Personal Space: How much distance feels comfortable between you and a friend when you are talking? What distance feels comfortable when you walk side by side? What distance is most comfortable between strangers when standing in a line?
Concept of Time: When you agree to meet a friend at a certain time, how important is it to arrive by that exact number on the clock? If someone else is ten minutes late, how do you feel? If you are ten minutes late, how do you feel? What’s more offensive: someone arriving late or someone getting upset because you are a few minutes late?
Individualism–Collectivism: Do you feel most comfortable working alone or with a team? Why? How do you feel when you see one person take all the credit for a group project? How do you feel when you see a team get equal credit when some individuals did most of the work?
These questions are not exhaustive but examples of questions to help you and students think about culture beyond holidays and food. Seek to understand the unspoken and invisible aspects of students’ cultures so that you can connect across cultural differences in ways that build trust. Know your own culture so you can be intentional to see beyond your own sense of normal to create space for different cultural orientations in your classroom. For example, if you are a teacher in the United States, recognize that the United States is one of the most individualistic cultures in the world and that making learning more collaborative is one powerful way to be a culturally responsive teacher (Hammond, 2015; Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010).
“Our diverse students’ knowledge and linguistic abilities are assets that should be integrated into how and what we teach.”
—Jeff Zwiers (2008, p. 12)
Beyond beginning-of-year surveys and getting-to-know-you activities, structure collaborative conversations daily in your teaching routines that invite not one right answer but diverse perspectives about the texts students read and concepts you teach. The more you invite students to build their voices in your classroom, the more you learn about their interests and values and the better equipped you become to connect to students’ backgrounds in your teaching. Flip to Chapter 3 for peer conversation strategies and Chapter 5 for strategies to connect to students’ prior knowledge and experience. Every chapter in Section IV will help you apply these strategies in synthesis to meet literacy goals.
3. Build on Students’ Primary Language Assets
Learn what students know and can do in their primary language(s). When possible, use primary language assessments or even an informal language survey to learn the unique language assets each EL brings to your classroom. In my home state of California, schools are required to assess primary language within ninety days of when an EL first enrolls in a U.S. school. When I worked as an EL specialist, I administered these assessments to Spanish-speaking ELs and provided this information for teachers. When an EL enrolled with another primary language, since I did not have language resources to assess proficiency in other languages, I used an informal survey to ask parents about student proficiency levels. Download a copy of my informal language survey at www.tonyasinger.com/elexcellence or create your own.
If primary language assessments are given in your district, take full advantage and find those assessment results to know if your EL students are proficient in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. If not, try to interview the student or parents (or have someone fluent in the home language interview parents) with an informal language survey to ask how well the student speaks, understands, reads, and writes the home language.
If you do speak a student’s primary language, you can use it to help emerging ELs access your core content:
Clarify Directions: Even in a lesson in which your goal is full English immersion, you can use primary language strategically to clarify directions for an emerging EL. Don’t translate everything, or the EL will tune out what you say in English. Instead be strategic to use the primary language to clarify confusions.
Check for Understanding: If you have an emerging EL and at least one other student proficient in the same home language, you can have these students talk through an advanced concept in their primary language before speaking in English. Your proficiency in the language helps you check for understanding as they discuss, and helps them build the English they need to express the same complex ideas.
Whether or not you speak a student’s primary language, you can tap into ELs’ strengths in that language to help them access your core content and learn English:
Build Background: Have emerging ELs with primary literacy read or watch videos in that language to build background in the high-level concepts and topics you are teaching. When students first build background in concepts and topics in their primary language, they will have an easier time making meaning from your speech and texts on that topic in English. Flip to Chapter 5 for strategies to build background.
Teach Vocabulary With Cognates: Flip to pages 124–125 for strategies to use primary language cognates to teach new words.
Encourage Use of Home Language in Families and Communities: Primary language use promotes academic achievement in English (Francis, Lesaux, & August, 2006). The majority of communication and conceptual skills students learn in their primary language transfers to their English learning and literacy. Do not advise parents of ELs to stop using their home language at home. On the contrary, encourage families to read or tell stories together—in the language of the home—and engage in discussions. Encourage students with extended family members in other countries to engage in communication and correspondence with them (via letters, video calls, emails, etc.) to continuously strengthen their bilingual and bicultural skills.
Learn Language From ELs: With genuine interest in learning the language, without putting students on the spot, create opportunities for ELs to teach words or phrases in their language to you and/or to peers. For example, one teacher with multiple home languages in her first-grade classroom incorporated the words for good morning in each language as part of her morning routine. All students chanted all of the different language greetings to start the day. In a high school classroom, a Spanish-speaking EL tutored an English-speaking peer with Spanish homework.
Value nonstandard English dialects. A nonstandard English dialect, like all languages, follows consistent grammatical structures and is powerful for effective communication with others who share the language. The following are examples of the many dialects of English that are part of the rich linguistic tapestry of North America:
African American English (AAE), also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE)
Cajun Vernacular English
Hawaiian Pidgin
Chicano English
A Standard English learner (SEL) is a student with fluency in an English dialect that is not the same dialect that English students are expected to use in school. Like ELs, SELs have a powerful asset in their fluency with their home language—an asset often undervalued by schools. Honor this asset by first recognizing that what may sound like “incorrect” English to a Standard English speaker is actually a correct application of logical grammar and syntax in the students’ home dialect.
“There is nothing inherently superior in the make-up of a ‘standard dialect’: non-standard dialects have vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation which are equally detailed in structure, and indeed are often imbued with pedigrees far older than those of the standard variety of the day.”
—Oxford Living Dictionaries (2017)