reading response

reading response

by Jianxin Sun -
Number of replies: 2

The elements of a school environment that promote school success for emergent bilingual and other linguistic minorities is, first and foremost, a welcoming environment that honors each student's language assets and that celebrates multilingualism, just as the case study of KAPPA International has shown. As sort of a by-product of the welcoming environment, the curriculum that really tailored towards their needs is also important. But I imagine such curriculum would be hard to realize in those schools with a relatively low percentage of emergent bilingual and other linguistic minorities. Leveraging students' own resources is also a successful practice at KAPPA International. They partnered students speaking the same language and build up a mentorship or buddy system to make students support each other. This approach disrupts traditional teacher-student hierarchies and positions students as agents of their own and others' learning. One of the factors that fail emergent bilingual and other linguistic minorities is inherited from the accountability system where teachers are "forced" to teach to tests. Under such government interventions, it is hard for teachers to not adopt a deficit view on their students. The denial of students enrolling in advanced classes is another element that fails emergent bilingual and other linguistic minorities. Most of the time, the schools deny their enrollment solely because of their "lack of" English proficiency and disregard their literacy skills, which hinders their success.

Translanguaging pedagogy in a bilingual classroom (where all students speaks the same language other than English) can be the teacher incorporating the other language into their teaching. Or, it is also fairly possible to just find a teacher that also speaks that language to conduct teaching. This scenario is somewhat like my experience in high school where all of us students speak Mandarin and our teachers teach in Mandarin and English, if they can speak Mandarin. Translanguaging pedagogy in a multilingual classroom might be more complicated, as I did not have any idea how this could work out before this week. However, the video series really informed me of how that could be like and challenged my assumption of language (or named language such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, ect.) is the only way to communicate. In the video series, many educators have demonstrated to us how we can make it happen if we are truly dedicated to. Some of them  Also, As García reminds us, language is not the only way to communicate. Utilizing multimodal ways of communication could also be a resolution.

In reply to Jianxin Sun

Re: reading response

by Prerna Karmacharya -
I agree that it is interesting to think about the differences between schools with a large emergent bilingual population, and schools with a small emergent bilingual population. It is wonderful that your high school has many teachers who know Mandarin! At the FACTS classroom I go to for fieldwork, there are students who speak Mandarin, Indonesian, and Spanish. However, the teacher only knows a little bit of Spanish, and does not know any Mandarin or Indonesian. It is interesting to see how she uses technological resources to mitigate this language barrier, and form strong connections with her students. Seeing from these readings, I agree that a student's experience can be vastly different depending on the linguistic context of their peers and educators. I also imagine that it is easier to find educators in the who know certain languages, and harder to find educators who know others. A bilingual context is probably very different than a monolingual one.
In reply to Jianxin Sun

Re: reading response

by Siyi Ding -
Hi Allen! You brought up how translanguaging feels more intuitive in bilingual classrooms but more complex in multilingual ones. Based on the video series, I'm curious about what specific strategies do you think are most realistic for a multilingual classroom where no single home language dominates?