Understanding Language in Diverse Classrooms

A Primer for All Teachers

Marilyn Shatz, Louise C. Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136700637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

With the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of students in U. S. schools, all teachers, regardless of the content area or grade they teach, need research-based strategies for assisting all students to gain English proficiency. This practical, concise guide shows teachers what they need to know about language, how it is learned, how it is used, and how teaching about it can be incorporated into lessons throughout the curriculum.

Understanding Language in Diverse Classrooms offers a model of how learning takes place and describes the critical role of teachers in that model. It includes comparison charts showing how some of the most common heritage languages represented among present-day students compare with English, and it provides examples of hands-on materials including checklists, rating scales, and sample lessons to help teachers prepare to teach all their students in diverse classrooms. Each chapter ends with questions to stimulate discussion and reflection on major chapter points, to enable readers to review and evaluate the information and then integrate it into their own practice.

Part I
Language and Languages

Chapter 1
Introduction

Why All Teachers Need to Know About Language

Humans are good language learners. Typical 4-year-olds are adept enough in their native language to use it to interact successfully with both parents and playmates across a host of social situations. And they do so without the laborious training it takes to get a chimp or a parrot to learn only a tiny fraction of what constitutes knowledge of human language. According to folk wisdom, children even pick up a second language with apparent ease if immersed in it at a young age. Yet, when it comes to schooling, language can be the stumbling block to learning for an increasingly large percentage of the population. Why? Our answer is two-fold: 1) folk wisdom ignores the complexities inherent in the task of acquiring and using language, and 2) all teachers must be equipped with knowledge about those complexities in order to foster academic success.

Schools have a language in which the tasks of teaching and learning are carried out. It is more complex and often more precise than social, or everyday, language. In the US, that school language is a particular variety of English labeled Academic English (Wilkinson & Silliman, 2008, 2010, & 2012). Over the years, the gap between everyday and academic language has grown. Moreover, an increasingly diverse student population from many different language and cultural backgrounds may not be proficient enough even in everyday English to cope with the academic variant found in schools (Danzak, Wilkinson, & Silliman, 2012). This can be true not just for young children but for older ones as well. In any level classroom, there may be students with a range of English and schooling experiences, some with everyday English and education elsewhere, some with one or the other, and some with neither (Silliman & Wilkinson, 2010). While all teachers are increasingly held to account for the success of all their students, few educators have been prepared by their initial preparation to understand how or why students from such varied backgrounds may have so much difficulty with instruction conducted in Academic English.

All teachers need to recognize that a key challenge in content learning is for students to move from everyday, informal ways of construing and representing knowledge into the technical and academic ways that are necessary for disciplinary learning in all subjects. Each content area has its own vocabulary and its own modes of expression for argument and persuasion. Students, especially English Language Learners (ELLs), will learn disciplinary content only if they understand its particular language. Content area teachers are responsible for helping them use that language appropriately.

Why is learning about language diversity and how to use knowledge about it in the classroom now so important for all teachers? It is not news that language is crucial for learning in school. For decades, teachers have been giving oral instructions and students have been reading texts, writing essays, and taking tests. Whether learning to read, do an experiment, or solve an equation, students have used language to comprehend what they were being taught and to express what they have learned. It has always been important that students attain competence in the language of schooling, Academic English.

However, it is news that, increasingly, students of all ages come to school underprepared to deal with Academic English. The language diversity of students in American public schools continues to grow. In 2009, more than 20 percent of the student population in American schools did not have English as their home language (Aud, et al., 2011). Many of these students are classified as ELLs; that is, they do not have adequate English language skills for schooling in English; the numbers increase yearly. Although children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds make up a large part of the ELL (or Dual Language Learner [DLL], or Limited English Proficiency [LEP]—as they are sometimes called) population, they are not the only ones. There is so much language diversity among students now that the school web sites of many large cities in the US often list the major languages represented in their districts. Moreover, for a given language, for example Spanish, there can be a number of different regional dialects or varieties found in the language backgrounds of students in US classrooms. Even for English, there are many varieties in classrooms across the country, from regional dialects to African American Vernacular English. In sum, the language diversity in almost any classroom is staggering.

How to meet the needs of such a diverse student population? US schools have addressed that question largely by introducing cadres of experts to deal with it. There are now special classes for ELLs, with English as a Second Language (ESL) expert teachers, reading teachers, and expert speech therapists (Danzak, Wilkinson, & Silliman, 2012). Such additional expert assistance may be extremely useful, but it is not enough. ELLs are often put in special classes or pulled out of regular classes for additional services. There is a limit to how much this can be done. As much as they might need special help, ELL students also need to spend time in regular classrooms with content teachers who are expert in the particular language of science and math. Moreover, they need to practice what they learn in class with peers who speak Standard English, and they need the opportunity to compete or cooperate with them in regular class rooms. What, then, is the solution—one that allows for an integrated schooling experience for all students and yet addresses the challenges of reaching a diverse student population for the teacher?

We propose not to do away with expert assistance but additionally to give all teachers, regardless of the grade or content area they teach, the tools they must have to address adequately the language needs of the varied students they teach. Then, even though some ELLs may spend a part of the day in extra language instruction, all students will participate in regular classrooms and benefit from all teachers more knowledgeably addressing the language demands of their topics. ESL teachers should be seen as more of a resource and advocate for the ELL student than as a substitute for content teachers.

Below we expand on our two-part plan for this book: First, we describe the kind of information about language that most teachers have not previously had access to. Second, we offer suggestions on how teachers can use their new knowledge to improve their instruction to students who need to acquire Academic English language skills. For more on Academic English and the need for students to learn it, see Chapter 7 (this volume) and Wilkinson & Silliman, 2008, 2010, & 2012.

What Teachers Need to Know about Language

Although teachers recognize the importance of language skills for learning, they typically have had little education into the nature of languages, the acquisition of them, or the many ways languages relate to cognitive or social development. Moreover, there has been little attention paid to whether and how ELLs or DLLs are different from monolingual learners. Because almost all of us have reached an everyday conversational competence in our native languages before we even enter school, we tend to discount the magnitude of that first-language acquisition accomplishment and, moreover, to assume that further learning in language will be as apparently effortless. Recent research in psychology, linguistics, and education tells us, however, that while humans are prepared to learn and use language, the actual learning and ultimate uses of language are anything but simple. This is especially true of users of more than one language (see, for example, Hoff & Shatz, 2007).

Importantly, you do not have to learn another language or become an expert in linguistics, the formal study of languages, to learn what you as a teacher need to know in order to deal with the increased language diversity in your classroom. In the chapters in Part I, to give you a better appreciation of language and language learning, we plainly describe levels of language analysis, discuss how languages can differ, show how language development relates to social and cognitive development, and discuss how being an ELL or DLL can affect the educational process.

We ground our approach to language learning in classrooms in our training in developmental psychology and discourse analysis. We offer two constructs, bootstrapping and discourse scaffolding, that complement each other to present a picture of learning analogous to what goes on between caregiver and young child. Learning cannot progress without the interactive involvement of both learner and caregiver or teacher. The first construct, bootstrapping, focuses on children as learners, who draw on whatever their level of social, cognitive, and language experience in order to learn more. The second construct, discourse scaffolding, refers to the methods by which the caregiver or teacher facilitates and guides the child’s progress by using language supports to help the child take the next steps toward knowledge. Learning from others via language is a hallmark of human development, both for a toddler being socialized into a language community and for a student in a US classroom. All teachers need to know how to use language to provide scaffolds for all their students, including ELLs.

How Teachers Can Use Their Knowledge of Language(s)

Because teachers already have so many educational and administrative tasks, we offer several devices to help them utilize their new knowledge. In Chapters 5–7 in Part II, we provide checklists, rating scales, language comparison charts, and age-based suggestions for including language learning in lessons, all designed as tools to help teachers manage the task of making their instructional plan responsive to the particular language needs of the varied students in their classrooms. In Chapter 8, we show how teachers can contribute to the language ability assessments of their students.

Checklists and Rating Scales

People make errors, their memories can fail them, and they can be disorganized. To help counter such tendencies, checklists have been employed in many enterprises. One example is their use in airplane cockpits before takeoff (Gawande, 2010). In Chapter 5, we offer checklists and rating scales to help teachers organize and keep track of the language backgrounds of the students in their classrooms, to identify sources of assistance for them, to help monitor their own communication with students and their parents, and to track the strategies they use to facilitate progress in learning.

Comparison Charts

One of the most difficult jobs for teachers, once they know their students’ language backgrounds, is to identify where and why students may have problems learning English. Without requiring teachers to have proficiency in another language, our language charts show how many common difficulties result from clear differences between English and other languages, and how these differences may impact a particular aspect of learning, e.g., spelling of English words. Teachers can use the charts in Chapter 6 to examine some of the most common home languages represented in American schools today and see how they compare with English in various ways (e.g., major sound differences). Then they can see how those differences may impact a student’s educational performance. They can also use the list of comparative features to make their own charts of languages represented in their classrooms but not in our book. Wikipedia and other web sources with information on languages (see Appendix A) should be helpful for such activities.

Language-Savvy Lessons and Assessment

Ultimately teachers are responsible for creating lessons that help children learn and eventually show what they have learned on evaluations. Based on information about innovative and successful classroom practices, we offer in Chapter 7 suggestions for both primary and secondary level teachers on how information about Academic English can be woven into lessons at any grade level and any topic. In addition, we provide some case studies illustrating successful methods. Chapter 8 is dedicated to an overview and application of assessment practices for ELLs. Our hope is that such suggestions and case studies will stimulate discussion and sharing among all teachers about such practices.

Additional Aids

Finally, we provide in two appendices sets of sources that include not only books expanding on topics in our volume, but also web sites we have found that seem especially well-designed and potentially useful for teachers. The web sites in Appendix A offer information about a wide variety of languages and even pronunciations of simple words. There are also sites that summarize recent research on young ELLs and offer suggestions and tools for teaching ELLs. In Appendix B, teachers who want to know more about languages, language development, or ELL or bilingual students can find books on those topics, as well as a range of recent books with chapters by experts on teaching.

Summary

We have made a case for all teachers needing to know about language in order to face the challenges of teaching the increasingly large numbers of students in US classrooms who need extra Academic English support. Central to our argument is our learning model, which uses the ideas of bootstrapping and discourse scaffolding as complementary processes that all students and teachers need to engage in if learning is to proceed. To assist teachers in their roles in the learning process, we will offer in the following chapters further discussion of language, types of languages, and characteristics of language learners, including bilinguals. We will go on to suggest how teachers can use checklists and language comparison charts, and we offer some examples of language-rich lessons as well as suggestions for assessment, additional readings, and useful web sites.

Discussion Questions

• Why should all content teachers know about language?
• What is every teacher’s role in teaching ELLs?
• How can teachers use their knowledge of language to best assist ELL students to learn?

Chapter 2
Language and Its Speakers

What is Language?

How would you respond to the question, “What is language?” One answer (found in a dictionary) is “any means of expression or communication, as gestures, signs, animal sounds, etc.” This answer is problematic. What about the barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, the crying of an infant? Many signs or signals convey information to us, but not all are language: indeed, the word infant comes from the Latin, meaning having no language.

Some of us have been privileged as caregivers to watch infants, from birth to three or four years of age, become language-using members of a community, able to persuade, joke, and argue. The apparent ease with which children attain so much skill in so short a time can be misleading: we are beguiled into thinking that acquiring language and how to use it in varied social settings is easy. Language acquisition may be natural—almost all children growing up in a wide variety of cultures and circumstances acquire language—but it cannot be said to be a simple process. After many decades of research, there is still controversy over how language is acquired (see Shatz, 2007a). Moreover, not even the brightest of non-human animals can do what toddlers do seemingly without training (Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008). Animals, of course, have their own ways of communicating, and we have learned in recent years that such systems are often more complicated than we previously thought. Still, to date, no other species’ communication system has been shown to approach human language in complexity or productive potential. And, no non-human animal has yet developed anything like full-blown human language abilities. So what is it that makes us human animals and our language different?

Language—at least human language—is more than conveying meaning through signs or sounds. It is an orderly system that allows for infinite productivity, that is, an unbounded variety of expressions. A simple instance of productivity involves continuing to add another noun with and to the subject of a sentence, e.g., “I like peaches,” “Richard and I like peaches,” “Richard and Louise and I like peaches,” “Richard and Louise and Alex and I like peaches,” etc. There are many other ways to be productive, for example, “I like peaches and bananas.” Or, “I like sweet peaches.” Yet, there are constraints on what is acceptable variation. For example, speakers of English would not say, “Peaches like I,” or “I-s like peach.” The point is that knowing a language means knowing how to create an infinite variety of expressions that follow the constraints or rules of that language.

Languages have traditionally been analyzed into various parts: sound systems (phonology), meaning systems (semantics), and systems for combining language units are traditionally divided into the studies of how words are structured (morphology) and how words are combined into the larger units of sentences (...