Seeing Value in ELL's Literacy Practices
In the midst of learning how to teach our students various subject matter (math, science, and literacy), we have also been tasked during this program with learning how to teach for all students, confronting our biases and striving to be culturally relevant. Honestly, I've felt overwhelmed at times and left classes wondering how I could reach ELLs specifically, especially if I do not speak their 1st language.
I'm 36, but this is valid.
(Perhaps I'm worrying too much.)
My desire is to incorporate all we have learned about culturally responsive classrooms and create an environment where every student can grow and thrive, no matter their background - and I'm fairly certain this is your desire, as well. This week's readings gave great insight into ELL students and focused on their literacy development, seeing value in their unique literacy practices - most of which may occur outside of school. Important findings by Mari Haneda in "Becoming Literate in a Second Language..." included:
- Recognizing that ELL "children's out-of-school literary practices are mediated not only by parents but also by siblings and...extended family", usually through collaborative literacy activities, like story-telling. (Haneda, p. 338)
- Chinese and Korean communities often participate in language and cultural enrichment classes, in addition to academic classes that prepare children for school.
- Older students (especially struggling readers/writers) use literacy outside of school in a variety of ways for personal means, by journaling, advertising, or through social media, to "construct desirable identities for themselves...and improve their English" while utilizing their 1st languages (p. 340).
In "My Mother Never Read to Me" by Zulmara Cline and Juan Necochea, the authors told their "nontraditional" literacy stories about how they developed into high-level readers and writers through oral story-telling. Both authors were not read to and lived in print-absent homes, however, their families shared stories. This oral tradition (strong in Latin and African cultures) introduced the authors to "folk tales, fables, legends, family histories, tragedies, music, and traditions" (Cline & Necochea, p. 124). They both credit oral family stories for their academic success.
So, how do we link home life and school life?
In what ways can we "develop an understanding of students' personal and community literacy resources and...incorporate them into classroom practices"? (Haneda, p. 343) Is it as easy as getting to know them?
How can we show value to literary practices that take place out of school and may be nontraditional? What does literacy look like to you and what all does it encompass?
How can we use oral story telling in our classrooms as a literacy activity? The video below may be an answer to this question. This video follows teachers and their ELL students as they use Digital Storytelling as a literacy practice. Yes, the students are older, but I believe the idea can be scaled down for elementary age students. Thoughts? You could also perform a quick google search for storytelling apps to use in your classroom.
Resources:
Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). My mother never read to me. Journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 47(2), 122-126.
Haneda, M. (2006). Becoming literate in a second language: Connecting home, community, and school literacy practices. Theory into practice, 45(4), 337-345.
ReplyDeletePricilla, I like how you summarized the last two semesters as your opening comment. Yes, I have walked out of class wondering how to teach ELL since I am a monolinguist person. Last Fall in one of our courses we talked about walking the neighborhoods and visiting the local stores to become familiar with the culture around the school. I think this is a significant first step, but there is so much more that will need to be learned by us as teachers. As a teacher, we will need to understand family values, costumes, struggles and success to gain a little understanding about a student. The Value of Hard Work: Lessons on Parent Involvement from an (Im)migrant Household shows us that reading is not everything. Spoken word and sharing of experiences a family can share their oral history and teach their children much more than just reading. The Padilla family show their children the value of hard work in the fields or the classroom. Although they pushed their children one way, untimely it was up to the children to decide.
Our classroom narrative project is similar to the YouTube video you shared. As a teacher, this was a great multimodal use of a lesson which brought students together such as Israel and his partner. Likewise, our narrative project did the same to our small groups as we learned about a critical life experience. As an elementary school teacher, I could in vision doing a similar lesson plan with grades 4 and 5.
Pricilla, I do not believe it just as simple as getting to know the students because every person is like an onion and there are so many layers to peel to get to the soul. As a teacher, we must be willing to continue to peel. What does literacy look like to me? Literacy requires us to be investigators and flexible to all forms of communication. If we just believed in print as literacy, we would dismiss the Padilla family. What a great loss that would be to society, school and family. Spoken word, songs and family history that is shared and retold by relatives and friends provide a solid foundation of literacy. Teachers have to be willing to believe. Keep asking questions and making connections.
Jay and Priscilla, I've had the same concerns about reaching my ELL students. As I've shared in class before, I went to an international school growing up and was surrounded by students and teachers who spoke a variety of languages. Despite this experience and my knowledge of french and spanish, I don't feel adequately prepared for teaching ELL students. In my classes growing up, my classmates from other countries would gradually pick up english over the course of the year. I don't remember them being pulled out of class for extra english help. There was a similar approach to our language immersion program. From pre-k onward I was placed in a class and the teacher would only speak french to us. I have to wonder if part of the problem with teaching ELLs english in a traditional school setting is that we don't allow for this natural immersion. It's scary at first, to be placed in a setting where you don't understand anything, but you're also more likely to pick up the language faster. Unfortunately, I'm also not sure this is entirely possible within a school system where testing is so prevalent. If the goal is to get the students to the point where they understand enough to take a test in english, then there's more urgency to learn english at a faster, less natural pace.
DeleteI love the idea of incorporating oral storytelling in the classroom as a means of expression for ELL students. For students from families like the ones in "My Mother Never Read", this form of expression might feel more authentic. I think it's much harder to write in another language than it is to speak it. Oral storytelling could provide our ELL students with the opportunity to show their understanding of content/subject matter more easily than writing a paper. As for getting to know your students, I think this is an important first step. With ELL students I also think body language and tone are important to consider. I've seen teachers in a school setting talk about their ELL students in a negative way in front of them. Just because they don't speak your language fluently doesn't mean that they won't pick up on your tone and body language.
Priscilla, I feel like there's so much I could say in response to all the great questions you raised, but I don't really want to pull an Austin so I'll keep it short!
ReplyDeleteI really liked the example in the Haneda article about the multilingual books. I think that is an awesome way to incorporate children's L1 language skills into the classroom. Instead of requiring students to write a monolingual English story, we could allow them to write a bilingual story. Haneda mentioned that some of the books were displayed in the classroom. This is a great way to give legitimacy to languages other than English. Too many times teachers forbid their students from speaking or using any language other than English. This is harmful because it teaches kids that the language they hear at home, the language their parents speak is not good enough for school. It's not good enough for educated people to use. There is no harm in using a few words of another language with friends or to express something that doesn't translate into English.
I'm learning in my Sociolinguistics class right now about a concept in language learning called 'translanguaging,' which is when multilingual speakers strategically integrate multiple languages into their communication for specific purposes. Instead of seeing use of another language as an English-language deficit, translanguaging sees it as a strength and something that can be built on.
Priscilla, I know too well the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the work that lies ahead. Even with the best of intentions and all the preparation possible, I know that there will be times I will fall short of what I need to accomplish. However, those are opportunities to learn and improve. This is all part of the pep talk I give to myself when I feel daunted by all that is expected of us. While getting to know the students is a critical component of CRT of which we are all aware, it is not enough to overcome barriers between literacy practices at home and at school. We must also get to know the families as well, beyond superficial relationships which are typical of parent/teacher relationships in my experience. How can we incorporate a households’ funds of knowledge if we know nothing about what life is like at home for our students. Inviting families into the classroom and encouraging their participation is a fairly obvious next step but presents a few challenges. Language barriers prevent parents and teachers from communicating clearly without help from a translator, which often by default becomes a student. Having students translate, especially elementary aged students is not ideal. First, it is unfair to the student as it is a lot to ask of them. Furthermore, they may not have the verbal skills to accurately translate what is meant to be conveyed. It is fine and well to invite parents into the classroom to share what they know. Especially as parental involvement increases student productivity (Lopez, 2001). However, if I cannot understand what is being said/shared by parents, how can I incorporate it into a lesson? How can I further draw on that knowledge? We would need another bilingual adult to act as translator/cultural mediator. This seems like an unusual luxury to expect from schools with limited resources. I work at a catholic school with mostly Spanish speaking students and there is no translator. The school secretary works a the de facto translator but she has other responsibilities and cannot be available as needed. I agree with the positions presented in all three articles, that storytelling is a valuable and rich literacy practice. I plan to welcome narratives and storytelling activities in my classroom by providing opportunities for students to share their experiences. I want to draw on their family’s experiences too but I am not sure how to do that at this point with parents that speak Spanish primarily. Most of the parents at the school I work at speak Spanish only but take English classes at the school in the evening. Perhaps if I worked as a teacher in a school that offered these classes to parents I could volunteer to help out to increase my knowledge of Spanish, their communities and build community.
ReplyDeleteFirst things first, the granny meme ...… hilarious!
ReplyDeleteAnyways, great post, Priscilla! I am definitely going to pull an Austin here, so bear with me... We talked about it in our last class, how a student isn’t necessarily struggling, but rather the teacher has not yet found the student’s niche to engage that student and tap into his/her potential for success. Your quote from the Haneda reading exemplifies this notion that Older students (especially struggling readers/writers) use literacy outside of school in a variety of ways for personal means, by journaling, advertising, or through social media, to "construct desirable identities for themselves...and improve their English" while utilizing their 1st languages (p. 340). How we define struggling, or rather how it becomes defined within the school, can and does stifle students’ literacy development. Schools focus or place so much value on “basic reading and writing instruction”, the fundamentals, that students “are not given opportunities either to engage with the substantive content of the subject-based curriculum or to use language throughout fully to explore [their] own ideas.” When the concept and idea of literacy is so narrowly focused/defined, there becomes a disconnect between in-school and out-of-school literacy. Students don’t fit the school definition, so they are labeled and tracked, and are placed in remedial classes focusing solely on basics/fundamentals that reading and writing becomes so mechanical that the students’ notion of reading and writing for school and for self becomes disconnected. This can minimalize the value of the students’ home life, family, culture, and self, which can result in a “feeling of (being) discriminated against at school,” (p.340). So, what is viewed as struggling, could be rather a misinterpretation due to the disconnect, as students are engaging actively in literacy outside of school, but these modes are not valued within the school. “Given that some students regard reading and writing for self and for school as completely unrelated activities, a question remains as to how teachers might tap into students’ literacy competencies that are not publicly visible in school,” (p. 340). “Is it as easy as getting to know them?” It may not be as easy as just simply getting to know our students, families, and communities, but it is certainly the essential first step in the process!
Your quote you pulled from the Haneda article about recognizing that ELL "children's out-of-school literary practices are mediated not only by parents but also by siblings and...extended family", usually through collaborative literacy activities, like story-telling. (Haneda, p. 338), was one I highlighted and made a note about my mom’s experiences. My mom used to tell me and my brothers about ELL students who, by the standards were labeled as struggling or “low-achieving” … who other teachers would warn her or tell her how far behind these students coming to her class were, and she would be so frustrated when she was telling us. So many of the students and their experiences from the Haneda article reminded me of the students from my mom’s classes she would tell us about. She told us about a 3rd grade student who was teaching his parents and his younger brother (who was in Kindergarten) English. She told us about another 3rd grade student she had in class who would fill out paperwork (including her registration paperwork for school), pay bills, act as a translator, and a variety of other things for her parents, neither of whom spoke English, however, even in being capable of all of that … the school had tracked her and labeled her as low-achieving/struggling from the moment she enter the school – similar to the cases of Nan and Almond in the reading. Both of these students enter my mom’s class with a recommendation from their previous teachers for remediation … they were considered to be struggling and on remedial literacy track. These are only a couple of the numerous similar instances. Haneda poses the question, “Why do some children who lead remarkable active literate lives outside school tend to be disenfranchised when it comes to school literacy practices?” (p. 340). Just like the students from my mom’s class and the students from the article, recognizing, valuing, and building off of what the student can do, valuing the students' culture, family, and community, and utilizing culturally and personally relevant materials and modes of literacy would certainly be far more effective and impactful to the students' literacy development in school than the traditional standard operating procedures!
ReplyDeletePriscilla, you bring up some really great points! Trying to feel like I'm going to do adequately enough as the teacher in the classroom once I get there is very overwhelming! Because I do not speak Spanish either, this has been something that has been eating at the back of my mind. How exactly am I going to teach students if I have a hard time communicating with them? Haneda's article honestly brought up a lot of great examples of ways in which we can recognize the other approaches to literacy, and your video was an awesome example too! It's very telling of the success of the projects when you can hear it in the students voices when they are explaining the task, and how excited and care about the assignment. I think the answer to your question "Is it just as easy as getting to know our students", is two fold, both yes and no. Yes because we will have to work and learn to evolve our classrooms to the children that enter it over time, and we will do that by getting to know them and not assuming we might know something about them in the first week. And no, it isn't easy, because this will take time to develop and to build the environment where students are welcome to express their ideas and their opinions freely. While I don't think this will necessarily be easy at first, I think once we find our own way through our own experiences, this won't seem as impossible over time. Haneda mentions that teachers do two things; first, "it is vitally important that teachers value and build on students' existing home and community literacy practices in promoting literary competency at school", by means of boundary crossing (pg. 343). And secondly, that teachers "reflect on what it means to help students become literate" (pg.343). I think all of this means that we just need to look for ways that students bring learning into the classroom that might not be the "traditional" way of learning and try to get students to tap into what they know as well.
ReplyDeletePriscilla, I loved that you are so open with how you are struggling with reaching ELL students because I’m sure all of us have felt the same at one point throughout the last two semesters! I remember last semester, my kindergartener spoke Spanish as her first language and was still learning English through her class time. I found it was difficult to engage at times because we had a small language barrier but ultimately I was able to learn about her interests and guide my lessons with that information. As Haneda explains, it was critical for me to understand the student’s outside interests and literary practices in order to create a lesson that is both culturally relevant and responsive to the students academic success. In response to your question, is it as easy as getting to know them? I definitely don’t think it is! I think the most critical thing you can do to be culturally responsive to ELL students is putting yourself into their community and incorporating their community into your lessons. I also love the idea of incorporating oral story-telling into lesson plans as I’ve seen this in my own experience. I worked in a class that would allow each student time to tell stories of their families, communities, and cultures while educating other students on different backgrounds. What are some ways you would incorporate oral story-telling into your classroom?
ReplyDeletePriscilla, thank you for sharing your personal struggles and questions you've been experiencing this semester. I think it's important for us to recognize these and honor those feelings and it shows how much you care by constantly questioning and wanting to do what's best for your students. I really liked that you brought up the quote about how to "develop an understanding of students' personal and community literacy resources and...incorporate them into classroom practices"? (Haneda, p. 343). I think this go back to the idea that if we take our time to communicate with our students families, allow for them to have space in class to discuss their culture, and show up in their communities in a real way we can begin to understand their experiences with literature especially if its not traditional. Spending time investing in who your students are is the best way to know what to incorporate in your classroom to help them thrive. It actually makes a lot of sense to me that the sharing of oral storytelling is beneficial to students enjoyment of reading when traditional reading isn't present. These stories tend to have a personal or cultural connection to the students and their families and tend to be rich in detail. These are all important facets of becoming invested in reading, and being able to connect to your "text" is a great way to start. I think when you realize how stories can make you feel and think it would create a desire in students to want to look for more of that, and they can look for more stories in actual books.
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