ON THE PODCAST: Supporting Multilingual Learners

A transcript of this episode is available below.

Edie: 

When I sat down to talk with Lindsey about her new book, we began with her hopes and dreams for multilingual education.

Lindsey Moses:
 

In my dream world, all students would get to be multilingual and would get to have educational experiences that value and honor their home language. And so, I think for me, that starts with training and education and recruitment of teachers. Where are there spaces where we can build on students' home language, help them become experts in their home language as they're learning additional languages, and that there are educational spaces where they also have access to teachers who speak multiple languages? I think being multilingual learner is an asset, period, right?

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Lindsey:
 

But I think sometimes in the broader world, I've been doing a lot of work with schools all over the world, and in so many countries people think of multilingualism as an expectation, as an asset. The more languages you speak, the more people you can communicate with, the more things you can read, the more places you can explore. But historically in the US, sometimes students coming in who are learning English, there have been some deficit-based views about things that students don't know.

Edie:
 

For sure.

Lindsey:
 

And when I think about multilingual students, I think they are completely fluent and navigate life at home and in their community in one language. Then they come to a classroom where they're learning grade level content and an entire new language, which is incredible and really brilliant.

And so, when I think about approaching teaching multilingual students, I think the first thing we have to do is look and think and get to know all of the many things that multilingual students know and can do, both in their home language and in spaces with us in the classroom where we might be speaking in English. And once we know what they can do, we can then think about how we can adjust our instruction in English to help them have access to that content and be able to support what they already know and do to leverage what they will be able to do.

Edie:
 

I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background.

Lindsey:
 

So, I started my teaching career in a migrant community outside of Denver in Colorado, in a bilingual school that had separate Spanish and English classrooms. And so, I was the English-speaking component in a second grade classroom. And during my time there, I went back and did my graduate work in ESL multicultural bilingual ed.

Now, I'm at Arizona State University where I teach courses, but also a large part of my job is doing research and my heart has always been in the classroom. And so, I've been doing research here for about 10 years in collaborative partnerships with teachers, who together we identify something that they want to build upon or learn or grow from a problem of practice around language and literacy. And then, I help support them in trying to use research to solve problems to address that.

And so, sometimes that means that we team teach or we plan together, but I video record all of this work and conduct interviews and collect all the data, because teachers have so little time to do things outside of the classroom. So, I learn alongside them and we try to support each other, but I have a lot of resources in terms of analyzing the data, that teachers might not have time for. And then, from that space, we try to share that work with other teachers. So, the research we do together, we think about, "How might this support or help other teachers?" And through that process, I've been really fortunate to work with teachers all over the country and more recently in a lot of international schools.

Edie:
 

So, as teachers are back in the classroom this year, how can they start to put some of what you spoke about into practice? Maybe what's a strategy they could use to get to know their multilingual students, start to build that rapport?

Lindsey:
 

This was a new to me strategy within the last two years, maybe. A brilliant teacher that was willing to collaborate with me and share ideas and do some research would do this at the beginning of the year. And she said she learned something new every year about her students. So, community asset mapping is basically where the teacher and the students do research and get to know all of the assets in their community.

And so, you can set a diameter of 10 miles or depending on how old the students are, and then you can divvy up different assets or resources that you might be able to find in the community. And then, that's part of students' group work and homework is to identify all of the community assets and resources, including their home community as well as things locally. And then, kids come together and you create an actual asset map where you might place, maybe it's the veterinarian, maybe it's the church, maybe it's the community park, maybe it's the school. And everyone comes together to talk about the resources that they learned about in their community and with their parents, which really builds on assets that teachers, particularly ones who don't live in the community, might not be aware of. And they build a map of the community.

And I think there's just so much learning that takes place both in terms of students, but as well as the teacher. Kids will say, "Oh, I didn't know about that." Or they'll say, "Hey, we go there too." And so, it just sort of creates this sense of shared knowledge around who we are, where we live, and all of the resources that are there, and becomes kind of like the heart of our classroom that we can add to throughout the rest of the year too.

And I think it always just goes back to those assets, right? That we value the community And what people in the community bring and contribute. And sometimes that's not part of our academic curriculum that we could get from something like a program. And so, I think it's a really powerful way. And also, parents see that they're valued and that their knowledge is valued and see it represented in the classroom spaces.

Edie:
 

I love this emphasis on connecting with the community and families. I imagine this must also be helpful when there are multiple languages spoken in one classroom. I imagine that can be a teaching challenge.

Lindsey:
 

We have been talking a lot about the need to support students' use of home language and trans-languaging practices where students draw on all of their linguistic resources and move in and out of languages that they know and use. And teachers want to support that work. But sometimes they say, "I'm monolingual." Or, "I only speak English and Spanish. How do I support my Hmong speakers, or my Russian speakers, or my German speakers?" And so, oftentimes teachers, particularly in urban areas where they might have nine different languages spoken in the classroom, they want to help support and build on students' home language, but it oftentimes feels overwhelming, especially if they're only speaking one language.

And one of the things I encourage teachers to do, and there's actually a chapter on this on the book, is about building on and connecting to their home languages. You don't have to be proficient in all of the languages. So, thinking about resources online, resources in the school community, but also students and parents as resources. So, it's okay not to be the expert, and it's okay if students are saying something that you don't know in that language. You can go to them and go to experts and resources to help connect and build on that work. Again, back to that assets-based approach. When we think about what kids know and can do, then we can build on that. And sometimes that means letting go of feeling like we have to be the expert in all the things, and being flexible, and use students to help show what they know.

Edie:
 

Thanks for tuning in today. You can read a full transcript and see an example of a community asset map at blog.heinemann.com. 

Lindsey Moses is a professor of literacy education at Arizona State University.  A former elementary teacher, Lindsey works with classroom teachers around the country supporting the implementation of effective literacy instruction in diverse settings. Her research focuses on elementary literacy instruction and English learners. 

Lindsey is the author of What Are the Rest of My Kids Doing? Fostering Independence in the K-2 Reading Workshop, Supporting English Learners in the Reading Workshop, and coauthor of Comprehension and English Language Learners.