As a future teacher, this class has served great value to me. Thus far it has given me the opportunity to explore my boundaries of knowledge when it comes to language as well as it proved to me the importance of bilingual education. As someone who never heard different languages as a child outside of mandatory french class, the concept is very new to me. The first time I had ever heard a teacher engage students in learning new languages was a few weeks ago. She sat her grade 3’s down on the carpet and they each went around and said “hello” in a language of their choice. This was a rotation they did every single morning and they change the word every week. It was a beautiful experience seeing all of these children excited about learning languages and I believe it stood out to me now because of the awareness this class is providing me with.
My theory is that to create true learning that will be remember and carried on you have to first spark their interest. This makes learning and sharing not only exciting but effective because it gives them things to be proud of like being able to use many different languages!
The WordArt earth I have displayed to the right is the word “Water” in 15+ languages. Unfortunately the platform did not honour all writing systems that were need to translate it in more languages but I think this serves as a good example of something to hang in a classroom. This is just one it to provoke interest in the adolescent minds and make them curious to know more or feel free to express themselves in their home language.
Another interesting take on integrating language into a classroom was this video:
Why is learning languages that are not your first language important?
My biggest take away point from this is Durk Gorter comment “students need to develop fluency in different languages to gain sensitivity to different cultures.”. This is an essential part of learning for adolescents because young minds is where the most growth is created. Therefor, if we as teachers are able to educate students early they have the opportunity to progress into multilingual thinkers.
Resources For teachers:
These are tools that I found in my learning process through September. I plan to save these for the future to make teaching and learning about languages fun!
- ScribJab– Digital bilingual story making website that allows kids to explore their creativity.
- Dual Language Project– A perfect activity for the early years classrooms. If given the opportunity to work with grade one students, this is something I would be thrilled to do with my class.
- Can Do Scale– Is a self assessment tool used to track your language learning progress. I believe this can be a helpful tool for teachers who are working to achieve many languages in the room because it “describes what a language learner ‘can do’, not what the learner ‘cannot’ do.” Which is an important boundary when teaching adolescent minds.
- History of English Writing– This video is a good reference point for teachers when introducing the topic of different writing systems and languages. It taught me that English is complex, it came from many places and has developed substantially since it first came to be.
- The “The world in our classroom activity” in the textbook Language and Learning in Multilingual Classrooms by Dr. Elizabeth Coelho is an excellent activity to give students and opportunity to shared their family roots with their peers in a safe space. If hung on a wall, it would be a perfect daily reminder that language is everywhere around the world and comes in many different forms (Section 3)
Lastly the article “How Can Teachers Maximize Engagement among Multilingual Students?” by Dr. Jim Cummins discussed 7 intriguing ways to implement multilingualism into the classroom. I found this very useful and has been an article i’ve added to my collection of resources for my future. An example of one of the methods is “School library collections have multilingual books for both students and parents to read at school and at home. School policies can ensure that libraries maintain a diverse and well-stocked selection.”(Cummins, 2019). I love this exmaple because books to me are very important, in fact as only a second year student I have already begun collecting books for my very own in classroom libray for students and I will now be on the hunt for multilingual ones too! This is exciting to me because before this class it probably would have been a book I put back on the shelf and thought was silly but now, I am thrilled to see what I can find. Literacy is important and reading an easy way to start teaching languages.
Overall, I had not thought of language as anymore than what comes from ones mouth or what is written on paper, but I now understand that language equals community and the more we learn the more we will be able to pass on, in hopes that children will understand its importance much earlier than I did. I am thrilled to see what else this class has to offer!