Teaching (Bi)Multilingual Learners: Connecting Languages

Abstract

Ms. Rubio is a fifth-grade bilingual teacher. She values biliteracy and knows how her students benefit from making cross-language connections. She is concerned because she has been told to scale back on the amount of time she spends teaching literacy in Spanish because her students have to take their state exams in English this year.Ms. Barraza is a fourth-grade teacher in a diverse school with an English Language Development (ELD) program and no native language instruction. She values bilingualism and often tells her children that it is beautiful to be bilingual. However, she frequently wonders how she might more concretely include two languages in her classroom and put her beliefs into practice.

Toward a Multilingual Perspective on Reading: Aligning Emergent Bilinguals' Resources with Theories of Reading and Implications for Instruction

“…The call for updating theories of reading instruction is an opportunity to incorporate and normalize factors thatarekeytoEBs'readingdevelopment.Itiswellknown that multilinguals' reading development is not identical to monolingual readers (Escamilla et al, 2014(Escamilla et al, , 2021. For EBs, oracy (oral language skills in tandem with language development) and metalinguistic skills are critical as they cumulatively acquire literacy skills (August & Shanahan, 2006).…”

“…Literacy decisions at the state, district, school, and classroom levels have come into the spotlight and are of interest to audiences beyond educators. As it is a time of change, it is also a time of great opportunity when audiences can become familiarized with the complexity of reading instruction as it pertains to how to provide multifaceted approaches that meet the needs of different populations of students and the diversity within them (Compton‐Lilly et al., 2020; Escamilla et al., 2021). This time of change is key to EBs, as past policy decisions have overlooked the needs of these students' unique literacy trajectories to deleterious effect (Brooks, 2020).…”

“…It is focused on how bilingual people language and how they interact with the text. When reading is conceived in this way, we (educators) can no longer think of the reading process or reading instruction as implementing monolingual procedures or translations of monolingual procedures but must completely revise reading instruction to be centered on multilingual students' diverse practices which are tied to cultural and content knowledge (Escamilla et al., 2021; Espinosa & Ascenzi‐Moreno, 2021).…”

“…If teachers do not actively weave meaning into foundational learning skills, there is a danger, especially for EBs, that over time they have not engaged in meaning making, and can decode, but still find comprehension a challenge. Because EBs, regardless of the program they are in, operate across their languages, or metalanguage, the ability to think and talk about the relationships between their language is a critical feature of their literacy development and is integral to all components of reading instruction (Bühler et al., 2018; Escamilla et al., 2014, 2021).…”

Multilingualism in Society and Education: The Ukrainian Context

“…Research findings repeatedly show that learners are best served when their diverse linguistic repertoire is valued and built upon (Escamilla et al, 2021). Some of the ways of enhancing plurilingualism in the language classroom are by introducing practices that enable students to draw on their multiple languages in a task completion such as comparing languages; introducing dual-language and multilingual books; encouraging translanguaging; allowing students' L1 in discussing complex concepts, promoting language awareness (Trinki & Krevelj, 2020).…”