The Shift – How I Went from Teaching English to Teaching for Biliteracy

I have a tendency to be pretty passionate about most things I get into.

My Co-teacher, Bebi, and me at a Next Gen Science Standards bootcamp weekend. Those are helmets and harnesses we’re sporting. Note the massive structure people are climbing in the background. Of course we did that! 

As I began my teaching career, I developed into a teacher who loved teaching English and literacy to children, helping them gain independence and giving them tools to be successful citizens down the road. Maybe your story is similar?

I remember counting seven different home languages other than English among the students in my first two classes. I quickly learned that adjusting my teaching to ensure that my English Language Learning students would have access to our curriculum would be an essential element of my teaching. Duh. But I was new….

And then I moved to California, picking up a fourth grade position at a school in the East Bay. My class included a myriad of home languages other than English. I loved the fact that I couldn’t pick a single student and be able to guess their home language just by looking at them. Now I realized that all students benefit from instruction that focuses on explicitly planning for the development of language and literacy … and that I really needed to know my students well.

My journey later took me to Reno, NV, where all of the students the neighborhood school in which I was teaching received free lunch, and 80% of the students in my Kindergarten classroom were classified as ELLs. I needed some additional strategies!

So I took classes – lots of them. Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD), etc., …and soon enough I had earned my ESL Endorsement. I implemented lots of ESL strategies and gradually saw improvements in my effectiveness and my students’ performance. I loved it! My kids were leaving kindergarten knowing how to read, write, listen, and speak in English!

The early stages of a pictorial based off of GLAD strategies.

I encouraged them to continue to speak Spanish at home, as I knew the research on the benefits of bilingualism. I communicated that reading can and should occur in whatever language books they had access to at home, just READ! “But at school,” I said, “practice your English.”

Then I joined a Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program… and participated in some professional development specifically aimed at developing biliteracy.

“I have my ESL Endorsement,” I said at my first TWI training. “What’s the difference between using those best practices for ESL and teaching for biliteracy? Is there a difference?”

Cheryl Urow, who was the facilitator of that professional development session, was very patient with me. This was clearly not the first time she had heard those questions. And over the next three days, I was completely “enlightened”. This was THE SHIFT I needed to be an effective teacher in an immersion program. Here’s how it happened:

Many of my former (non-TWI) students will graduate from high school socially bilingual, but there is a big difference between socially bilingual and being bilingual AND biliterate. One of the biggest game changers for me was the Thomas and Collier research graph. Have you seen it? Changed my life…

Of course the ESL strategies I implemented created success for my students. The reality is that all K-3^rd grade programs see growth. As I looked at the Thomas and Collier graph, I followed the trend of those EL students and was heartbroken to see that if their instruction with ESL pullout would continue, they would never achieve average reading performance for their grade level. Why would they be so far behind their English-speaking peers when they have the gift of bilingualism to help them? I was confused.

Before I taught in TWI, I didn’t teach my students to use their bilingualism as an aid. The message was more of a separation: Spanish at home, English at school. Code switch. As Urow and Beeman explain on page 4 of Teaching for Biliteracy, “…keeping the two languages separate has had the unfortunate effect of emphasizing to students that what they know in one language cannot be used in the other language.” Oh. I’d never thought about that.

Along with a mental shift, there were some instructional shifts I needed to implement.

I teach in a two-teacher model of Two Way Immersion, and so share my students with my Spanish-speaking teaching partner. We each have our own classrooms, which in turn have their own linguistic spaces. A majority of my room is dedicated to English because that is the language of instruction in my classroom. However, I also have a dedicated space for our Bridges, where we bring our languages together and where our students learn the similarities and differences between the languages. We – myself included – engage in cross-linguistic transfer, we build metalinguistic awareness. I was elated when a first grader interrupted a story recently, “Satellite! That’s a cognate! I know satelite in Spanish!” That would never have happened in my class when I taught for monoliteracy. They are metacognitive about language use. And they are 5-7 years old.

This year’s first graders begin a list of cognates based off of our sun/moon bridge. The list continues to grow.

I work very closely with my Spanish partner (details in a future blog). Specifically, what I do differently now – what I’ve had to shift – is that we discuss how our children are performing in BOTH languages. We celebrate the successes and growth in one language and plan how we help that child apply that growth to the other language. While we teach different content, we use the strengths of the students to help their literacy growth in both languages. A child who makes benchmark standards on Spanish reading but not on English reading is not a “failure”. He is a child very much on the road to success, with many tools to aid him and that I, as his English teacher, need to help him access.

This kindergarten student uses his knowledge of letter sound in Spanish to help his English spelling. He is a native Spanish speaker; you can see his letter sound knowledge between the two languages is still intertwined, but he is beginning to differentiate! Big celebration to see “famole” for family. “My mom works. My family is together.”

This 1st grade native English speaker easily identifies when he is writing in Spanish and when he is writing in English. His color choice exemplifies his conscious shift between languages as his vocabulary develops. Celebrate that metalinguistic conscientiousness, you 6-year-old!

This shift of knowing about our students in BOTH English and Spanish is unique to teaching for biliteracy, so different from talking in grade-level PLCs about student performance or comparing data about our students with their monolingual peers. My teaching partner and I have to communicate clearly and regularly to know our students well and how we can use their strengths in one language to help performance in the other.

I have shifted how I approach language use at home and school as well. I no longer compartmentalize. We encourage all families to speak, read, and write in Spanish as much as possible. We celebrate it, not separate it. And we are passionate about it.

Look for next month’s blog on how teaching for biliteracy has improved my English literacy instruction. I can’t wait to share my – and my students’ – continued growth!

References

Thomas, W.P., & Collier, V.P. (2002). A national study of school effectiveness for language minority students’ long-term academic achievement. Santa Cruz, CA, and Washington, DC: Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence. www.crede.ucsc.edu/research/llaa/l.l_final.html