Going Beyond Translation: Boosting Metalinguistic Awareness for Multilingual Students
By Sarah B. Ottow
Have you ever been communicating in another language and found connections to your own? For me personally, I can share a few examples. The word chocolate in English is the same in Spanish, chocolate, yet it pronounced differently. Chocoloate has the same root word from Nahuatl, a Mexican indigenous language, chocolatl, a chocolate food made from cacao. Yum! As a Spanish Language Learner, I am constantly looking for connections between my first language of English to Spanish. Another example is between Spanish and Serbian I came across in my journey to learn my partner’s first language. Because I know enough Spanish, I noticed that the word for map in Serbian, karta, has the same pronunciation and practically the same spelling in Spanish, carta. which means letter. The root word there is carta in Latin or Italian which means paper. Interesting that words and their roots have similarities in different languages.
Another example of how languages overlap is looking not just as words but also at their script systems. For example, English and Spanish both use the Latin, or Roman, alphabet while Slavic languages like Russian, Ukranian, Serbian and others, typically use Cyrillic script. Here is a Venn Diagram showing the similarities and differences between the Greek alphabet, the Roman alphabet and the Russian (Cyrillic script) alphabet:
Image from @pickover on Twitter
What is metalinguistic awareness and why is it important?
This process of making connections between language consciously, bridging from one language to another, is called metalinguistic awareness. In Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges between Languages (2013), Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow describe metalinguistic awareness as, “the understanding of how language works and how it changes and adapts in different circumstances” and a strategy for doing so as contrastive analysis (p. 4). Historically, in the United States, languages have generally been kept separate and restrictive language policies have further promoted English-only environments. Yet, the brain loves connections so we need to make these opportunities clear for students. Plus, even if we don’t teach in a bilingual/dual instructional setting, we can still validate our students’ bilingual/multilingual identities by promoting metalinguistic awareness.
Furthermore, bilingual/multilingual learners are constantly in a state of using their “full linguistic repertoire” which Ofelia Garcia as translanguaging (2009: 140). If we don’t encourage connections across languages for our language learners then we are not allowing them to fully access their entire knowledge base in any language!
How can teachers bring metalinguistic awareness into the classroom?
There are many ways to support the connection between languages into any classroom that go beyond translating. Translation alone may not provide opportunities for students to drive their own learning and metalinguistic awareness plus their English language development.
Here’s an excerpt from my book The Language Lens for Content Classrooms (2019) about the importance of capitalizing on cognates and word study:
Our ELLs come from many different language backgrounds and many different language families. What do I mean by language families? A group of related languages comprise a language family that comes from a common ancestral language, and there are known to be 147 language families in the world (Thompson, 2015). Indo-European languages like Greek, Slavic, and Romance languages come from similar roots yet have their own characteristics. When we teach students to look for these common roots, we are using the strategy of discovering root words and even cognates.
Let’s take the word assess in English, for example. Although it can be traced back to Middle English, it is likely rooted in the Latin word assessus, which is the past participle of the word assidere, which literally means “to sit beside.” If we think about the spirit of assessment in its most authentic form, we hope to be learning about what a student can do by literally or figuratively sitting beside the student. Assessment, when done accurately, is an act that is something we do in service of students, although I’m sure you could argue, as can I, that assessment is often something that is done, especially large-scale assessments, not entirely in service of students and certainly not always in ways that accurately assess what students can do. At any rate, my point here is that by diving into the word history of the word assess, we can see that it is connected to the term to sit beside not by accident. There is meaning there.
Another way to make words come to life is to teach cognates. For example, the word water in English is similar to the following:
• wasser in German
• vand in Dutch
• voda in Russian
• woda in Polish
• voda in Czech
Approximately 30–40 percent of English words have a word that is similar in Spanish, like map/mapa, dollar/dólar, and camera/cámara, to name a few (Colorin Colorado, 2017). Allow students to share the cognates they hear and read. Some teachers even co-create lists with students throughout the year.
In word study, analyzing the parts of words, or morphemes, is an effective way to get students to see patterns and meaning across content areas (Ebbers, 2008). For example, if you teach that the prefix inter means “between,” then students can see it in many words, like international, interface, interstate, intertwine, and interval. In fact, there are forty-five more words—at least!—that use this prefix (Sight Word Games,
2013). Talk about word power!
Word study and cognate study in general is an effective way to be more linguistically responsive through small steps. I’ve seen teachers simply add this in by doing a quick word study for a few minutes once a week with content vocabulary related to the unit. Like all the ideas presented here, make it your own so that you and your students get excited about language!
Image from https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures
Instructional Leader Dalila Mendoza explains some other tangible ways to bring metalinguistic awareness into the classroom below, starting at 4:52:
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Welcome. Whether you're joining us live or you're joining us later in the archive, I'm really excited about today's "Confianza Live" video. We have a very special guest with us today, and the topic is all about honoring students' identities through building metalinguistic awareness. And I'd like to introduce our guest, Dalila Mendoza, the EL Director of Taunton Public Schools. How are you, Dalila?
I'm doing well. How are you?
I'm doing great. I'm so excited to hear from you today and to share your wealth of experience and knowledge and really, really practical advice with our viewers. So I really appreciate you being here.
It's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. So can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your work?
Sure. So as Sarah said, my name is Dalila Mendoza, and I'm the EL Program Director for Taunton Public Schools. So this position is very close to my heart because I grew up in Taunton. I am also an EL. I'm a former EL student for the Taunton Public Schools. And I'm passionate about this work with these students because I know what it feels like to be an L. My parents are immigrants from the Azores in Portugal, and so I'm first generation here. So I truly know the struggles of being an L, and I wanted to do this work in order to advocate for the Ls and have a program where they are most prepared for post high school pursuits and really using their language as that knowledge base because that is their identity, their language.
That's incredible. I mean, just to have that firsthand experience and bring it in to help teachers not just develop the empathy, but help advance the students' education is really exciting. And I know I've really enjoyed working with you over the years. And so can you tell us a little bit about the journey that you've taken as an EL director and what you think the students need and what you've been trying to do to support your L program to become even better?
Sure. So my vision has always been, for the Ls, is the rigor, so Taunton Public Schools adding that rigor to the instruction. It's often forgotten that Ls hold knowledge, and again, as I said earlier, their language, which is truly their identity, and how can we tap into that? So they have all this knowledge. They just can't communicate it in English. So and a lot of our students come in not just with their one language that is their identity. They come in knowing multiple languages, where English then becomes the fourth language that they're learning. So now, how do we take all of that? How do we take their identity, their knowledge that they have, and really connect that with English words is essentially what we need to do. So this is where the rigor comes in. And with the rigor is the oracy, depths of knowledge, and metalinguistic that has all become a part of our work in my department with the guide of Confianza. So working with Confianza, we have collaboratively observed the classrooms, we've co-taught professional development for my staff. We take all of that and the student success and see exactly where the gaps are, and then we map out the vision of the coming year. And I love that, because the vision is always shared with my staff. It's connected to my goals as the director. And lots of coaching and support is always given to me from Confianza and to my teachers, from both me and Confianza. So this has now become a transparent way where we all have the same vision and are developing professionally together to better serve our students.
It's quite a journey. And I know we've been working together for several years, and I've really, like I said, I've really enjoyed learning from you and supporting your vision as the leader. I see Darlene in the chat. Collaborations are great, and it's exactly right. I mean, this is complex work. And really, you didn't miss a beat when we hit the pandemic. We've continued our partnership. You've continued, actually, from what I see, drilling into those three priorities you just said, the rigor, connecting to content standards and high complex tasks, and then the oracy, even ensuring that students are engaging, and speaking, and listening online, you know, even synchronously and asynchronously. I've seen that come to fruition. And then that final piece that we're gonna dig into today is helping students connect to their first, second language through metalinguistic awareness. So, so great. So let's talk a little more in depth about what is metalinguistic awareness. How have you been bringing that to your team of L teachers so that they can really boost students', you know, not just English language development, but their content development and then their sense of identity? What have you done so far to do that?
So the metalinguistic awareness is, as you know, the most recent work that we've done. So in, most recently, reading about metalinguistic awareness, you know, I've known of, but reading a book, which was wonderful, and using the knowledge and use of the two languages as a linguistic asset rather than as an obstacle really was an aha moment to we need to add this along with everything else that we've done in our work. So you and I then took the opportunity of the school closure to offer professional development for my staff for metalinguistic awareness through the use of contrastive analysis. So we started the PD series with an excerpt from my mom's book. My mom, Manuela DaCosta wrote an operetta in Portuguese called "Os Sonhos De Dona Dores." I had my staff toggle with this excerpt using the language or languages that they know to make meaning. So as you can see here, this is a actual excerpt. This is the excerpt from the book, and this is an actual slide that we used in our PD. So this was an interactive way for the teachers to feel exactly what the students feel, to take the languages that they know, and some only knew English and some knew English and another language, not necessarily Portuguese, and feel what it feels like to be the student when presented with a new language, but yet using the knowledge that they have. This is the key point, because they have knowledge inside of them, and to make connection to another language in order to make that meaning. So I thought this was a huge aha moment for my staff, as well, that they were presented with something that they do not know, but yet could make connections to it and move from that. So this was the contrastive analysis PD that we had presented to the staff.
Yeah, and I know it was really exciting being part of that with you, because I know, as you said, you do have generally a pretty multilingual staff, some monolingual, English only, some bilingual and Spanish at different levels of proficiency as well as Portuguese and other languages to boot. Yet, you know, putting them in the students' shoes and having them engage with the text in Portuguese that may or may not be comfortable for them was a way for them to try out this strategy of contrastive analysis. So you're saying, in this slide, they're able to really slow down their thinking, and looks like they annotated, they really brought their connections and added their own notes there in yellow, right, like highlighting cognates, and taking guesses, and so forth.
Right, and the important piece is that this is high-level text. So that's bringing in that rigor. So it's not a second grade level used with adults. It's really high-level text, bringing in that meaning. And it's not a lot of text, but it's meaningful text. And a lot can come out of that. Not only are they learning this language, but this excerpt has to do with women wanting to get away from their home country and go to America because America was seen as an escape. And they really didn't care how to leave their country, because they felt as though they had to do everything at home, and America might be better. So what comes out of that? Gender roles can come out of that. Immigration can come out of that. Learning about different countries can come out of that. So then you can take this high-level text in teaching the English language but also all these other concepts and things going on in the real world that they can make meaning of.
It's so amazing. And when you think about student's identity, you really modeled that with your staff. And as I know and as you just shared, you know, this is not just a high-level piece of literature. This is written by your mother and author, Manuela DaCosta. So you were able to bring some of your identity into the PD and say, "This is part of my story, or at least my family heritage," which again, I think that putting staff in students' shoes both culturally and linguistically sounds like something that you would recommend. Is that right?
Yes. And also, the connections that happened between people, too, not just with the text, you know? So then you learn about other people. What connections did they have with this text? And it might be just one word that they all connected with, or it could be, "My parents went through this," or, "I've been through this." It could be from word level to experience level, you know? So and then this brings the oracy part of it, too. So in allowing them to talk and engage and talking about those experiences, as well.
It's so exciting. I mean, you know, we've been working together on all these pieces and going back to the rigor, you know, you're just talking about how students, regardless of language proficiency, can access and be part of high-level concepts. Like, you're talking about loss, moving, gender, you know, experiencing new cultures. Those are accessible and relatable for all students. So as we think about what tips you have for teachers, administrators, coaches, how can we use metalinguistic awareness to strengthen students' identities, and how important is that rigor part of it to you in the level of text?
So metalinguistic awareness and the contrastive analysis skill is key for the identity piece. And then the rigor comes with the type of text that you have, bringing a high-level text. But the identity, they're using, they're being acknowledged. "I know you have a a lot in there. Give it to me," you know? "It's okay that you don't know my language, but let's use what you have and learn a new language, but that language that you have is so key to you learning this new language." But the knowledge is still there. It doesn't matter what language that knowledge is in. And so then that identity becomes stronger, which then is powerful for students. And then their anxiety levels are down. We hear a lot about the anxiety that can block the learning, right? And it's a safe place. They can tap into what they know because it's applicable. So there's so many things that go with that piece of bringing their language to their learning.
Fantastic. And noticing in the chat, you know, something that I was thinking of too is it's building mutual respect. You know, Confianza, that word that we use, is really important 'cause it is meaning reciprocal power relationships. Historically, you're saying if we, the alternative is we jump right to English. We say, "English only. Read this in English. Think in English," you know, "Go, go go in English." We think, you know, that English-only movements historically have been painted around English is the only way, and it's the dominant language, and it's, you know, the most important language. And it's important to get students only thinking in English. Where what you're saying is if we slow down and have, even in an English-only program, you're not a bilingual, multilingual program. You're honoring your bilingual, multilingual students by helping your staff slow down and do close reading with short amount of text to get students to think about language, to get students to bring in their own language, their own identity as a tool, not, as you said, a deficit or even something to skip over.
Right. And I mean, even me as a second language learner, I still have to slow down and think, "Okay, am I writing," even if I'm writing in English, "Am I writing this in the Portuguese manner, or am I writing this in the English manner?" You know? And I was grateful that my parents really validated and they held onto our culture and held on to the fact you need to be fluent in both languages, and never lose Portuguese, because that is key. And so all of that, I've been blessed with having that.
Yes.
And there are many students that don't have that. But I want to have that program that we have that, you know, and students know that they are just, they're a wealth of knowledge for all of us, and we really need to tap in to students.
We have to, and as a leader, you've made that really clear, and it's gonna be exciting to see how this continues to develop. I'm seeing in the chat, you know, recognizing the home languages, the native languages, and seeing it as a tool, again, is critical. Historically, and I'm married to a person like this, who has subtractive bilingualism. The home language has been subtracted out of people in favor of English, right? And then, like, those home languages are looked at as minority status, and then English is assigned the majority status. You know, this does connect to anti-bias education and social justice, and how are we assigning value to the home language? How are we leveraging it in meaningful ways that help academic learning? So you're promoting an anti-subtractive model. You're promoting an integrated model that honors students' identities and really helps teachers meaningfully use their home language. Even if we can't teach in Serbian, Portuguese, you know, Arabic, we can teach students to think in that language constructively and use it to the best of their ability.
Right. And then the pluses that come out of that just multiply, you know? As I said, the stress level goes down, and they're more engaged, and the learning becomes better. You know, the learning environment becomes better.
Right. I love that. And the funds of knowledge are just really clear for teachers as opposed to maybe slipping into a deficit mindset, you know, unintentionally. I think one tip I would add based on what I've learned from your staff and the work around this strategy before we wrap up is even if students aren't literate in their home language, in other words, even if they can't read and write in, say, Portuguese or Vietnamese, whatever that L1 or L2 or L3 is before English, that's not the point. They might have those literacy skills so they can recognize cognates and how it looks, but they can also explain, "Oh, we have an idiom like that in our language," or, "Yeah, I actually know how to say cup in my home language, and it's similar, even if I can't write it," right? So there's ways for students to engage at different levels of proficiency, too.
And that brings in the four levels, the four domains, right, the language domains, which all have to be a part of that. So yeah, that's a huge piece.
The reading, writing, listening, speaking has gotta be in every lesson. So I just wanted to tell our viewers, if you're interested in learning more about Dalila's work and our general tips that we've learned this semester around teaching online, we do have this particular piece that she just shared with us in Part 2 of "Remote Teaching Tips for Supporting ELLs." And thanks for putting the banner up so we can go there as well as blogs on heritage language, blogs on bilingualism, simultaneous versus sequential bilingualism, and the danger, right, of subtractive bilingualism as we've discussed, and on and on. So we're here to support you, and we hope that this was useful for you. There's been some exciting comments in the chat that we're really valuing your participation, you know, either now or later. So please, have a wonderful summer, everybody. And Dalila, I hope you're gonna have a really nice, relaxing summer after all this hard work that you've done.
I hope so too. Thank you.
Thank you all.
It was a pleasure.
And we will to be continued. Hopefully we can have you back and talk more about your journey in the future.
I would love that.
Okay. Thank you so much, Dalila.
Thank you. Bye.
Bye, everybody.
Additionally, this brief tutorial shows specific ways to use the metalinguistic strategy of contrastive analysis into reading. This strategy can be used in any content area and across various grade levels, including when working with adults or, as I like to practice, in your OWN journey of becoming multilingual!
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Hi, this is Sarah Ottow from Confianza, and I'm gonna give you a very quick overview of a strategy called contrastive analysis to support students' interlanguage and translanguaging between their home language and in many cases the target language, which is English, but it can be used between any languages.
What does this mean? Well, it means that we compare and contrast, again, the student's home language that they're coming with with the target language, all in the service of building students' metalinguistic awareness.
You may have heard of the term metacognitive awareness, which is thinking about thinking. Well metalinguistic awareness is just as important, but we don't often make that visible, the invisible aspects of language, it's thinking about language, and that's important for all of our students 'cause we're all academic language learners, and it's important for our multilingual, bilingual students explicitly as they build their proficiency in English.
However, at any age, we can take part in this strategy of contrastive analysis. Here's an example from a text called "Os Sonhos De Dona Dores" by Manuela Lourenco DaCosta, an Azorean author, and as I was reading this text in Portuguese, I'm not proficient in Portuguese, I was annotating and connecting to words that may or may not connect to my home language of English and also my second language of Spanish.
The idea is to get the gist of the text and to start to activate the background knowledge and build the background knowledge and most importantly start to have discussions and really empower students to bring their home language in, which of course is connected to their identity and their culture.
So with Taunton Public Schools, the district we're partnering with to make contrastive analysis a district-wide, multilingual learner department priority, we are building it in and supporting teachers to bring it into their practice. In this case, this is from the newcomer program that we're gonna be working on and continuing to expand on the social justice framework that we're building together.
The upcoming unit is going to feature this text from Trevor Noah called "Born a Crime", and here's the quote here. So I'm gonna show you how we're gonna do this, or one of many ideas of how you could do this. With the students we call it language connections because we think that's a little easier to understand than contrastive analysis, that's kind of a technological or technical, rather, technical term.
So first of all, you can toggle the immersive reader in your teacher settings to use on any slide. And that's really exciting because you can teach students how to use these different tools to increase spacing, to make it more manageable. Perhaps they wanna play with the font, play with the background.
There's lots of ways to do this. What I like, too, is in this grammar functions, you can have the students break the words into syllables, which is really helpful, as well as teaching grammar in context, which is of course such an impactful way of teaching grammar to students of all proficiency levels, not just in isolation. And then, finally, in the reading preferences tab over here, you can actually have it translated.
So let's go down to Portuguese. And you can actually do a word or you can translate the whole document, or rather, page. You can also have it be read to you. And that's really important because students can go back and forth up here between the original and English or their home language, and that empowers them once again to connect to what they know. Because, of course, no learner is a blank slate, so we wanna draw on their funds of knowledge and really bring it into our work.
I really like this draw feature, too, in your pod, because they can circle words and they can go ahead and write words using the text to make connections. So, for example, the word imagine perhaps really connects to if they're a Spanish speaker, you know, imagine is like imagina in Spanish, so they can make their notes here, they can move it around, and again, it's very empowering to have the students start with what they know as opposed to just start launching in and reading in English when they may actually have some great connections and wonderings and questions.
It's a wonderful discussion starter. You can also use other tools, like here's an example from Jamboard, so you can use those Post-It pieces there and other pieces, as well, on Peardeck and lots of other platforms.
So I hope that was a useful overview for you. And good luck. Thank you.
More Resources
Spanish (plus other Romance languages like Portuguese, French and Italian) have a lot of cognates in common. This list from Colorín Colorado shows Spanish to English cognates.
A previous blog from Confianza Contributor Carly Spina, Inviting Heritage Language into Classrooms, describes additional strategies for integrating students’ home languages into any classroom.
I discuss the why and how of investing in students’ cultural and linguistic identities further in depth in my book, The Language Lens for Content Classrooms: A Guide for Language Learners (2019), published by Learning Sciences International.
This image from a Tweet by Japanese historian @nick_kapur on Twitter shows how the syntax of Japanese and Korean interfaces with English:
3 Strategies to Honor Students' Language Assets White Paper from Ellevation Education
Consider why knowing multiple languages can be a major benefit as exemplified in this video of polyglot journalist Philip Crowther, an international affiliate correspondent for The Associated Press, using six languages in his reporting. Can you identify all six languages?