Blog Post

The Long Way Home…to Teaching for Biliteracy

Wisdom emerges as a result of reflection, imitation, and experience. [1] As I immerse myself in my fifth year as a teacher of emerging bilinguals in a dual language kindergarten, I recognize the various cycles of reflection, imitation, and experience that have led me to teaching for biliteracy. Imitation is the essence of becoming a good teacher…we read about educational theory in school, but we become good teachers by noticing what other teachers do, trying it out, and making it our own. Over the course of my 15 years in the field of early childhood and education, I have built layers of expertise that have coalesced into a personal pedagogy of teaching young emerging bilinguals. [2] I will describe this pedagogy as applied in the context of a dual language classroom, but the specific approaches, strategies, and activities I share can also be applied in bilingual classrooms. With this first entry, I will share where my road to teaching for biliteracy started and the forks and turns I encountered along the way, with the hope that you will see how every fork and turn contributed something meaningful to the journey.

The Road to Trilingualism

My first and most important layer of expertise was gifted to me by
my parents. I am a first generation Cuban-American woman. My
parents came to this county in the early 60s to flee the growing oppression of the communist movement in Cuba…they chose to leave, although in their eyes, they were forced to abandon their country. I grew up as a simultaneous bilingual in Miami, Florida, with grandparents that knew no English, a mother who spoke to me in English to practice the English she was learning from watching American soap operas, and a father who spoke to me in Spanish though he had learned enough English to get by outside of our home. I took this gift for granted for a long time…there was nothing special about knowing Spanish in Miami (most people spoke Spanish), and as a teenager, I chose a revolt against Spanish as the marker of my search for independence. I had been forced to take Spanish class in Catholic School until 8th grade, and I certainly was not going to continue doing so when I had a choice of what foreign language I wanted to learn in high school. So I took American Sign Language. Little did I know that taking American Sign Language (ASL) then was the seed that sprouted my next level of expertise.

After high school, and now a trilingual, I pursued a bachelor’s degree in deaf education. Although there are many approaches to teaching deaf children, my studies focused on capitalizing on deaf children’s visual strengths by teaching them to communicate in American Sign Language (ASL) (a visual and spatial language). ASL meets the needs of face-to-face communication between deaf individuals, but it is not a written language. Deaf children must learn to read and write in English, in essence, their second language. ASL has unique linguistic characteristics that are completely different from English. For example, English sentences are constructed as noun-verb-object, but in ASL that order changes to noun-object-verb. By its very nature, the process of learning to read and write in English for deaf children is one of comparing and contrasting the languages and making connections between the unique features of each language. I graduated with my bachelor’s in deaf education and taught deaf children in a self-contained class of children that ranged from preschoolers to first graders.

Years later, I moved to Chicago with my husband, and decided to pursue a master’s degree in early childhood education at the Erikson Institute. I graduated from this program in 2009, and after a year of teaching Spanish as a Second Language at Erie Charter School (my current school in Chicago, Illinois), I was presented with the opportunity to teach kindergarten in the

dual language program. It was the second year of the program at our school. I invited the opportunity to apply (and expand) my expertise Picture Bteaching language through content to a new context. After a year of teaching Spanish as a Second Language, I had also begun to recognize how my geographic distance from my family had also created a linguistic and cultural distance from my heritage, and now as an adult, it was becoming more important to revive that part of me. And so began my journey toward teaching for biliteracy.

Translating My Knowledge to a New Context

That summer before my first year as a kindergarten dual language teacher, I was directed to a book about dual language education that I fervently read cover to cover. One of the biggest messages in this book was that there must be a strict separation of languages at all times, both in speaking them and in displaying them in the environment. If I had reflected on my own language learning and bilingualism, this would have felt very unnatural, but to consider my own language background did not even cross my mind at that time. The other big message in this book was that students should receive literacy instruction in their dominant language.

Using these two guideposts (languages must be kept separate at all times and literacy instruction must be delivered in the child’s dominant language), I embarked on my first year as a dual language teacher. That year, I struggled with the idea of how to identify a child’s dominant language (was it the language spoken at home? the language he used in preschool? the language that the child most often spoke to me?). It was at best an educated guess! And based on this educated guess, I divided my class in half, based on the idea that according to the model, half were English dominant and half were Spanish dominant. That year, I used a lot of furniture to divide my classroom in half as well (an unconscious coincidence that, in retrospect, seems very poetic).

As teachers of emerging bilinguals, we are all pressed for time no matter how we teach. Imagine my year when I was teaching literacy in English (to one half of my class) AND literacy in Spanish (to the other half). Not knowing any better, I spent a great deal of that year translating English storybooks into Spanish so I could teach the same literacy lesson in each language. I made two versions of the same anchor charts—one in English, the other in Spanish. Because my students were learning to read and write in their ‘dominant language’, it was only during math, social studies and science that I needed to worry about using strategies like visuals and physical movement (that I imported from my work with deaf children) to make input comprehensible. I was using a variety of curricula: Making Meaning for reading comprehension, Being a Writer for writing, Trailblazers for math, and FOSS for science…trying to implement each as faithfully as possible (the reading and writing programs in EACH language) because I felt unqualified to say they weren’t appropriate without intimate knowledge of them. When I taught deaf children as a special education teacher, I did not use programs; I designed my own integrated program using the Florida standards. To say that I quickly became overwhelmed with all the programs I was using would be an understatement. I kept thinking there had to be a better way that was more manageable and that made more sense! My self-diagnosed problem was that I had not yet discovered that better way…so I set out on a mission to find it.

Discovering a New Way

My administrator directed me to the Illinois Resource Center for training and it is there that I discovered what I would come to know as teaching for biliteracy. I took my first workshop with Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow in April of that first year teaching kindergarten in a dual language program. The title of the workshop was Integrating L1 and L2 in the Bilingual Classroom. I was drawn to the word ‘integrating’ because it was a familiar word from my deaf education and early childhood training, and because it

seemed like an answer to the ever-present challenge of fitting it all in. Over the next four years, I attended several of Karen and Cheryl’s workshops, inviting student teachers and colleagues to come with me. I think it was from that very first workshop that there was mention of a book that would be published “soon”. Oh how I lusted after that book. I asked about it at every workshop I went to over the next two years, although in retrospect I was already studying some of what would be written in it just by being there.

Putting All the Pieces Together and Making It My Own

It is in this, my fifth year as a kindergarten dual language teacher, that I really understand all the pieces and how they come together. If I reflect on how I got to this point, I remember that I began by dabbling in the things that made the most sense to me. We know that the best way to learn is by finding existing knowledge on which we can hook new knowledge. I knew about the power of using concrete experiences as a starting point that ensured a shared knowledge base for a topic. I was well versed in using the Language Experience Approach with deaf children. I understood the value of integrating curriculum from my early childhood training. I was good at bringing stories I read to life by using facial expressions and sign language. I had learned about Vivian Paley’s story dictation and dramatization at the Erikson Institute, and witnessed children’s engagement during my internship for Erikson. As I attended Karen and Cheryl’s workshops, I constantly reflected on what I already knew and hooked what they were teaching me on my existing knowledge. In their workshops, they modeled many of the strategies they were teaching me about…and I imitated them in my classroom. And through experience, I have made them my own.

Our dual language program continues to grow as we add a grade level every year, and our teachers (myself included) continue to grow as we develop a pedagogy that capitalizes on the strengths of our community of learners while being responsive to their needs as bilingual and bicultural individuals. When I look back to the two messages of that first book I read about dual language education, I can clearly see how the guideposts have changed. The languages should be kept separate (we should not flip- flop), but there is a time when they must come together for contrastive analysis. Literacy does not need to be taught in a child’s dominant language, but we must ensure that the child has the oral language base necessary to be able to learn to read in an emerging language…and language dominance is a complex phenomena that is not necessarily absolute (e.g., I am English dominant when it comes to discussing educational theory, but ask me about how you cook ‘lechón’ in a ‘caja china’ for ‘nochebuena’ and suddenly I am not so English dominant—language dominance is context dependent!).
Picture C

Walk with Me as I Continue Down the Road

The development of wisdom, like life, is a journey and with this blog, I embark on my next cycle of reflection, imitation, and experience that I hope will continue to evolve my practice and my knowledge…and enrich my wisdom. Through this monthly blog, I hope to share key experiences that shape my year, and practices that have become cornerstones of my pedagogy. Just as I do in my classroom, I plan to strategically use my two languages and write some entries in Spanish. Each classroom and each community is its own microcosm, and although I will write with my own students and classroom in mind, I hope that my stories will spark your own reflection, inspire you to imitate something that you read about, and encourage you to make it your own. Despite the differences in the programs we inhabit, there are kernels of knowledge and wisdom that we can all benefit from,

whether we are dual language or bilingual teachers. Ultimately, I hope that our collective reflection, imitation, and experience will nourish and grow our wisdom over the next year.

So where did your journey begin? How did you find the road to teaching to biliteracy, and what do you hope to discover as you walk along this road?

[1] To paraphrase the great philosopher Confucius.

[2] In this blog, emerging bilinguals refers to all students learning to read and write in two languages, whether they are sequential bilinguals with a clear language strength—English or Spanish—or simultaneous bilinguals whose knowledge is shared across two languages.

Stay Tuned For These Future Entries…

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Comments (4)

  1. Lisa Speakman December 1, 2014 at 5:35 pm

    Thank you for sharing the wisdom from your journey. Hopeful your blog will be a place for bilingual educators to connect and share their insights and knowledge too.

    1. Susan Pryor December 18, 2014 at 3:33 am

      Thanks for reading and responding, Lisa. It was a pleasure to meet you in person last week!

  2. aspeights February 4, 2017 at 11:10 pm

    I am a literacy coach at a Deaf school. I read Teaching for Biliteracy last summer and have been giving it to my colleagues at every chance. Our school is transitioning to an ASL-English dual language model, and our early childhood department is about to read Teaching for Biliteracy in hopes of finding a framework that we can use. As you’ve integrated the ideas from this book in your Spanish-English kindergarten classes, have you considered how you would adapt your practices in an ASL-English classroom? What can you imagine would work well and what wouldn’t?

    1. Susan Pryor February 8, 2017 at 4:15 am

      Hello! There are several elements of the Teaching for Biliteracy approach that I think would translate well to an ASL-English context: the use of integrated curriculum that maximizes instructional time and resources, in addition to contextualizing reading and writing tasks; an intentional focus on the development of oracy first (which would equate to the development of academic communicative competence about the unit topic in ASL); the incorporation of word study (which equates to ‘sign language study’ in ASL); and the Bridge as a strategy to identify and understand the linguistic similarities and differences between the two languages being used. This kind of comparison can be especially useful in the areas of morphology and syntax as students learn to transfer concepts learned or expressed in ASL to English in their writing. On a broader level, Teaching for Biliteracy truly believes in the goal of bilingualism and biliteracy—the minority language (in this case, ASL) needs to be elevated, and both languages need to be nurtured and developed throughout a student’s education (preschool to college). We recognize that developing a language is about more than developing the ability to communicate, read and write. Nurturing the development of ASL for Deaf students is also nurturing the development of their identity and their connection to Deaf Culture and the Deaf Community. Feel free to contact me at teachingforbiliteracySP@gmail.com if you would like to continue the conversation.

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