Читать книгу EL Excellence Every Day - Tonya Ward Singer - Страница 38

Learn what students know and can do in their primary language(s). When possible, use primary language assessments or even an informal language survey to learn the unique language assets each EL brings to your classroom. In my home state of California, schools are required to assess primary language within ninety days of when an EL first enrolls in a U.S. school. When I worked as an EL specialist, I administered these assessments to Spanish-speaking ELs and provided this information for teachers. When an EL enrolled with another primary language, since I did not have language resources to assess proficiency in other languages, I used an informal survey to ask parents about student proficiency levels. Download a copy of my informal language survey at www.tonyasinger.com/elexcellence or create your own.

If primary language assessments are given in your district, take full advantage and find those assessment results to know if your EL students are proficient in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. If not, try to interview the student or parents (or have someone fluent in the home language interview parents) with an informal language survey to ask how well the student speaks, understands, reads, and writes the home language.

If you do speak a student’s primary language, you can use it to help emerging ELs access your core content:

 Clarify Directions: Even in a lesson in which your goal is full English immersion, you can use primary language strategically to clarify directions for an emerging EL. Don’t translate everything, or the EL will tune out what you say in English. Instead be strategic to use the primary language to clarify confusions.

 Check for Understanding: If you have an emerging EL and at least one other student proficient in the same home language, you can have these students talk through an advanced concept in their primary language before speaking in English. Your proficiency in the language helps you check for understanding as they discuss, and helps them build the English they need to express the same complex ideas.

Whether or not you speak a student’s primary language, you can tap into ELs’ strengths in that language to help them access your core content and learn English:

 Build Background: Have emerging ELs with primary literacy read or watch videos in that language to build background in the high-level concepts and topics you are teaching. When students first build background in concepts and topics in their primary language, they will have an easier time making meaning from your speech and texts on that topic in English. Flip to Chapter 5 for strategies to build background.

 Teach Vocabulary With Cognates: Flip to pages 124–125 for strategies to use primary language cognates to teach new words.

 Encourage Use of Home Language in Families and Communities: Primary language use promotes academic achievement in English (Francis, Lesaux, & August, 2006). The majority of communication and conceptual skills students learn in their primary language transfers to their English learning and literacy. Do not advise parents of ELs to stop using their home language at home. On the contrary, encourage families to read or tell stories together—in the language of the home—and engage in discussions. Encourage students with extended family members in other countries to engage in communication and correspondence with them (via letters, video calls, emails, etc.) to continuously strengthen their bilingual and bicultural skills.

 Learn Language From ELs: With genuine interest in learning the language, without putting students on the spot, create opportunities for ELs to teach words or phrases in their language to you and/or to peers. For example, one teacher with multiple home languages in her first-grade classroom incorporated the words for good morning in each language as part of her morning routine. All students chanted all of the different language greetings to start the day. In a high school classroom, a Spanish-speaking EL tutored an English-speaking peer with Spanish homework.

Value nonstandard English dialects. A nonstandard English dialect, like all languages, follows consistent grammatical structures and is powerful for effective communication with others who share the language. The following are examples of the many dialects of English that are part of the rich linguistic tapestry of North America:

 African American English (AAE), also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

 Cajun Vernacular English

 Hawaiian Pidgin

 Chicano English

A Standard English learner (SEL) is a student with fluency in an English dialect that is not the same dialect that English students are expected to use in school. Like ELs, SELs have a powerful asset in their fluency with their home language—an asset often undervalued by schools. Honor this asset by first recognizing that what may sound like “incorrect” English to a Standard English speaker is actually a correct application of logical grammar and syntax in the students’ home dialect.

“There is nothing inherently superior in the make-up of a ‘standard dialect’: non-standard dialects have vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation which are equally detailed in structure, and indeed are often imbued with pedigrees far older than those of the standard variety of the day.”

—Oxford Living Dictionaries (2017)

A student proficient in any English dialect that isn’t your English dialect may say or write things that sound or look like an error to you but aren’t an error at all (LeMoine, 2007; Pullman, 1999). Interpreting such language choices as errors would be like interpreting a French speaker’s use of bonjour as an error. It’s not wrong, just a different language. It has value in one context, and we can build on that value to teach a new way of using language in this new school context.

If you teach students with fluency in nonstandard dialects, seek to learn the history and some of the most common structures of that dialect. Find texts (oral, written, or multimedia) that model effective communication in the dialect and incorporate these into your own reading and your close reading with students. This is a relevant opportunity to engage students in what is already called for in college and career readiness standards—a close analysis of the following questions: What is the audience and purpose for this text? How do the author’s linguistic choices impact tone and communication? Students with fluency in more than one dialect have increased background knowledge for this type of analysis and increased linguistic options for communication across diverse contexts for different audiences and purposes. What a gift!

Teaching “standard” English and valuing students’ primary language(s) is not an either/or proposition. Having a “yes, and” mindset means we simultaneously value students’ home language and the academic language we want them to speak in school. We can do this by being curious about the language assets students bring to school and making intentional connections to those assets in our teaching.