Blog Post

Unexpected Notices: What Kindergarteners Learn About Language from the Bridge

What do kindergarteners really understand about the Bridge? This year, I decided to ask my students to explain the Bridge in their own words so I could begin to document the effects of doing the Bridge in my classroom. In order to add an air of authenticity, I told my students that I had a friend who didn’t know much about the Bridge and I needed their help to explain it to her. The interviews were very informal—I simply asked students “What is the Bridge?” and then let the conversation guide me. Like many things with kindergarteners, there was great variety in both their understanding and their ability to articulate their thinking.

 

The Bridge is About Languages

“The Bridge is about languages like Spanish and English.”

Some students answered the question very literally, while others delved into specific metalinguistic comparisons. What I noticed from the interviews is that most students understood that the Bridge is a time when we speak in Spanish and English. This may seem inconsequential at first, but the fact that they recognize and name two languages is evidence of the most basic element of metalinguistic awareness. Before we ask them to begin making comparisons, they must internalize the idea that there are two different languages. Not all students come to us with that understanding. One of my favorite interactions at the beginning of every year goes something like this:


Mochila Bookbag Exchange


This exchange really happened on the first day of school this year, before I had introduced my purple and green necklaces. Without the visual cue of colors (purple means English, green means Spanish), this monolingual child was having a hard time assimilating the idea that one object could be called two different things because she didn’t understand that each label belonged to a different language. This understanding is built through our efforts to make the distinction between the two languages explicit throughout the year. The fact that most of my students are now aware of and are able to articulate that the Bridge “is about languages like Spanish and English” is a great accomplishment, especially for students who come from monolingual homes.

 

The Bridge is a Process

“..the first day we write it in Spanish… and then we go like this [walks across an imaginary bridge]…and then we write all the words in English.”

Many students replied to the question “What is the Bridge?” by describing the process of doing a Bridge—that we write words in one language on one side of the chart, cross the bridge, and then make a list in the other language on the other side of the chart. I physically walk from one side of the chart to the other and many students demonstrated this as they said the words “cross the bridge.” When I asked students “What do we talk about during the Bridge?”, most students answered with references to content from the various units we have done this year (e.g., “We talk about things that we’ve been talking about…we’ve been talking about a lot of things” or “We talk about trees and animals…”).

I was a little disappointed about these responses at first. Why were my students referencing content? After all, the Bridge is not a time for focusing on content—it is a time for focusing on linguistic features. Why were my students focused on the fact that we translate words (e.g., “…the first day we write it in Spanish and then…we write all the words in English”). Translation is supposed to be only a means to an end—a way of creating the text we will use to do the real work of contrastive analysis. I had to take a step back from this disappointment and remind myself that these are kindergarteners and that this year was the first time that they engaged in the kind of metalinguistic thinking that the Bridge entails. In describing the process of doing a Bridge, my students are demonstrating that they understand this activity and that they know how to engage in it. We spend a lot of time in kindergarten teaching children the routines of learning activities before we expect them to demonstrate any learning from them. Similarly, students must understand the process of doing a Bridge before we expect them to demonstrate metalinguistic learning.

 

Finally…the Unexpected Notices!

“…both of the languages can be really special and there are a lot of cool words in them…”

I wanted to dig deeper into my students’ understanding, so I crafted a more specific question: “What kinds of things do we learn about English and Spanish when we do the Bridge?” This question yielded a lot of specificity about the various foci of our contrastive analyses throughout the year, as described in the chart below in my students’ own words.



Chart with St Quotes


The Bridge Evolves as Students’ Understanding Grows

“…the more words get into our minds the more…our brains will grow.”

When we think about how the Bridge impacts our youngest students, we need to frame our expectations in the same way we do for all other areas of learning in kindergarten. We don’t expect kindergarteners to be reading chapter books by the end of the year. We send them off to first grade reading emergent texts and using invented spelling, and we celebrate these accomplishments as crucial steps on the road to reading complex texts and to spelling conventionally. Similarly, Bridges in kindergarten plant seeds about the two languages our students are learning in. Some of these seeds will sprout during the kindergarten year, but others will lay dormant until sometime in the future. Each year, a teacher will water those seeds as he or she continues to engage students in contrastive analysis through the Bridge…and each year, students will grow stronger in their understanding of the two languages and in their ability to engage in more sophisticated levels of contrastive analysis.

My investigation of kindergarten students’ understanding of the Bridge was not scientific, and my discoveries cannot be generalized beyond the walls of my classroom or to all kindergarteners (even all kindergarteners in my classroom). That said, I have drawn some conclusions about how my kindergarteners understand the Bridge and the two languages they are developing. This year, the Bridge helped my kindergarten students develop:

 

  • Awareness that English and Spanish are two distinct languages.
  • An understanding that during the Bridge we are looking at similarities and differences between two languages (for my students, most commonly evidenced through the lens of letter sounds and cognates).
  • Awareness of a special category of words—cognates—and an understanding that they are words that look similar and sound similar. This nascent understanding will evolve in later years to the true definition of a cognate (two words that share a root word and mean the same thing).
  • Awareness that some letters make the same sound in Spanish and English, while others make a different sound in each language.
  • An understanding that there is not always a 1:1 correspondence of words between English and Spanish (e.g., in English we use the, but in Spanish we can use el, la, los, or las to indicate the same thing as the in English).
  • Awareness that the endings on words in Spanish can impact the meaning of the word in relation to the gender or the size/age of the referent (e.g., hermanO vs. hermanA; hermanO vs. hermanITO).
  • Awareness of conventions unique to Spanish (e.g., accents, tildes, inverted question/exclamation marks).
  • Awareness of differences in word features between English and Spanish. In comparing the English word sap to the Spanish term estudios sociales, my student may be tuning in to the more multisyllabic nature of words in Spanish.

 

It is important to note that these conclusions should not be used to narrow the scope of what students may notice or what teachers acknowledge during a Bridge in kindergarten. Over time, and with more scientific methods of data collection, perhaps we will be able to create trajectories of the development of metalinguistic awareness for emerging bilinguals. Until then, it is important to remember that the Bridge is ultimately student-driven. All similarities and differences that students notice are valuable in that they are exemplars of the ultimate goal of doing the Bridge: the comparison and contrast of two languages with the goal of better understanding the connections between them.

I’m going to end this post by sharing with you two particularly descriptive interviews. You’ll recognize some of the dialogue from the quotes I used in the charts above. These students are quite articulate and are certainly unique in their ability to explain their thinking. There is something about listening to their explanations in their own voice and their own words that, in my opinion, has a special value.


Kinder GirlKinder Boy

What is the Bridge_Kinder Girl

What is the Bridge_Kinder Boy


I invite you to share your impressions of my students’ metalinguistic ‘notices’—you might notice things that I missed! If you do the Bridge in your classroom, what insights have you heard your students have about their two languages?

Comment (1)

  1. cfuller5 June 22, 2015 at 4:45 pm

    I love the audio you included in this post. I was very interesting to hear from the child’s point of view why you do the bridge.

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