Today we are revisiting part of a conversation between Heinemann author, Andrea Honigsfeld and educator Pam Schwallier. From breaking down outdated labels to embracing an asset-based approach, they discuss how educators can empower students to leverage their linguistic and cultural strengths.
Transcript
Andrea Honigsfeld:
So regardless of language proficiency levels, I'd like to talk about cross-cutting strategies. Rather than thinking about that you need a whole different toolkit if you have a level one student, now you have a level two student, all of a sudden you need to switch out to your toolkit and so forth and make it unsustainable or overwhelming for educators. We could certainly select and focus on those cross-cutting strategies. How do we make sure that we are offering our students visual input, access to the curriculum through multimodality, engaging in learning, again through multisensory, multimodal, multilingual entry points and learning experiences, and also creating a learning environment, a classroom environment in which the students are starting to do more and more of the talking, of the active engaged language use.
If they're only on the receptive end, if they're only receiving information and language, they're going to be developing pretty strong receptive skills or interpretive skills, according to the new label that WIDA is introducing in the 2020 standards. But ultimately, what we want to make sure our students can do is to express themselves, and express themselves through multiple modalities, through speaking, through writing, through visually representing their ideas and so forth. So these are those cross-cutting strategies that we can keep in mind across the language proficiency levels, and adding more challenging, more inviting opportunities for them to express themselves, as well as reducing the amount of scaffolds or the type of scaffolds that we put in place.
Pam Schwallier:
Yeah, so as we're thinking about cross-cutting strategies, I know some of our teachers now are doing a lot more co-teaching, providing some integrated services. So our teachers have really appreciated as they're co-teaching and learning how to bring a content expert with a language expert into that same space. Some of those anchor charts that you can see examples of, or multilingual glossaries that have been used or strategies to get total engagement in their class to be able to increase the amount of interaction and building upon the assets and having a space where students can use both of languages in their classroom during assessments or during conversation and pulling that back together.
So this book has been really powerful as a tool, along with some others, as our teachers have begun to tiptoe into this space of providing more services together rather than our prior model had been truly pulling students out; where we had a separate EL block we called language block for a long time and they used a separate curriculum. And all of those strategies were kind of housed or almost kept secret in this space of an EL classroom, where the tools in this book really are empowering all of our teachers now to look at how do we learn language and content together and honor the assets of our students, and keeping them with their peers to be able to practice that language together?
Speaking of assets that you mentioned earlier too, the whole book is really grounded in this assets-based approach, which has been really important to us as a district, as we've been trying to elevate multilingualism and really honor the languages and cultures of all of our students in this space. So maybe you could talk to us a little bit more about why that was so important for you as you were writing this book, and maybe a little bit about why it's important for all of our students, and especially multilingual learners in particular, to elevate and leverage those assets.
Andrea:
So for too long, we've been thinking about English learners as limited English proficient students. Do you remember that acronym?
Pam:
Oh, yes.
Andrea:
Oh, yes. Right?
Pam:
It stuck around for a long time.
Andrea:
LEP. And to me, it was just so disturbing to think about this population as a larger and larger and an increasingly growing group of students who are defined by their limitations. Just even the very first word is Limited English Proficient. And I remember a very long time ago, I think in the 1990s, there was one school district in Florida that was just very defiant. They redefined LEP as Language Enriched Pupil. So we still had to use, everybody had to use LEP as the designated acronym or descriptive label attached to this population. But in this case, rather than accepting or even embracing the limitation to define the students, they decided to focus on the assets. They are truly language enriched because they speak another language already. Many of them also have multiple languages, dialects, varieties of different linguistic repertoires that they can tap into. So the asset-based approach that I incorporated in this book is reflective of the same thinking: moving away from the limitation, even moving away from English learners, redefining this population as a group of students who bring rich linguistic heritages, traditions, literacies, or oral traditions into the classroom with them.
Pam:
Yeah. I know that that terminology has changed so much over the years. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all of the acronyms in the field of education. So we have gone from EL, ELL, some people call the class ESL. We called it Language Block for a while, and now we hear more and more people across the nation refer to these students as multilingual learners or emergent bilingual learners. And I'm just wondering your perspective, as this terminology changes and evolves over time, why the shift in terminology? And how does that really impact our students and families and the way that we as educators speak with and about this group of students?
Andrea:
I think words are very important. How we define students will have an impact on how they define and see themselves. So going back to this notion of defining students as Limited English Learners, English Proficient Students, they themselves will see their limitations. If we start shifting in a more asset-based direction, we're going to reaffirm in our students that language is a powerful part of their identity; something that they have to be proud of, something that they can use, something that has a space and time in the school context as well. It doesn't just belong after school. It's not just the home language that we're interested in, but we're interested in how the students can leverage their access to their multiple languages and literacies in the classroom. Even if the teacher is not multilingual, that's where the challenge comes in, of course. I don't know if you have experience with that, when you have maybe some of your teachers being bilingual, multilingual, some other teachers might not be multilingual. So how do they feel about this?
Pam:
Yeah, we certainly have some misconceptions where when people hear what I do, "How many languages do you speak?" Well, I am bilingual, but with only Spanish and English. And so, I really affirm our educators that they don't need to be bilingual. They don't need to know more than one language to be able to support our students becoming bilingual. And so, sometimes that misconception hinders them, is they feel that they're not equipped enough to serve the student population. But really affirming that these students come to us with a rich language background, and that our teachers with strategies like the ones that we find in your book, and through so much of the literature and expertise that exist in the field, that they really are equipped to be able to meet the needs of our multilingual learners. And so, it's been a joy and a challenge to be able to work with our teachers who are multilingual, monolingual, serving in content areas, serving as EL specialists.
Edie:
Thanks for tuning in today. To learn more about Andrea's book, Growing Language and Literacy: Strategies for Secondary Multilingual Learners, and to read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com.
Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld is TESOL professor at Molloy University , Rockville Centre, NY. Before entering the field of teacher education, she was an English as a Foreign Language teacher in Hungary (grades 5-8 and adult), an English as a Second Language teacher in New York City (grades K-3 and adult), and taught Hungarian at New York University. A Fulbright Scholar and sought after national presenter, Andrea is the coauthor or coeditor of 27 books on education and numerous chapters and research articles related to the needs of diverse learners. Andrea is coauthor of the Core Instructional Routines books with Judy Dodge. Visit Andrea at www.andreahonigsfeld.com.
