Leveraging Multilingual Students' Home Language

The following is an adapted excerpt from Lindsey Moses’ recently released Supporting Multilingual Learners.

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Mel, a teacher new to teaching multilingual students, confessed to her mentor after the back-to-school professional development day on supporting multilingual students: “I feel unprepared. So many of you speak Spanish, or at least a little Spanish, but I don’t. I don’t see how I can build on students’ home language when I don’t know the home language. I am really worried that I won’t be able to do what the school is asking and that my students will suffer because I only speak English.”

Mel’s mentor reassured her. “Of course, it makes it easier if you speak students’ home language, but one year I had eight different home languages in my classroom. The key in this work is finding resources to support but also recognizing that students are knowledgeable and have a whole host of resources they bring to class. They might not yet be able to communicate that in English, but it is our job to find ways to build on what they know, make connections to their home language, and build on it. The online resources are getting better every day. I can share some of the tools I use to help become more knowledgeable about students’ home languages and how I use them to better support the students.”

Following are strategies to leveraging students’ bilingualism, which can promote academic, cognitive, and social achievement growth.

Online Resources

Modeling vulnerability, learning a language, and showing students you care enough to try to connect to their strengths and home language go a long way in building community and confidence. The online resources for this type of work are improving at a rapid rate, and many are free. There is the traditional Google Translate™ application, which now translates speech, text, and images for 133 languages. Though none of them is perfect or better than a person who’s proficient in the language, there are a variety of free online resources that can provide a lot of support. 

Find, Use, and Read Translanguaging Books

Translingual books are a wonderful way to model published authors’ translanguaging practices for students. The number of books containing the integration of multiple languages that are not just directly translated but infuse more than one language throughout the text, dialogue, and pictures is growing. Many of these books also include a pronunciation guide or bilingual glossary to help support monolingual speakers. The website Libros for Language has created an extensive list and categorized various translanguaging text types across a range of languages and grade levels.

While reading aloud for enjoyment is always a wonderful option, I encourage using these texts to also draw attention to language choice, author identity, and translanguaging options and positive identity development for multilingual students (Moses, Hajdun, and Aguirre 2021). I recommend reading a translanguaging book for the first time for joy and exposure. During the second read, I prompt students to notice the different uses of languages throughout the book. Then, we discuss and categorize the types of words used in different languages before we talk about the author’s purpose for and strategic use of multiple languages. Finally, I encourage students to think about how, when, and for what purposes they can use multiple languages in their daily lives and writing.

Introduce and Draw Attention to Cognates

Cognates are words that share the same linguistic derivation and have identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings. For example, the English word perfect and the Spanish word perfecto both mean “as good as possible” or “free from faults.” Another example: the word banque in French means the same as bank in English. Introducing and drawing attention to cognates can provide access to comprehension of a large number of words without any formal definition, instruction, or memorization. This is particularly true with Spanish and English. Thirty to 40 percent of all English words have a related Spanish word (Calderón et al. 2003). Teaching students about cognates and to look for cognates taps into their rich linguistic knowledge and helps them better connect to and learn academic language in English.

Teachers approach cognate teaching in many different ways. Teaching and using morphology to recognize cognates can be particularly helpful. For example, teaching Greek and Latin prefixes, root words, and suffixes that are similar across languages can provide access to and understanding of so many words.

Use Bilingual Resources

Bilingual resources can take on many forms, and they can be used by the teacher during instruction or by the students during practice. Bilingual books (with two versions of the story in the book in two languages) or sets of books in different languages are common resources often found in the school or local library. Other resources might include bilingual dictionaries, bilingual anchor charts, bilingual labels, bilingual vocabulary cards, bilingual word banks, bilingual word lists, and bilingual word walls. You can adapt bilingual resources depending on the instructional focus and student needs. Providing even a small amount of bilingual support for key strategies or anchor charts that the class will revisit can be extremely helpful for multilingual students.

Perform Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive analysis is the study and comparison of two languages. Contrastive analysis helps language learners better understand a new language by building on their knowledge in the first language. It assists language learners in identifying common linguistic patterns that are similar and different across languages. A familiar and common example of this is comparing adjective and noun placement in English and in Spanish. In English, the adjective precedes the noun (the red ball). In Spanish, the noun precedes the adjective (la pelota roja).

These simple noticings are a great start but they get more sophisticated quickly with students’ language development. It is helpful if the teacher has background knowledge about students’ home languages. However, it is very possible to do this work even if the teacher does not have a lot of background knowledge in the language. A quick internet search about similarities or common mistakes across the two languages will give some helpful initial information. Additionally, a quick chatbot search of common language differences and similarities between the two languages will give you information about vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, verb tenses, articles, and much more.

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