Incorporating Home Languages
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Along with fellow researchers across the world, we continue to find in each study that the most powerful predictor of LM [language-minority] student achievement in L2 is nonstop development of students’ L1 through the school curriculum…
A growing number of students are entering our school system speaking one or more language besides English. While over 75 percent of these students speak Spanish, there are more than 400 other languages spoken by students at the K-12 levels (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Even those students identified as speaking Spanish may also speak indigenous languages at home which are overlooked by the school system. Although these students arrive at school with rich linguistic repertoires, our education system is not set up to support their language practices. In most cases at best it actively ignores, and at worst actively eliminates students’ non-English linguistic repertoire, resulting in herrtiage language loss.
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Ofelia García and Nelson Flores (2012) have researched and synthesized a group of pedagogies that address this issue, which they have termed dynamic bi-plurilingual pedagogies. These are pedagogies that have a heteroglossic language orientation, incorporate fluid language practices, and use languages as the media of instruction (teaching content through a language rather than teaching the language itself). Their strength is that they are flexible, allowing for responsiveness to the local context and change (for instance in the student body demographics) from one school year to the next.
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The following are some classroom activities that draw on these pedagogies.
Book Reports
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Students read a book in their home language, and write a report on it in English.
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Students read the same book in English or their home language, discuss in groups in their home language, and then write up their discussion in English.
Home Language Dictionaries
Keep a blank notebook or binder for each home language in the class. When students learn new words, they can add them to the corresponding notebook in English and their home language, creating a two-way dictionary.
These can be used and added to by future students.
Research
Encourage students to do research for a class project online in their home languages, and then write up their report on it or do their class presentation on it in English.
Discussion & Group Work
Make space in the classroom for students to do discussion or group work with peers who speak the same language, and then report on this to other groups in English.
