Chapter 8: Collaborative Empowerment

At the Preschool, Elementary and Secondary Levels

Our assignment permits skipping "Chapter 7: The Deep Structure of Educational Reform," which probably goes beyond "that which we can change;" "Chapter 9: From Doublethink to Disinformation: The Academic Critics of Bilingual Education," an attempt to give the other side the word and "Chapter 10: Babel Babble: Reframing the Discourse of Diversity," also a chapter on policy, which would be very useful to some, but not first-year math teachers. So I have not read these chapters now, but may come back to them some time.

---

In Chapter 7, Cummins gives practical examples of several schools at various levels where the concepts he has developed here are carried out in practice as inspiration to the rest of us. I quote first from his conclusion, and then return to the various schools to pick out certain practical elements I find particularly interesting.

They show also that empowerment is generated only through interactions that affirm students' identities and extend their conceptual horizons. The creation of power in these interactions is at the core of genuine educational reform.
One reason why much educational reform has remained at a safe surface level ... is that genuine reform ...is not safe.; it threatens structures of privilege and status within the society. Faced with the escalating rhetoric of diversity as the enemy within, it takes courage for educatios to assert the rights of children to develop their home languages and the importance for the nation of fostering these multilingual resources....
(Cummins, p. 253)

Cummins tells about a preschool run on Montessori principles developed by the Foundation Center for Phenomenological Research, which is apparently now the National Council of La Raza which now has a number of different programs, including the one linked here on Early Care & Education Programs. The major difference in the preschool in Winters, CA, described by Cummins is that the school recruited members of the community with no educational training, and taught them Montessori methods, creating a school that is part of the community, provides jobs for community members, trains whole families in health and literacy, and in general perpares the small students well for the school career. The students and their parents become empowered by the program and strenghten their identities as Latino/as and Americans. From the website I cannot determine if this school still exists nor any studies on its results.

For the Elemenary level, Cummins highlights the work of several different schools:

• The Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Washington. D.C.is primarily Spanish/English, but also enrolls both Asian and African American students, as well as Spanish speaking students from many countries, making it very mulit-cultural, while retaining the students' identities.
  

  [The] School offers a ... bilingual program for grades pre-k to eighth. All instruction and school activities are conducted in a dual-language immersion environment, with equal weight given to learning in English and in Spanish. Both ... faculty and ... student body are balanced 50%-50% between native English and native Spanish speakers. In addition, by enrolling children from many neighborhoods, nationalities, cultures, and economic circumstances, Oyster provides a heterogeneous social environment that is essential to its multicultural mission. Oyster enjoys an unusual dual status as a DCPS neighborhood public school and as a school entirely devoted to a specialized program. Accordingly, all "in-boundary" children have a right to attend grades K-8, while "out-of-boundary" and pre-k applicants are admitted according to the school's selection criteria.
  (From school website)
  

• The Dual Language Program of Manhattan's District 3 has at least three types of bilingual education. Cummins was particularly interested in their pioneering Dual Language program.

  Bilingual
  Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs provide language arts and subject matter instruction in the student’s native language and English as well as intensive instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL). As the student develops English proficiency, instruction in English increases and native language instruction decreases.
  Dual Language
  Dual Language programs educate ELL students in need of English language instruction alongside English-speaking students who are interested in learning a second language. Programs continue to develop ELLs’ native language and English language skills throughout their schooling while enabling English-speaking students to become bilingual as well. Both groups provide good linguistic role models for each other, and through their interactions, support language development in both languages. Students receive half of their instruction in English and half in the target language.
  ESL
  Freestanding English as a Second Language (ESL) programs provide all classroom instruction in language arts and subject matters in English through the use of specific instructional strategies. Native language support is available to help students accelerate their understanding in subject areas. Native language assistance is supported by such activities as encouraging students to discuss subject matter with peers in the native language, allowing students to use the native language to write explanations of what they understand, and making native language textbooks, libraries, dictionaries, reference materials and technology resources available for students to use in the classroom.
  (PDF from District Website)
  

• The Bilingual Bicultural School, which occupies part of a larger school in East Harlem, uses multi-subject projects to teach both English and Spanish dominant students in both languages. They have been particularly known for the use of technology for these projects.

  The Bilingual Bicultural Mini School's Mission is to provide a performance standards-based curriculum that is of exceptionally high quality, challenging and intellectually enriching for all our students. OUR MISSION WILL BE ACHIEVED THROUGH THESE GOALS: 1) Students, parents, teacher, and administrators are treated with respect; 2) Trust, faith and belief in our children are ever present; 3) We recognize that all our students have gifts and talents; 4) Provide higher level of knowledge in all subject areas; 5) The integration of technology across the curriculum; 6) An arts program that gives all students access to art, music and dance instruction; and 7) Parents participate in schoolwide activities that emphasize scholastic growth for their children.
  (From school website)
  

At the Secondary School level, Cummins finds that the situation for bilingual students is acute for several reasons:

1. Students risk running out of time before they have caught up sufficiently in academic English...
2. traditional departmentalized high schools are organized in rigid way that often track ELL students into lower-level programs, and construct their bilingualism as an academic deficiency.
3. a large majority of secondary school teachers have had minimal training to eneable themto teach ELL students effectively.

The three programs profiled [in this chapter] have one major element in common: they all acknowledge that bilingual adolescents have "so much to say" ... and they provide organization of structures and interpersonal spaces within which students' voices can find expression.
(Cummins, p. 245)

• A Navajo-English Applied Literacy Program encourages students to create "specific products for specific audiences," such as their community. They produced articles about the community in both Navajo and English for the community weekly paper, and videos in both languages for the local TV station among other activities. By reporting on their community they learned more of their own culture, strengthened their Navajo language, and most importantly developed empowerment based on their Navajo/American identity.
• At a high school in Oxnard, CA, a single teacher, Bill Terrazas, encouraged students to have long dialogues around round tables to help them find their identities and position in the community. His students formed an organization called Students for Cultural and Linguistic Democracy, which I, unfortunately can find no current references for.
  
• The International High School at Laguardia Community College in NYC is truly international, with an ethnic break-down of 35% Asian, 48% Hispanic, 3% Black and 14% White of different nationalities. 63% have ELL status. As part of their Mission Statement, they list
  

We are committed to the following educational principles:

• Limited English proficient students require the ability to understand, speak, read and write English with near-native fluency to realize their full potential within an English-speaking society.
• In an increasingly interdependent world, fluency in a language other than English must be viewed as a resource for the student, the school and the society.
• Language skills are most effectively learned in context and emerge most naturally in purposeful, language-rich interdisciplinary study.
• The most successful educational programs are those that emphasize high expectations coupled with effective support systems.
• Individuals learn best from each other in heterogeneous, collaborative groupings.

(From school website)


• To this I would like to add the Internationals Network for Public Schools that I discussed in a post about Chapter 5, September 11, and Oakland International High School, which I discuss on Sept 27: Oakland campus caters to refugees.
  

---

This is the completion of my interactive journal about the required chapters from the book Negotiating Identities. However, if I should find something else related to this topic in the future, I will return with a new post. I consider this, like all journals, as a work in progress.
I would very much appreciate your comments, suggestions or additions to my posts. Perhaps, for example, you are working with a program that should be included here.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

The Role of First and Second Language Interdependence in Explaining the Outcomes of Bilingual Programs

When you learn to speak as a child, you are using some sort of innate cognitive abilities to understand language, which Noam Chomsky called the General Theory of Language in his revolutionary book from 1957, Syntactic Structures. He proposed that individual grammars of individual languages were based on a cognitive structure used by all languages. For example, all languages (except sign language, of course) use a variety of phonemes, which can be described by universal features, all express various concepts in some sort of semantic structure, words, prefixes, etc., and all have a certain syntactic structure (subjects, objects, verbs, etc.) This is why it is possible for us to learn a strange language by picking up objects to ask for their names and put the names into some sort of comprehensible structure. We still have to learn the specific rules for each language, but the main framework is already in place.

[Linguists] must be concerned with the problem of determining the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars [of specific languages.] The ultimate outcome of these investigations should be a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages.
(Chomsky, p. 11)

Chomsky's book arrived the same year that a symposium on Universals in Linguistic Theory was held at the University of Texas. These books were the "bibles" when I studied linguistics back in the 1960's. I was pleased to see that Chomsky's book has been republished, and that the topic is still of interest. Nowadays, of course, there are bio-neurological theories of language that weren't possible when I studied linguistics, such as the works of Steven Pinker, which I will have to study some day.

So learning a language is learning those specifics about the particular language; learning math is learning math concepts, which are language independent.) We can appreciate a picture drawn by someone no matter what language she was thinking in when she painted the picture; people who speak different languages can plan sports, even on the same team.

Just as a football player has no difficulty learning the rules of basketball or soccer, because they have some general "sports rules" and a pianist can learn to play a violin or flute because he already understands the musical concepts behind playing instruments, then every language that a student learns builds on her cognitive understanding about what the general language rules are that govern all languages. In each case, the person compares and contrasts the sport, or instrument or language with what s/he already knows, to figure out which new parts still have to be learned.

For example, a Spanish speaker discovers very quickly that English has a lot of recognizable vocabulary, and figures out rules so that he can automatically "invent" correct words in English using those rules. He learns by trial and error when these invented words work and when they are incomprehensible, buiilding his cognitive understanding of both languages.

According to Cummins, there are still people who believe in a "Separate underlying proficiency (SUP) model of bilingual proficiency", which apparently believe that you start from scratch when you learn a new language. Cummins is supported by the early theorists in the theory of Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) model, which assumes that a good part of learning is common, no matter what language you speak, as he shows in this figure:

Figure 6.4 The "Dual Iceberg" Representation of Bilingual Proficiency
(Cummins, p 174)

Cummins reports on numerous studies representing many language combinations that prove this point, that by learning one new language, a student builds a cognitive representation of language learning that aids him in learning new languages. This is why some people can speak enormous numbers of languages - since a large part of each language is common cognitive representation.

The Ramirez Report (1991), the Thomas/Collier Study (1997) and various International Evaluations

Cummins goes into more detail on a four convincing studies, where large numbers of students taught in different types of bilingual programs were studied, both in the U.S. and internationally. All of the studies he describes provide good support to the thesis that the longer students have good training in their L1 as well as the L2, they will become proficient in both, and in some cases more proficient than their monolingual peers, supporting the additive enrichment principle.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

Theory Proposed by Bilingual Education Advocates

Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle

Figure 6.1: Effects of Bilingualism
(Cummins, p. 171)

Bilingualism and Metalinguistic Abilities. Researchers have found that bilingual students gain cognitive skills from their bilingualism, including learning a third language faster. Because they are constantly comparing and contrasting their two (or more) languages, they become cognitively aware of the structure of the languages, and how they are similar or how much they differ. They consistently score higher on "measures reflecting creative thinking (the Torrance Fluency and Imagination measures), metalinguistic awareness (Word Order Correction), and verbal and non-verbal awareness."(Cummins, p. 165)

Cummins tells about conclusive studies in Italy and in India, where

studies show a clear positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive performance, instuding measures of metalinguistic ability. [The researcher] suggests that bilinguals' awareness of language and their cognitive stragegies are enhanced as a result of the challenging communicative environment in which their bilingual abilities have developed.
(Cumins, p. 166)

My bilingual children are decidedly more creative than I am. Although my artist grandmother was sure I would be an artist, my creations were very down-to-earth and concrete, while my children produced much more fanciful drawings and writings. My son is now a very creative developer. I expect that my own social creativity has also advanced because of my late bilingualism. After inital protestations about how strange things were done in Denmark, I learned to accept cultural and food differences them, which I have carried over to my new life in the "new" culture of California, 30 years later.

A variety of explanations have been suggested to account for the observed superiority of bilingual children on certain types of cognitive and linguistic measures: for example, the fact that bilinguals have two words for the same idea or object and two ways of expressing the same through may lead them to "objectivfy" or become more aware of their linguistic operations...
(Cummins, p. 167)

This would indicate that we not only should encourage those of our students who are fortunate to become bilingual to keep their two languages equally strong (as in the illustration), but encourage monolingual students of the advantages of becoming bilingual. Possibly the some of the members of the organization U.S. English realize the advantages of bilingualism, and fear that bilinguals will become to strong in our culture. Interesting enough, since this is a country of immigrants, maybe the creativity of those immigrants can be attributed to their bilingual backgrounds. Are monolinguals too complacent without the challenge and contrast of bilingualism? Interesting enough, the origins of U.S. English are among the foreign born who has "made it" here in this country. According to the website

Mauro E. Mujica ... Chairman of the Board and CEO of U.S.ENGLISH since January of 1993 ... [who] immigrated to the United States from his native Chile, has a firsthand understanding of the obstacles facing non-English speakers upon their arrival in this country. His insight into the linguistic isolation of non-English speakers and his determination to help tear down these barriers made him a perfect successor to the late Senator S.I. Hayakawa, who founded the organization in 1983.
(U.S. English, About)

The organization is apparently working to pass legislation in states (and being somewhat successful) to make English the Official Language of this country, but they claim that this does not mean "English Only."

As evidenced in our legislation, official English would not affect the diversity of languages spoken in the home, foreign languages learned in classrooms, mottoes, Native American languages and the like. Making English the official language of the United States refers solely to the language of the government, not of the people, private business, classrooms, etc. Passage of official English legislation would not make the United States “English-Only,” just as Nigeria is not “English-Only” and Mexico is not “Spanish-Only."
(U.S.English, Official English)

This message doesn't sound as terrible as Cummins suggests. As with all organizations, the initial concepts of the founders may have been lead astray by xenophobic followers, who are trying to limit the amount of bilingual education in schools, so that the students do not get the support they need to become truly fluent in both languages, also in Academic language.

Enhancement of Third Language Learning. Studies comparing how well bilingual students learn a third language compared with monolingual students (for example, Basque students in Spain who are bilingual in Spanish, who are learning English in classes with monolingual Spanish speakers) have consistently shown the advantage of bilingual students, who can draw on their enhanced metalinguistic abilities. However, Cummins reports that just bilingualism isn't enough. The students apparently must reach a certain threshold (in Academic Language) for this to be effective.

Specifically, there may be threshold levels of proficiency in both languages that students must attain in order to participate effectively in instruction and avoid falling behind academincally and in a second, higher, threshold necessary to reap the lingistic and intellectual benefits of bilingualism and biliteracy.
...
[The] research strongly suggests that, rather than "shutting doors" as Schlenger (1991) claimed, literacy in two languages enhances the intellectual and academic resources of bilingual students. At an instructional level, we should be ... [building] on this potential advantage...by focusing students' attention on language and helping them become more adept at manipulating language in abstract academic situations.
(Cummins, p. 170)

I have known examples of students who evidently did not manage to cross the threshold in both languages giving them decided linguistic problems in school. The one student was the youngest child of (divorced) Canadian immigrants to Denmark. The parents both spoke inadequate Danish, as far as I could see, also with their children. I think that the older children had no difficulties, so they possibly had an English-speaking environment at home before the divorce. The youngest, however, had no good role models of either English or Danish at home. Luckily he was very musical and sang in various groups, so he was learning correct language through songs. However, he had not advantage from these two languages when I was trying to teach him German.

In the next post, I will take up the final topic in this chapter, the role of the first and second language interdependence.

Chapter 6: Bilingual Education

What does the Research Say?

Politicians are not usually in agreement about what to do with English Learners in their school systems; and according to Cummins, they figure they have enough experiential evidence to make their decisions. Where there have been many studies about education bilinguals, from all over the world, and a few theories about what is best for the students, politicians have rarely used the results of research that has tested the theoretical hypotheses against all the different studies. Chapter 6 relates the theories with types of bilingual education programs and the studies made about these programs, to find the methods that most researchers (and fewer policy makers) have discovered work best.

Types of Bilingual Education Programs

In Bilingual Education, two (or more) languages of instruction during parts of the student's school career. This is not the same as teaching three years of high school Spanish to English speakers, where Spanish is the subject being taught, not (necessarily) the language of instruction.According to Cummins, this can be interpreted in two ways:

• The method is used as a means by which other educational goals are achieved. Students are often taught in bilingual classes only up to the point where they are deemed able to participate in regular classes with their peers. The bilinguaal education is used to provide a transition from L1 to L2. Real proficiency in L2 is expected to develop while the student uses it in regular classes along with L2-speaking peers.
• In some bilingual programs, however, bilingual proficiency is the goal, rather than the means. Students are expected to become academically proficient in both (or all three) languages. These programs are often found in two types:
  1. Second language immersion, such as French programs taught in Canada, where students may be taught entirely in French for the first few classes, gradually moving toward 50% English and 50% French as the language of instruction of all subjects.
  2. Dual language (two-way) bilingual programs, where students with two different L1s are taught in each other's languages, sometimes starting with about 90% in one language and sometimes 50/50, with perhaps the one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
  Thus the students gain academic language proficiency in both languages.

Typologies of bilingual education programs

Different researchers have classified programs according to "goals, status of the student group... , proportions of instructional time through each language, sociolinguistic and sociopolitical situation in the immediate community and wider society." (Cummins, pp 160-161) Cummins divides these into five types, based on the status of the L1 and L2:

• Type I use indigenous or Native languages as the medium of instruction, often aiming at reviving and revitalizing languages that have been endangered through earlier abusive educational programs . Besides in the US and Canada, these can be found with Maoris in New Zealand and other similar countries.
• Type II use a national minority language, like Welsh in Wales (which might also be motivated as a Type I program; French, German or Italian in Switzerland; Swedish in Finland, and Basque in Spain.
  
• Type III use international minority languages used by relatively recent immigrants to a country. These are common in places like the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as the U.S., and are mostly used to transition students into the dominant language. In some case, Type II and III merge, as with Spanish/English schools in the U.S.
  
• Type IV are bilingual/bicultural programs for the deaf or hard-of-hearing.
  
• Type V are for majority/dominant group students, who can see an advantage becoming bilingual. These include the French immersion programs for English speakers (the already bilingual English/Swedish daughter of friends in Montreal enjoyed participating in such a program) as well as some duo-language programs in the U.S.
  

Theories of bilingual education

There seem to be four major theories about bilingual education. The first two are favored by policy makers who oppose comprehensive bilingual education, while the last two are based on cognitive theory, and are favored by Cummins:

1. Linguistic Mismatch: where there is considered to be a mismatch between a student's L1 (and culture) and the language and culture of the school, the student is instructed in the L2 to minimize or erase the mismatch, assuming that students would encounter academic difficulties because of a mismatch. (Cummins, p. 158.) Cummins dismisses this assumption with short shrift later:

   While the claim that children cannot learn through a language they do not understand has been persuasive to many policy-makers and educatiors (and, in fact, underlies the quick-exit transitional focus of most U.S. bilingual education), it ...fails to account either for the success of English background children in ... dual language programs...
   (Cummins, p. 164.)

2. Maximum Exposure: students learn the L2 best by being completely immersed in it as soon as possible, providing maximum "time on task" for learning English, and leaving the L1 for home use alone. This is the method that has been taught in schools for Native Americans here, as well as similar schools in many other countries where a native population was dominated by another (as discussed in my blog post about Chapter I,) where children were kept in boarding schools in an attempt to "save them from their heathen culture." Cummins quotes several claims that purport to prove that time on task learning the predominant language (and this means, in particular, the spoken language) is the greatest predictor of learning this language, claiming that bilingual education spends too little time teaching English. (Cummins, p 163)
3. Additive Bilingualism Enrichment Principle: bilingual students gain cognitive skills from their bilingualism, including learning a third language faster.
   
4. Linguistic Interdependence (or Common Underlying Proficiency) Principle: cognitive skills are independent of the language being spoken (i.e. it doesn't matter what language you speak to learn to drive a car) so the cognitive skills of language learning are interdependent on each other. (Cummins, p. 159.)
   

These last two theories are discussed and supported in the rest of the chapter, so I will cover them in the next blog post.

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 4

Focus on Use

If the students learn their math and Academic Language enough to get good test scores, but never use the logical skills of math or the persuasive skills of Academic Language outside the classroom, then their education remains in the classroom, and has no connection with the rest of their identity. Therefore students must use these skills for authentic purposes. As Cummins says:

Language must be used to amplify students' intellectual aesthetic, and social identities if it is to contribute to student empowerment, understood as the collaborative creation of power.
(Cummins, p. 144)

So we have to make sure that students are actually using this language. For math, this would have been an alien concept not too long ago. Students worked problems, including word problems, which require a certain mastery of English, but they never wrote more than a geometry proof. Nowadays students may be expected to keep a Math Journal, where they keep track of the steps to do various problems, for example, and maybe even are asked to reflect on how a math concept can be used in real life. By using written Academic Language, according to Cummins:

• Students must ... figure out sophisticated aspects of [English] ...to express what they want to communicate;
• [Students and teachers become aware of] ... what aspects of language they need assistence with;
• [Teachers get] the opportunity to provide corrective feedback...
  (Cummins, p. 144)

Although Cummins recommends such great literacy tools as drama/role play, creative writing and critical autobiographies, these will always play a smaller role in a mathematics classroom. However, using language in structured groups to provide and strengthen background knowledge and in various forms of journals can be used in math. Asking students to explain the steps they have taken to solve a problem in writing, much like writing geometry proofs, can help activate Academic Written language, which is useful for all students, not just ELLs. Using more authentic projects for learning math is certainly a challenge to a first-year teacher like I will be, but is by far the best way for students to see how both math and Academic Language can be used outside the classroom.

ELLs might be permitted to discuss a topic first in their L1, if there is more than one speaker of that language in the classroom, and then produce a written report in English. They may even be permitted to write their outline in their E1 first, while they are gathering their thought. In my experience, however, they should be discouraged from trying to write first in the L1 and then translating to English, because they will translate idioms directly.

Scott J. Cech in another Education Week article, Weigh Proficiency, Assess Content, discusses NCLB requirements that ELL students test scores be included for adequate-yearly-progress purposes after only one year, although most research would indicate that students need up to seven years to master English at a level with their peers, even in math.

Students whose state NCLB test grades are consistently lower than their peers are automatically in for feelings of inferiority. Their schools have difficulty reaching expected results when their total scores are pulled down because of their lower scores.

The obvious thing, of course, is to set in everything to figure out how to bring these scores up, but the article can only report on a few practical studies, where different approaches have been used to improve ELL students' Academic English. For everyone agrees that that is the path to be taken.

Education Week has been running a blog by Mary Ann Zehr called Learning the Language, which "will tackle difficult policy questions, explore learning innovations, and share stories about different cultural groups on her beat." The most interesting post I read from recent times is High School for Newly Arrived ELLs Opens in San Francisco. The school is part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools which has 11 schools in New York and more recently one in Oakland and now San Francisco. Their students have all lived fewer than four years in this country. This is what their website says about their Approach:

At International high schools, a badge of prestige replaces the “stigma” of immigrant status for students, families, and faculty. It is understood that near native fluency in English and proficiency in a second language are valuable resources when it comes to achieving professional and social success in the United States and the global economy and participating fully in democratic society. Within our network, every teacher is a language teacher as well as a teacher of academic content and skills. The educational process takes place in a heterogeneous, learner-centered, collaborative, and activity-based environment. Students are organized in diverse clusters that work with the same team of teachers over 1-2 years. Classes are mixed according to age, grade, academic ability, prior schooling, native language, and linguistic proficiency. They are interdisciplinary and rigorous, and the curriculum includes literature, social studies, math, science, the arts, technology, and physical education

The Internationals’ pedagogical approach to educating English language learners is based upon five major tenets:

• Heterogeneity and collaboration: schools and classrooms are heterogeneous and collaborative structures that build on the strengths of each member of the school community to optimize learning
• Experiential learning: expansion of the 21st century schools beyond the four walls of the building motivates adolescents and enhances their capacity to successfully participate in modern society
• Language and content integration: strong language skills develop most effectively in context and emerge most naturally in a purposeful, language-rich, interdisciplinary, and experiential program
• Localized autonomy and responsibility: linking autonomy and responsibility at every level within a learning community allows all members to contribute to their fullest potential
• One learning model for all: every member of our school community experiences the same learning model, maximizing an environment of mutual academic support. Thus all members of our school community work in diverse, collaborative groups on hands-on projects; put another way, the model for adult learning and student learning mirror each other.
  (Internationals, Our Philosophy - my emphasis)

These students are learning English while they are learning content. They are not being held back until their English is good enough. The schools emphasize their bilingualism as a "badge of prestige" and empowers them to become active citizens.

What an exciting place to work and learn, and what an inspiration! I will continue to explore their website. It has a wealth of inspiration!

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 3

Focus on Language

One of the main reasons bilingual students end up having trouble keeping up with their fellow students is perhaps that they have learned conversational English so well that teachers and counselors figure they are generally fluent. However, students do not learn Academic English from their friends. They learn it in the classroom. Their friends have had a number of years to build a advantage that the ELL students have to catch up with. Of course there are some Standard English speakers in their classes who didn't quite catch on either when Academic Language was being presented, so any activity to strengthen Academic English is good for the whole class.

In an article from Education Week Research Hones Focus on ELLs Debra Viadero reports on how even the best ELL students tend to fall behind their peers with English as L1, and that researchers agreed that it has something to do with learning Academic English. Following are some short quotes from the article:

What they have yet to nail down is how to help this vulnerable and challenging population of students over the learning hump that comes later in elementary school; how to teach higher-order reading skills, such as comprehension; how to teach adolescents who are new to English; and how to boost achievement in academic subjects other than English.
...
Making matters worse, the existing research on the topic has been dominated by a single, politically explosive question: Should English-language learners be taught, either initially or for an extended period of time, in their native languages?

...five independent research reviews addressing that question over the last 25 years conclude that teaching students in bilingual settings is more effective—at least modestly so—than teaching them only in English.

“I think the evidence is there,” says Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, a private research center in Washington. “There’s a lot of transfer that occurs from the first language to the second language.”

...Scholarly views diverge even more over how long it should take for students to master English, with estimates ranging from three to eight years.

...To prod students to talk more, especially in the academic arena, many experts recommend setting up structured cooperative-learning groups so that students can practice speaking under less-threatening circumstances. In fact, a research-based practice guide published last year by the Institute of Education Sciences calls for English-learners to spend at least 90 minutes a week working one-on-one on carefully designed activities with students of different ability and English-proficiency levels.

...the bottom line is that the research suggests that English-learners need some sort of classroom support if they are ever going to succeed in American classrooms. ...Yet he estimates that 10 percent to 50 percent of ELLs are in classrooms where few, if any, modifications are made to help them overcome their language difficulties. And their numbers are growing, ... even as pressure builds in some states to enact policies that block teachers from using students’ primary language in classes or limit instructional modifications for English-learners.
(Viadero)

Cummins says that ELL students need to develop "critical language awareness, which encompasses exploration of the relationships between language and power." (Cummins, p. 137) In other words, students have to become aware of the differences between colloquial, usually oral, language, and the language of power, which is generally Academic Language. (Even powerful speakers of Ebonics or Latino/American use a different language to convince people, than they in daily conversations.) He suggest turning the students into "language detectives" who discover the differences between colloquial language and the language of power - and academic English, to see how different forms of language are used in different contexts. In this way, there is no denigrating colloquial language, the language of the student's home identity, but the students learn how to use language flexibly.

He talks of enabling students to "harvest the language" (Cummins, p. 139) by being aware of grammatical structures and vocabulary. While most of his suggestions would be more applicable in a more text-based subject than mathematics, there is undeniably a math vocabulary that students must learn to be successful. We must be careful not to dumb down the mathematical vocabulary for these students, but teach it to them instead. (This summer I discovered this while teaching division of polynomial fractions. We were saying that they should "flip" the divisor, until it occurred to us that the students actually knew the term "invert.")

Cummins suggests working with the Graeco-Latin vocabulary, which of course, is prevalent in mathematics, and points out that students with Romance language backgrounds like Spanish are accustomed to using these words. We should have them discover the small differences between the English and Spanish cognate terms. The computer program HELP Math that I discussed in the previous post has an excellent glossary that compares the English and Spanish terms. For students with other languages, we will have to help them build this understanding of the vocabulary and word-building functions of prefixes and suffixes.

Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 2

Focus on Meaning

Of course, when you are teaching a subject, the most important thing you want the student to understand is your content, in other words, the meaning of what you are teaching.

If the student does not have (or realize that she has) sufficient embedded context to understand the meaning, it is the teacher's job to make sure that the she has the background information necessary to take on the challenge of learning new content.

Since I will be teaching Math (I haven't found a job yet, so I have no classes where i can try out these things) whatever I write here will be theoretical when it comes to Math.

As I quoted in the previous post, if you're a great teacher of, say, math, to the "standard" student, but leaving the Standard English language learners behind, you're not a great teacher. If most of your kids get it somehow, there's still that group who didn't, and maybe could have, if they'd had the necessary background to understand it.

With math the problem could be poor preparation in elementary or middle school. It could be a parent who told the child that she always hated math. It could be that the child missed out on some important part of math because he moved from one district to another and they were doing things in a different order. (That happened to me. I moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania in April of my Junior year. I had no problems in most of my subjects, but in math, they had already had coordinate geometry and we were just about to get to it in my Ohio school, so I had to learn it on my own. Even now, many years and many math classes later, I still feel some strange insecurity there.)

So what's a math teacher supposed to do?

The good thing is that math is very symbolic, and pretty much the same despite the language. Of course, there are differences.

• Where we write 2,456.25 most of the rest of the world writes 2.456,25, which is certainly confusing. In some countries, division is not indicated by / but by :
• In Denmark, subtraction is indicated by ÷.
• In Denmark, Ø is a letter (and also the word for "island," not a number.
• Many Europeans write one with a little flag to the left (like our 7) and cross their 7's so they don't look like ones.
• Since I had math in school and college prior to the advent of calculators and computers, we never talked about negative numbers as "negative two" but as "minus two." I think the new nomenclature came partly because of the advent of number lines (which we also didn't use) and the different keys for "negative" and "minus" on a calculator keyboard (which have been a hassle for me!)

Those are just simple things that might floor a good math student from another country.

For students L1 is a European language, they probably know a lot of the math vocabulary already, or at least they will recognize most of it. But a student from an Asian country most likely has to learn the entire math vocabulary even though she can do the symbolic math.

In most cases the students have some prior knowledge of math that the teacher can help them activate in various ways that have already been discussed. If a student has not been exposed to the necessary mathematical background, then it is necessary to find help to bring the child up to speed. Since the rest of the class will be moving on, this puts an enormous pressure on the child who is trying to catch up.

Cummins suggests a sequence for introducing new content, which can also have some application in math:

1. Experiential phase - to activate background knowledge
2. Literal phase - finding out what the text in the book says literally (as in explaining what a word problem is looking for.)
3. Personal phase - relating to the student's own experience (which might be difficult in some areas of math.)
4. Critical phase - drawing inferences and exploring generalizations.
5. Creative phase - translating the previous phases into creative action, like solving the problem or extending a math concept to something else.
   (Cummins, p 134)

Other ideas he suggests which could be used in math are

• Use visuals to stimulate discussion
• Use manipulatives and multimedia presentation
• Share prior experiences with people of diverse backgrounds (like those number and operator difficulties I mentioned above.)
• Writing activities that focus students' prior knowledge - a bell-work assignment?
• Linking prior knowledge to knew concepts, which is something so basic for teaching that I wonder why it's even mentioned.
  (Cummins, p 135-6)

HELP Math for Spanish/English bilingual students

I happened on an interesting website the other day, called HELP, aimed at Spanish/ English bilingual children learning math in grades 3-8. I signed on for the 21-day free trial so I could see how it works. There is a little story with animal-like children doing things in real life, and then transfering that to a math lesson. For this page, Maria walks every day and keeps track of how far she goes in a table of values and a bar graph. When the student clicks the the button "En esta pagina" at the top right, a speaker tells about the page or the sequence in Spanish, giving an oral background to what the student is learning. The middle button on the bottom is a glossary of key terms with explanation in English and Spanish and always an example.So the student gets background knowledge in Spanish, hears the story in English, and can check key terms in both languages, which is right after the book! Evidently it is possible to aquire the program for your school with Title I, II, etc. grants. It looks like a useful program.

But what do we do for the children who speak a language that isn't Spanish?

I plan to look for textbooks in the languages of my bilingual students, so they have a reference work to check with. Conceivably there will also be math materials in those languages on line. My students could help search for materials in their languages.