Dual Language Series: Part 1 - Who are our learners?
by: D. Garcia
"The roots of the term education imply drawing out children's potential, making them MORE than they were; however, when children come to school fluent in their primary language, and they leave school essentially monolingual in English, then our schools have negated the meaning of the term education, because they have made children LESS than they were". (Cummins, 1989)
Read Part 2 and Part 3 in our Dual Language Series.
"Las raíces del término educación implica extraer el potencial de los niños, haciéndolos MÁS de lo que eran; sin embargo cuando los niños vienen a la escuela siendo fluidos en su lengua materna y ellos dejan la escuela esencialmente monolingües en inglés, entonces nuestras escuelas han negado el significado del término educación, porque ellos han hecho niños
MENOS de lo que eran. (Cummins, 1989)
In the United States, we educate and inspire children and young people who are learning Academic English along with over 350 different languages spoken at home and in their communities, 75% being Spanish Speakers. According to the Migration Policy Institute, this population grew by 60% over the last decade making these students the fastest growing population in United States Schools. These figures may stimulate the questions about whether our U.S. Schools are being taken over by one particular language met with historic opposition: Spanish.
Subtle or not so subtle rhetoric in 2018 certainly suggests the we take a look at the question. In fact, recently I interviewed a potential ESL Teacher who gleamed with the opportunity to teach her “America Heritage” to her future students. The reality is that Spanish is not and has never been a foreign language in the United States. The reality is that over 85% of English Learners in Pre-Kindergarten through fifth grade are also United States citizens, as well as 62% of secondary English Learning Students (Zong and Batalova, 2015). The United States with 41 million native and 11 millions bilingual speakers is the largest Spanish speaking population outside of Mexico at 121 Million Speakers (Guardian, 2015). There is some suggestion using U.S. Census Data that by 2050 the United States will be the largest Spanish speaking nation in the world (Instituto Cervantes, 2015). Since the 1830’s the United States has engaged in some sort of treaty based land grab in the Southwest, Caribbean, or other strategic territorial expansion into areas culturally and linguistically inhabited by Spanish speaking Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans and Cubans. Spanish and English have commingled in intertwined connection and contact for generations.
We’ve recently left the decade long era of NCLB that characterized students learning English as “Limited English Proficient (LEP)”as a way of indicating our responsibility to ensure English Proficiency. This short sighted view of the complexity and the resources that multilingualism brings to the cognition, learning, and identity of learners, brings me to question this recent practice and how it prepared a landscape for English only policy in many of our nations states. Both language sovereignty and the English only movements have coexisted since the founding of our nation resulting in our plurilingual constitutional protections.
However policy and law have not always permanently changed people and communities. For generations of students, an English only education results in subtractive schooling, where schooling actually results in a loss of learning, in this case language loss. Language erradiction is part of our social design and a story that can be told and retold in the United States as a means of asserting power over a population.
While language eradication is not always the first goal, it is often the outcome of other endeavors that have now found to have no research base whatsoever, such as:
the earlier English is taught, the better the results ("the early-start fallacy")
the more English is taught, the better the results ("the maximum-exposure fallacy")
if other languages are used much, standards of English will drop ("the subtractive fallacy")
(Phillipson, 1992)
As myths about language learning, language learners and bilingualism persist, scores of monolingual English speaking parents vie for seats in immersion programs around the country so their child has the 21st century edge of bilingualism and biliteracy. While linguistically talented students who navigate learning through two or more linguistic and cultural identities outside of school may continue to experience well meaning, but potentially “subtractive schooling”. Subtractive schooling has been defined in more or less similar ways as a “form of schooling that systematically divests in the linguistic, cultural and ethnic funds of knowledge of minority students with the intention of causing assimilation to the empowered group” (igi-global.com). One of the main forms of Subtractive Schooling include English only opportunities to learn for multilingual students. We know these learners have greater potential than our policies and communities have committed to in education. Are we doing what we could and what we should for the preponderance of Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin speakers who make up the largest population of English learners in schools today? Are these learner’s right to learn only English, also a violation of their right to Biliteracy and a Biliterate identity that is social as well as scholarly? Are we creating immersion programing to add a prestige language to already privileged populations, while failing to ensure access to “native speakers”? Could we add to what a student brings to their learning linguistically? Can we envision and then implement programming and services for students that guarantee academic achievement at or above grade level in English, but also ensure this in a partner language? Can we envision and create graduates who can effectively communicate with diplomatic, academic and social networks with the entire Western Hemisphere and critical parts of the Eastern Hemisphere? Will be ensure Bilingualism and Biliteracy? How will we begin this courageous work?
Join with me in learning about the journey in developing vision and action towards Dual Language Program Development which offers the holistic promise of making schooling an additive experience for all learners. I look forward to sharing with you my experiences in building Pre Kindergarten through 12th grade programs for Linguistically Talented youth-that just happen to be great for ALL learners. This is largely impossible for English learners in English only learning contexts. Dual Language Programing can help districts honor and develop the linguistic capacity, thus the academic scholarship of our Linguistically Talented youth. Let’s get to work!
Jim Cummins inspires us all to embrace "The roots of the term education imply drawing out children's potential, making them MORE than they were”.
What are two linguistic profiles of our bilingual students? Hear D discuss the answer to this question below:
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Hi, my name is D Garcia. And today I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the linguistic profiles of our bilingual students.
Sometimes we think of bilingual students as being newcomers who come to schools speaking a language other than English. Sometimes we think about our bilingual students being students that are learning a second language at school, either through immersion, or through world language programming. In any case, we like to refer to our bilingual learners in two ways.
The first is that we have sequential learners. Students who come to school with an already firm academic grasp of their home or their first language. Many times our English learners that are learning in a French or Spanish or a German world language classroom are sequential bilinguals. I, myself, am a sequential bilingual, learning Spanish when I was 24 years old. So I had a firm grasp of my academic first language, added a second sequential.
There are however many students who are simultaneous bilinguals. These are students from a very young age, either at birth, or through early childhood, have begun to develop two or three or four language proficiencies. These simultaneous bilingual learners are students who have not yet had a fossilization in their first language before adding a second. So in essence, they have two or more first languages.
The profile of these students look like home language speakers of Spanish, who use English at the daycare, and English with their teacher and their doctor, but Spanish with Mom. It also looks like students who are English-speaking at home and attend a language immersion program in 4K/5K at like 50 to 90% of their day, or their instruction is in Spanish or another language. These children have not yet had like a fossilization, or an academic purpose for their first language before adding a second. They essentially have two or more languages for social and academic learning purposes from a very young age.
So this is really important because our kids develop very early on attitudes about themselves as language learners and language users, depending upon the context in which they're learning their languages. It should be no surprise to us that many of the students that are learning a second language in school, especially if English is their first language, learn prestige varieties of their second language. They're learning their teacher's variety of Spanish, or their teacher's variety of French, which are often accepted versions of those languages that teachers themselves have learned in university or by living abroad.
Some of our learners that are sequential learners, especially if they're home language speakers of a non-English language, are learning varieties of their home language which may not have the same prestige as the varieties that are learned in universities. These are students that are learning language in their community. They're learning community uses of language and languages, including languages that include two or more languages simultaneously, like Spanglish. Those students are learning how to use their language, which is very contextual to their audience. The audience speaks between two or more languages. The students speak between two or more languages.
And so language context has a lot to do with how students see themselves as language users, and the impact that they can have on them can determine whether or not a student is feeling confident and proud of the linguistic attributes and assets they bring to school, or whether they feel a little concerned and/or are aware that their language variety either lacks prestige in comparison to their teachers' and/or their school environments.
I wanna say just something else about this that I see many of our simultaneous bilingual students as linguistic or linguistically talented students, students that are managing multiple systems in their head and know how and when to apply and with whom, is nothing short of the amazing nature of the human brain. I'm able to see my own child ask questions like, "What is this for?" Using English grammar and Spanish words and I think it's just a miracle. I don't think, "Oh, what poor Spanish he has." Rather, I realize the complexity of what's happening in his brain to be able to do something like that. Anyways, just a thought from me.
I did wanna share with the group today also some premises around multilingual education, which I think are important to take with us as we approach perhaps revisioning around sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. And the first is that languages other than English are minority languages in a majority culture, which means that they're very, very high risk. And the learners themselves are at high risks for lack of attainment, for academic and learning purposes in their home or community language. And this has impacts on their wellbeing, far-reaching impacts.
The other thing is that simultaneous bilingual learners, they bring all of their language to all of their learning. There is never a time when you can say to a simultaneous bilingual, "We'll only do this one thing in English. We'll only do this one thing in French." They're constantly negotiating the back and forth of their languages in their brains to make meaning. Unfortunately, sometimes kids don't feel free to do those things, and they end up not accessing parts of their learning and parts of the characteristics of their learning that they need for what they need to do.
The other thing is that both in any languages they're governed by their own linguistic rules. And as much as we think, well, this language is very similar to the next, the fact of the matter is that French and Portuguese are their own languages and have their own norms, their own language systems and their own cultural applications. Important to realize. Also, I think in working with sequential bilingual learners, or simultaneous bilingual learners, we have to have a lot of emphasis on using their strengths, particularly with oral language for literacy. So kids that come in speaking languages that they don't yet know how to read and write, we need to use what they can do in their spoken language and their listening comprehension to support their literacy. Again, oracy, oral language, is a rehearsal for writing.
So the more we can get kids talking and talking about what they wanna communicate, the more fruitful, proficient, expletive and profound their writing is going to be. Finally, I wanna leave you with the fact that language acquisition is socially constructed. If a child is speaking a version or a form of language which you think, "Hmm, this lacks prestige," or, "Hmm, that might be wrong to say it that way."
Just remember, there's an audience that has given this child multiple strokes for "Yes, this is understood, this is how we say it." And there's a context for that. Kids don't learn language in a vacuum. They learn it from their community. So if a child needs to call a garbage can something and that's not well understood, just realize there's an audience for that and it's been valued and is valuable. A child needs to be able to say it that way in their community to be successful.
So those are my thoughts about sequential and simultaneous bilingual learners.
References
Phillipson, Robert (1992), Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford University Press.
Zong, Jie, and Batalova, Jeanne. 2015. “The Limited English Proficient Population in the United States.” Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
To Further Your Learning
From Confianza's Collaboration with Teaching Channel's ELL Deep Dive Video Library: