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:

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!

Instructional Leader Dalila Mendoza explains some other tangible ways to bring metalinguistic awareness into the classroom below, starting at 4:52:

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!

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?