language and being able to navigate successfully across them (Gutiérrez, 2006)

•  Instill pride in students with good examples from the literature (Jiménez, Luis Rodríguez, Cohn)

•  Problematize examples in the literature that suggest that the price to be paid for our public images is to give up our Spanish (Richard Rodríguez)


Las Cajas de Cartón The Circuit

Walqui-van Lier, A., and Barraza, R. (1995). Sendas Literarias. Boston: Heinle & Heinle



Richard Rodríguez: Hunger of Memory

Chapter 1: Aria



Problematizing leaving the L1 behind


Costs of leaving the L1 behind:

•  Personal, emotional

•  Family break down

•  Psychological harm

•  Educational

•  Societal


What is our role as community members?

Clarify pervasive misunderstandings: •  The problem is parents are not interested in their

children’s education •  We should teach parents English so that they only speak

English at home with their children •  The best thing would be to Americanize them all •  “I did it, why can’t they?” •  All English Language Learners are here because they

want to be here

Invade communicative spaces


Instead of Destroying the Immense Potential Our Children Take to School...

... and constructing students’ images of themselves as powerless individuals, lacking in the kinds of skills valued in school, as the Richard Rodríguez example given demonstrates, we need to say:

¡Si se puede!, Yes we can!, as Diana Cohn’s book, published bilingually in 2002 is aptly named.


ISBN 0-938317-69-5

Cohn, D. (2002). Sí, Se Puede! Yes, We Can! Janitor Strike in L.A. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press. Illustrated by Francisco Delgado.


As we engage in this transformation, I want to offer seven maxims

to guide our work as educators: 1.  Engage students in substantive activity that requires them

to draw on new semiotic (symbols that communicate ideas) tools in both languages. (Wells, 1999 “semiotic apprenticeship”)

2.  In school invite students to engage in reading activities -understood in the broadest sense- that dramatically shift their stance as producers and comprehenders of text.

3.  Invite students to behave as legitimate members of an intellectual community by challenging texts, transforming, and creating them. (Richard Rodríguez example)


4.  Invite students to draw connections within and across texts using their knowledge and tools as legitimate supports in their intellectual activity.

5.  Invite students to engage in sustained, quality conversations, that explain, support, challenge, propose alternatives, and allow them to expand their sociohistorical and educational ecology by collectively imagining a new educational and sociopolitical future, seeing themselves as historical actors. (Gutiérrez, 2006)

6.  Engage students in activities that invite them to explore the specific and concrete to theorize from that reality. (“Este libro es muy bueno porque nos muestra cómo vive mucha gente que trabaja duro y le pagan poco.”)


7. Extend students’ repertoires of practice. Help them develop their interpretive and productive capacities as they travel across settings, across genres and registers, and as practices travel through different and even contradictory contexts and activities. (Street, 2005)


An example of the possibilities

•  Videotaped by a group of four students 5-7 year old as part of a class project to create a one-minute book trail.

•  This was their first effort, the project would eventually grow into a 3 minute trail, and it meets the seven maxims I set up before.



Other examples can be created

•  They must be appropriate for your students, your context, your needs

•  They must tap into your students evolving multiliteracies and multilingualism

•  They must project them into the active citizens they will be: a proleptic approach


ISBN-13-978-0-89239-203-2

Rodríguez, L. (1999). It doesn’t have to be this way. A barrio story. San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press. Illustrations by Daniel Gálvez.


Yes, we can!

We live complex times, but instead of taking a pessimistic approach to the conditions of a system plagued with profound differences and inequities, I trust that the ideas and examples I have presented to you today illustrate the transformative potential of a humanist and equity orientation to education and the potential of developing two languages for life.

We need “a shift that entails a strong normative vision with principled and robust criteria for developing a just and powerful educational system in new economic and social conditions, in an increasingly complex and inescapable transnational and hybrid context.” (Luke, 2006)


References August, D. and Shanahan, T., (Eds). (2006). Developing Literacy in Second-

Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language- Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum."

Bialystok, E. 2001. Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. "

Dickinson, D., Darrow, C. & Tinubu, T. (2008). Conversations in pre-school: Toward cognitively enriching and responsive discourse. Early Education and Development. 19(3), 396-429."

Genesee, F., Lindholm-Leary, K., Saunders, W., and Christian, D. (2006). Educating English Language Learners. New York: Cambridge University Press."

Derewianka, B. (1991). Exploring how texts work. Sidney, AU: Australian English Teacher Association.


Gutiérrez, K. (2006). Intersubjectivity and grammar in the third space. Scribner Award Talk, UCLA.

Gibbons, P. (2009). English learners, academic literacy, and thinking: Learning in the challenge zone. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hammond, J. & Gibbons, P. (2007). Australian Responses to the Education of English Language Learners. A presentation to NYC teachers, April 24, 2007.

Hakuta, K. (1986). Mirror of Language. The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.

Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2007). Is there an academic vocabulary? TESOL Quarterly 41 (2): 235-253.

Schleppegrell, M. J. (forthcoming). Language in mathematics teaching and learning from a functional linguistics perspective. J. Moschkovich, (Editor). Language and mathematics education: Multiple perspectives and new directions for research. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.


Hakuta, K. (1986). Mirror of Language. New York, Basic Books.

Luke, A. (2006). After the marketplace: Evidence, social science and educational research. Australian Educational Researcher, 2006, 3.

Tuomi-Grohn, T. & Engestrom, Y. (2003). Between school and work: New perspectives on transfer and boundary crossing. New York: Pergamon.

Saiz, A. and Zoido, E. (2005). Listening to what the world says: bilingualism and earnings in the United States. Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (3):523-538"

Schleppegrell, M. J. (forthcoming). Language in mathematics teaching and learning from a functional linguistics perspective. J. Moschkovich, (Editor). Language and mathematics education: Multiple perspectives and new directions for research. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

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Unspoken Truths: The Value of Developing Bilingualism, Deeper Learning, and ... · 2013-11-11 · Developing Bilingualism, Deeper Learning, and Interculturalism from an ... our nation