It’s like a secret handshake… a secret code. Bilingual teachers, and teachers who have worked with English language learners know it. In fact, our students know it too! We are able to read messages that might appear as gibberish to our monolingual counterparts. This was made clear to me when my 5 year old daughter, a dual language learner, sent this message to her monolingual grandma:

   “I lab  may  famali  ivin  Yesica tu  but Tessa is crezi”

Grandma responded similarly to other adults who don’t know the code: alarm… concern…. does the child have a learning disability? Many of us have had such interactions with colleagues who unintentionally apply a monolingual perspective to interpreting student work. We’ve gotten practice in advocating for a multilingual perspective. We can point out how the child may have drawn upon resources from one language (in this case, the written code from Spanish) to apply in another language. We honor how doing so is both and strategic and sophisticated for a young writer.

No matter where we are on the learning curve of the secret code, ultimately we share a common goal for our students: to prepare them for success as writers! Writing is about communicating. It’s about sharing a story. We want a wide audience to be able to read the messages we write. Transcribing a message is our vehicle to do that. Research suggests that students learn how to transcribe less by rote memorization or rule following, and more by problem-solving. In a bilingual setting, how can we set our students up to be strategic in transcribing their messages? Let’s look at Alexandra’s writing sample to try on some teacher moves…

“Me and my mom, once my mom and I were drawing with pencil and my mom drawed a parrot and a guinea pig and she teach me to draw pets and when I looked at it it looked like a real parrot.”

Use a multilingual approach

In Chapter 8 of Teaching for Biliteracy, Urow and Beeman discuss teaching and assessing writing with a multilingual perspective. They present guiding questions for teachers to consider when analyzing student writing, drawing attention to how the writer might have applied a writing element (discourse structure, syntax, spelling, etc.) from one language to another.  Equally important to assessing multilingually is to teach multilingually. Once the teacher has identified a pattern in a type of cross-language transfer, they can honor, bridge, model, and release gradually.

 Honor: “Alexandra, I like the way you used what you know to write the word “teach”. In Spanish, we hear /ee/ and we write ‘i’.”

Bridge:  “In English, sometimes we hear /ee/ and often we write “ea”. Here are some more examples…”

Model/Release: “Watch how I find an example of where you wrote “i”, and how I can write it the way it looks in English…. See if you can find other places in your writing notebook to fix.”

Teach strategies for transcribing

Lucy Calkins writes:  “If we can keep only one thing in mind – it is that we are teaching the writer and not the writing.”  Our decisions must be guided by “what might help this WRITER” rather than “what might help this WRITING”. Setting students up for independence in transcribing means giving them some tools to help themselves.  Here are a few prompts for Alexandra to that end:

Develop visual processing (in either language!)

Many words in English require the writer to solve visually and not auditorily. The child cannot often depend on “sounding it out” to decode letters of a word in reading or to record sounds of a word in writing. Students like Alexandra need to develop a way to know how things look, and early on. Building visual processing is critical in English, and it’s also probably helpful in Spanish!  When students can write known words fluently and recognize known words rapidly, they move towards more fast and efficient processing.  Some high-leverage words for students to learn visually in Spanish might include aquí, que, fue, voy, hace, fuimos, gusta.  Teachers might use the following prompts to support the child in learning how to look:

When a child develops a way to use his eyes and not just his ears in one language, she will likely transfer this ability to reading and writing in another language.

Let’s honor the secret handshake of students like Alexandra, and also prepare them for success as writers!