This summer I took my family to Spain!  I was reacquainted with my love for jamón serrano, and for a culture that honors finishing conversations instead of ending them abruptly to get somewhere on time. I also remembered my experience living with a Spanish family 15 years ago, when I was a less proficient Spanish speaker. I had countless moments of frustration, wishing my Spanish family could only see into my English-thinking brain and realize that I had ideas far more interesting than those I was able to express! What I could produce in Spanish was just the tip of the iceberg.

This experience leads me to one of my favorite representations of learning bilingually, developed by Jim Cummins, known as the “dual iceberg” or linguistic interdependence hypothesis. Every language contains surface level features. Underlying those features are a set of common proficiencies that are shared across languages, often where cognition takes place.

How does this relate to our work? The bilingual reader has a repertoire of behaviors that he draws upon to engage in reading a text.  The reader might know something about how to read fluently, what to do when he gets stuck, and how to think more deeply about what he just read.  But when we only listen to the reader in one language, it is possible to overlook some precious tools he holds beneath the surface. Often the reader will display different strategies in one language than in the other.  Observing the reader in both languages gives us more complete insight into the bank of resources the reader possesses.  This information can later be used to teach for transfer of skills across languages.

Here’s an example of how a teacher might observe a reader in two languages:  In this case, I am the teacher and the student is Celia. Celia is entering the first grade of a dual language immersion school, where she receives literacy instruction almost all in Spanish. She speaks mostly English at home (if you’re wondering why the child is wearing pajamas, it’s because she’s my daughter… I have little access to students in August!) I gathered two texts, one in English, and one in Spanish, that seem to be in Celia’s instructional range. I’ve found when doing this observation it’s helpful to choose books that are set up with similar book structures. Below you will see a short video clip of Celia reading some pages of Little Chimp Runs Away in English.  Later she was asked to read some pages of a book Mi hermano mayor in Spanish.

View Celia’s Reading Clip in English   and  Celia’s Reading Clip in Spanish (both are 1 minute)

While I listened to Celia read, I observed behaviors seen in her stage of reading development.  The below is adapted from The Continuum of Literacy Learning and El continuo de adquisición de la lectoescritura (Fountas and Pinnell, 2012), and this resource can be accessed for a more comprehensive list of behaviors through reading stages.

Listening to Celia read in two languages provided valuable insight. With regard to fluency, I noticed similarities in her reading in Spanish and reading in English in that she sounds like she’s telling a story. While she attended to the print signals for dialogue and punctuation in both cases, in neither case did she show evidence of grouping of words together naturally (perhaps due to her cautious approach).  If I were to set this as a learning objective for Celia, it might make sense to teach in English, a language she’s developed more of an “ear” for in grouping words together to be a phrase.

Celia had some commonalities in her strategic behavior across languages, and also opportunities for teaching for transfer. In both languages, I noticed her stop at difficulty, check the picture, return to try something else that might work, and continue reading if things made sense and sounded right. Her attempts were visually similar with a part of the word (she tried “here” for “he” and “niños” for “nos”) and both happened to appear as the first word of a sentence. Celia seemed more likely to reread as a strategy in her English, than in Spanish. This might be an area for explicit teaching for transfer.  In both languages, Celia could benefit from increasing her bank of known words on which to rely as anchors of support in her reading, and from searching beyond the first letter of a word.

After the reading, Celia and I had a short conversation about each text. When we discussed in English, Celia was able to summarize, predict, and synthesize meaning, expressing orally her thinking. When we discussed in Spanish, she was less articulate in her responses. Because I saw what Celia could do in English, I know she does not lack the cognitive ability of thinking critically about a text. Rather, Celia will need scaffolds to help make meaning in Spanish, as well as multiple modes of communicating what she knows/thinks beyond an on-the-spot oral interview.

When we seize opportunities to look at a child’s behaviors in both languages, we’re able to see what’s beneath the iceberg! Please share examples of how you might have observed a student bilingually, and any new understandings that might have surfaced.