One Child, Two Languages

Patton Tabors

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781598574753
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Multikulturelle Bildung

Today's early childhood educators are serving more children learning English as a second language than ever—in Head Start alone, nearly 30% of the children speak a language other than English at home.* To support second language learners and put them on the path to academic success, every teacher needs this popular, practical, and highly readable guidebook.

Reflecting 10 years of dramatic change in early education—especially in critical areas like assessment and cultural diversity—the second edition of this bestseller gives teachers up-to-date research, usable information, and essential tools to meet the needs of second language learners in today's learning environments. Leading researcher Patton Tabors equips teachers with the foundation of knowledge they need to

• apply cutting-edge research to their everyday teaching practices
• address NAEYC's recommendations for responding to linguistic and cultural diversity
• use appropriate assessment techniques for children's first and second language, including an easy-to-use observation checklist (on the CD-ROM) to monitor children's English language learning over time
• discover ways to improve literacy instruction for all children, including literacy practices checklists (on the CD-ROM) that pinpoint areas needing curriculum support
• understand and attend to the particular needs of internationally adopted children
• conduct thought-provoking professional discussions with the book-club-ready study guide and materials (on the CD-ROM)

Teachers will also get updates on all the key topics covered in the first edition, including working with parents, understanding the process of second-language acquisition, and using the curriculum and classroom organization to facilitate English language and literacy learning. Ideal for professional development, this book is the best tool a teacher can have to support the language and literacy development and school success of second language learners while honoring their home languages and cultures.

*English Language Learners Focus Group Report, 2002

Chapter One

Introduction

Three-year-old Chantal lives in a small city in Massachusetts with her 5-year-old brother, her 20-year-old half-sister, and her mother and father. Chantal and her brother were born in Massachusetts, but their parents and their half-sister immigrated to the United States during a time of political strife in Haiti. Chantal's father works at a hospital as an orderly, and her half-sister takes English as a Second Language classes at the community college and has a job as a housekeeper at a local hotel. Chantal speaks Haitian Creole at home with her family.

This year Chantal has been enrolled in a Head Start classroom near her home. When she first came to the classroom, she did not speak any English, but during the course of the school year, she has begun to use some English during interactions with the English-speaking teachers and children. When Chantal's mother comes to pick up Chantal at school each day, she nods and smiles at the teachers but is unable to carry on any conversation with them about Chantal's activities. After helping to clear one of the tables used for the children's lunch, Chantal's mother collects Chantal and leaves the classroom. When the teachers want to schedule a home visit with Chantal's mother, they ask a social services worker who speaks Haitian Creole to make the appointment and to accompany them on the visit to translate for them.

Chantal's family is just one of many families that have immigrated to the United States in recent years, increasing the population of nonnative English speakers. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 20% of the people older than 5 years of age who participated in the American Community Survey of 2005 reported speaking a language other than English. The languages represented in this population were as follows: Spanish, 62%; Indo-European languages, 19.1%; Asian/Pacific Islander, 15%; and others (including Native American, Arabic, Hebrew, and African languages), 4% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).

Not surprisingly, the arrival of large numbers of immigrant families has had an effect on early childhood education. For example, Head Start classrooms such as the one Chantal attended have experienced a sharp increase in the enrollment of children from other than English-speaking homes. In 2002, the English Language Learners Focus Group Report stated that

approximately 27% of the children served by Head Start speak a language other than English at home and more than 140 languages are represented in Head Start programs nationwide. The linguistic representation of English language learners enrolled in Head Start programs is predominantly Spanish-speaking. The 2000–2001 Head Start Program Information Report (PIR) data on 900,000 children by dominant language indicated that 201,486 were Spanish language speakers;…13,419 were speakers of Asian languages; 2,416 were enrolled as Native American language speakers; and 26,827 were speakers of other languages. (p. 3)

Children such as Chantal now make up a considerable proportion of the children in many early childhood programs of all types. It can be anticipated that a large percentage of these young children are native Spanish speakers but that a myriad of other languages are represented as well. Although early childhood programs in certain areas of the United States are most heavily affected, almost all early childhood programs are affected in some way. Planning ways to serve these young children effectively is now a major challenge for early childhood educators.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION SETTINGS FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Early childhood education programs, from small family child care programs to private or public programs or child care facilities to federally funded Head Start programs, have responded to the arrival of English-language–learning children by developing programs that deal with the linguistic needs of these children in different ways. One useful way to categorize these programs is related to how language is used in the classroom.

Early childhood education settings can be divided into three major categories related to language use (see Table 1). In the following paragraphs, each type of setting is described, and an example is presented from a series of ethnographies completed as part of a research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Tabors, Aceves, Bartolomé, Páez, & Wolf, 2000).

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Table 1. Types of early childhood education settings for children from other than English-speaking homes in the United States

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Teachers

First-language classroom: Native speakers of L1^a

Bilingual classroom: Bilingual in L1 and English or native speaker of L1 paired with native speaker of English

English-language classroom: Native speakers of English

Children

First-language classroom: Native speakers of L1

Bilingual classroom: All native speakers of L1 or mixture of L1 and English speakers

English-language classroom: Native speakers of L1 or native speakers of different L1s or either of above and English speakers

Classroom organization

First-language classroom: All interaction in L1

Bilingual classroom: Interaction split between L1 and English

English-language classroom: All interaction in English

Language outcomes

First-language classroom: Development of L1; no development of English

Bilingual classroom: Maintenance or development of L1, while also developing English

English-language classroom: Development of English; no maintenance or development of L1

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^aL1 any specific native language that is not English.

The first type of setting is one in which the home or first language of the child is the primary language of the classroom. For Spanish-speaking children, this means that the teachers must be native speakers of Spanish; for Arabic speakers, this means that the teachers must be native speakers of Arabic. This kind of classroom is a first-language classroom.

Advocates of first-language classrooms for children from other than English-speaking homes (e.g., Wong Fillmore, 1991b) emphasize the importance of the development of the first language as a necessary basis for later literacy and, consequently, for later school success. These advocates are particularly concerned that young children are highly susceptible to losing their first language if the first language is not strongly maintained during the early childhood years. Their conclusion, therefore, is that children should attend first-language early childhood education settings and should not be exposed to a second-language setting before elementary school. Even then, they believe, there should be a strong developmental first-language program throughout the early elementary years to establish literacy in the first language.

This attitude was strongly supported by the teachers in the Spanish-language Head Start classroom for 3-year-olds that was established as part of the previously mentioned research project. In this classroom, the teachers, both of whom were native speakers of Spanish, were encouraged to use Spanish for the first time in their teaching careers. The children came from homes in which Spanish was at least one of the languages being spoken. One of the teachers, Sara, talked about the benefits of Spanish-language instruction for the children: “I saw it right at the beginning of the year…. The kids understand and respond…. Sometimes we do a lot more than what I used to do with my other classes…” (Tabors, Aceves, Bartolomé, et al., 2000, p. 431). Alicia, the second teacher in the classroom,

argued that second-language learning would be greatly facilitated once the bilingual children had a strong home-language foundation, “[l]o importante es enseñar su primer idioma…no van a tener problemas en aprender inglés—pero vamos a darle una buena base para que ellos sigan construyendo encima de su base.” [What is important is to teach them their native language…they won't have problems learning English—but let's give them a good base on which to construct meaning.] (Tabors, Aceves, Bartolomé, et al., 2000, p. 431)

A second type of early childhood education setting is one in which there are individual teachers who are themselves bilingual or in which there are two teachers who have different language backgrounds. For instance, in a classroom that serves Mandarin-speaking children, one teacher in the classroom may be English speaking and the other may speak Mandarin; or in a classroom that serves children who have recently come to the United States from Haiti, the teacher may be bilingual in Haitian Creole and English. In these situations, language choice becomes an issue: Which language is being spoken to whom, by whom, and under what circumstances? This type of classroom is a bilingual classroom.

Bilingual early childhood education settings may take a variety of forms. In some settings, all of the children come from one particular other than English language background, and only the teacher or teachers communicate with the children in English. At the other end of the spectrum are two-way bilingual or dual language programs, in which approximately half of the children in any given classroom are from the same other than English-speaking backgrounds and the other half are from English-speaking backgrounds. In these programs, instruction is scheduled so that both languages are used in meaningful ways during the day or during the week. In this situation, each child's first language is supported while a second language is added and children have second-language input from other children, not just from their teacher.

The bilingual classroom that was visited for the research project was led by Brenda, a proficient English-Spanish bilingual. A second teacher, María, was Spanish dominant. All but two of the children had some Spanish-language proficiency at the beginning of the school year. In this classroom, Spanish and English were spoken alternately during the day by both the teachers and the children. “In an interview, Brenda stated she strongly believed children should have the choice of speaking their home language at school…. ‘In my classroom, everything is done in English and Spanish—this is how children learn’” (Tabors, Aceves, Bartolomé, et al., 2000, p. 422). The two teachers told us that they made decisions about which language to use with the children based on their assessment of the children's preferences and proficiencies. However, interestingly enough, although Brenda often spoke Spanish with the Spanish-speaking children during individual or small-group activities, she always conducted large-group activities, such as book reading and circle time, in English. In this way, she turned group time into an English-language–learning opportunity.

The third type of early childhood education setting is one in which the primary language is English, even though there are children in the classroom whose home language is not English. In this situation, the teachers may have little or no proficiency in a language other than English, and their classroom may include children from only one language group or from many different language groups. This type of classroom is an English-language classroom.

In an English-language classroom, the teacher or teachers use English for almost all interactions; therefore, in such a classroom, a child whose home language is not English will not have his or her language supported, although there may be other children from the same language background with whom to talk and play. These classrooms can be a more or less welcoming location for a child whose home language is not English, depending on how multicultural the curriculum is and on what efforts the teachers make to bring parents and other cultural representatives into the classroom.

The two teachers in the English-language classroom in the research study were both native speakers of English, and the children came from five different first-language backgrounds (Haitian Creole, Barbadian Creole, Spanish, Japanese, and English). In this classroom, the teachers relied on English to get their messages across, often augmenting their words with gestures. Early in the year, the head teacher, Robert, “explained that he believes that immersion in an exclusively English-language classroom helps children learn the language more quickly and easily. He believes their progress is slowed down when they can rely on their home language to communicate at school” (Tabors, Aceves, Bartolomé, et al., 2000, p. 414). Interestingly, however, when a Spanish-speaking student teacher came to the classroom in the spring, Robert mentioned that he was still thinking through his ideas about native language use and did not discourage her from using Spanish with the Spanish-speaking children.

In the real world, of course, it is sometimes difficult to categorize actual programs. Therefore, these categories are meant merely as guidelines under which teachers and administrators of early childhood education settings can locate their programs in relation to a set of features that have been found to be consistent across a variety of settings.

These categories are also useful when thinking about the material in this book. Because much of the research and most of t...