The contributors to the SmartBrief Education Originals column Insights offer their unique takes on the most pressing issues facing today’s classrooms and school systems. The editorial staff at SmartBrief Education is responsible for choosing all of the articles’ authors.
In our opinion, every teacher enters the classroom with the intention of helping each and every one of their students succeed. Traditional approaches to teaching students English have centred on identifying their weaknesses: What do they not yet know? Just what is it that they can’t accomplish or grasp? Although intended to help, this may be preventing these students from succeeding.
It’s no secret that non-native speakers of English tend to outperform their English-learning peers on high-stakes achievement tests. Why should we be surprised by this result when these students are attempting to do two things at once: learn content in a foreign language and learn English?
Putting aside standardised test scores for a second, students who don’t speak English as their first language bring a lot to the table. They bring with them a language, one in which they are proficient in grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure. They have extensive experience and knowledge of the world’s cultures, which may differ significantly from that of native English speakers. Moreover, they might excel in their native tongue. Unless they are tested in their native tongue, educators will never know.
We prefer the term “emergent bilinguals” because it highlights the strengths students bring rather than the weaknesses they must overcome. Educators are missing a golden opportunity to capitalise on emergent bilinguals’ strengths and assets by focusing solely on the fact that they do not speak English as their first language.
Why and how asset-based education aids
Connecting new ideas to students’ prior knowledge and experience is a powerful learning strategy, according to the science of learning. Educators who take an asset-based approach to teaching emergent bilinguals can capitalise on the students’ prior knowledge and experience to better facilitate their acquisition of both academic subject matter and English language proficiency.
One efficient method of accomplishing this is through bilingual education. Core subject material is presented in both the student’s first language and a second language.
In order to ensure that their students acquire both a solid foundation in the target language and subject matter, teachers in bilingual classrooms strike a delicate balance between the two languages. Bilingual education programmes typically only offer instruction in English and Spanish, the two most common languages taught in US schools other than English, due to a lack of resources among public K-12 school systems to provide instruction in additional languages.
There are many advantages for both non-native and native English speakers to receive instruction in more than one language. Having the ability to read and write in more than one language has been linked to cognitive benefits for students. For instance, it has been shown that pre-literate children who start learning a second language at a young age go on to become highly literate adults.
When teaching emergent bilinguals, asset-based approaches make use of students’ existing knowledge and fluency in their home language to facilitate their acquisition of academic subjects. It makes use of those abilities to help students improve their English as well. There are many rules and concepts that are shared by more than one language; by making the connections between these rules explicit and describing how they apply within each language, teachers can capitalise on emergent bilinguals’ innate linguistic abilities to facilitate second language acquisition.
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Studies have found that teaching two languages simultaneously has no negative effects on students: “There is no credible evidence that bilingual education adds or creates a burden for children, yet…” Evidence suggests that teaching young children two languages is beneficial for them all.
Factors working against bilingual education
Why do so many schools continue to instruct emergent bilinguals in English only if studies have established clear benefits to bilingual education for all students?
Insufficient knowledge of this crucial pedagogy stands as a roadblock to its widespread implementation. There is persistent belief that exposing students exclusively to instruction in English is the most effective method of raising English language proficiency. There is a school of thought that says only English should be used in the classroom if high-stakes tests are administered in that language.
However, we do know that students who learn one language are better able to pick up a second. Educating emergent bilinguals in English alone is inefficient because it wastes their proficiency in their home language. Conquering this misunderstanding is crucial to the widespread implementation of bilingual education in classrooms.
Having insufficient resources is also a major obstacle. Teachers require not only materials but also tests that are made with the express purpose of facilitating the instruction of and assessment of students working with more than one language. It is crucial for educators to have a firm grasp on their students’ current levels of proficiency in both languages in order to build upon their students’ already robust linguistic foundations.
Future steps
The education sector, thankfully, is actively working to remove these roadblocks. To better understand and build on emergent bilingual students’ assets, some content and assessment providers are now offering carefully scoped and sequenced support in multiple languages to educators. When it comes to funding these initiatives, schools and districts are turning to Title 3 and other forms of state funding for bilingual education.
The states of California and Texas, which have the highest populations of ESL students in the United States, are increasing the number of bilingual programmes they offer to accommodate these students. With the hope of dramatically increasing the number of bilingual programmes in California by the start of the next decade, former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson launched the (unfortunately unfunded) Global California 2030 initiative. HB3 in Texas pays for dual language programmes in schools with at least 20 non-English speaking students.
Asset-based education can be implemented immediately regardless of the availability of financial resources in a given state or school district. A student has many resources, such as language, family, knowledge, and life experience. Identifying and building on students’ strengths is an effective way to help emergent bilinguals catch up and gives all of your students a leg up in the classroom.
