Accelerating Second Language and Literacy Development

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Transcript Accelerating Second Language and Literacy Development

Teacher and Student Identity Intersections in International School Contexts

Jim Cummins The University of Toronto

ECIS ESLMT Conference, Dusseldorf, March 4, 2011

Overview Pedagogies of Choice

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Teachers, individually and collectively, are never powerless – teachers have the power of choice. There are always choices in how we orchestrate interactions with our students and shape the interpersonal space within the classroom.

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By articulating and acting on the choices we have available, we can create contexts of empowerment for both us and our students.

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Mary Ashworth

Closing Keynote at Ontario TESL Conference Autumn 1978

Many students come to school either already bilingual in their home language and English or in the process of becoming bilingual. However, 12 years later, a large proportion of these students leave school essentially monolingual in English.  The whole point of education is to make students more than they were when they entered school. But when the messages bilingual children receive in school cause them to replace their L1 with English, education has made them less than they were. The very essence of the term education -- the nurturing of students’ abilities and talents—was negated by the education they received in Canadian schools.  Startling and disturbing insight -- Mary was talking about the Canadian educational system which, at that that time, was busy wrapping itself in the cloak of multiculturalism. The idea that Canadian schools and educators could be agents in the reduction of students’ potential and the constriction of possibilities—whether inadvertently or intentionally—was provocative.  However, Mary’s point was that, as educators, we have the power to challenge these discriminatory structures and discourses and expand rather than constrict students’ identity options

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The Power of Choice

Regardless of institutional constraints, educators have individual and collective choices in how we interact with students, in how we engage them cognitively, in how we activate their prior knowledge, in how we use technology to amplify imagination, in how we involve parents in their children’s education, and in what we communicate to students regarding home language and culture.

Bilingual Instructional Strategies: A Decade of Evolution

Stories are the most important things in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.

Philip Pullman

http://schools.peelschools.org/1363/pages/dual.aspx

The Collaborative Creation of Power in One Classroom

 Lisa Leoni: Year 1 – Grade 7/8 mainstream class; Year 2 – Grades 4-6 ESL;  Large Muslim student population from Pakistan;  Lisa explored implementation of bilingual instructional strategies as a way of enabling literacy engagement from a very early stage of students’ learning of English. In a “normal” classroom, it would be several years before newcomer students could engage in extended creative writing (in English).

Identity Negotiation in the Classroom

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where his knowledge was encoded and I It was also a way for me to gain insight

Tomer’s Identity Text

I think using your first language don’t understand something after you’ve just come here

it is like beginning as a baby.

to learn it all from the and you can do it in your You don’t know English and you need beginning; but if you already have it in another language then it is easier, you can translate it, language too, then it is easier to understand the second language. The first time I couldn’t understand what she [Lisa] was saying except the word Hebrew, but I think it’s very smart that she said for us to do it in our language because

we can’t just sit on our hands doing nothing.

Kanta’s Perspective

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And how it helped me was when I came here in grade 4 the teachers I was given a pack of crayons and a coloring with it. And after I felt so world than just coloring and I felt important also. So when we started

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Ontario TESL conference] I am you that I am something.

Teaching for Cross-Language Transfer: Madiha’s Perspective

I think it helps my learning to be able to write in both languages because if I’m writing English and Ms. Leoni says you can write Urdu too it helps me think of what the word means because I always think in Urdu. That helps me write better in English. When I came here I didn’t know any English, I always speak Urdu to my friends. Other teachers they said to me “Speak English, speak English” but Ms. Leoni didn’t say anything when she heard me speak Urdu and I liked this because if I don’t know English, what can I do? It helps me a lot to be able to speak Urdu and English.

Identity Texts: a tool for cognitive engagement and identity investment

 Identity texts refer to artifacts that students produce. Students take ownership of these artifacts as a result of having invested their identities in them.  Once produced, these texts (written, spoken, visual, musical, or combinations in multimodal form) hold a mirror up to the student in which his or her identity is reflected back in a positive light.

 Students invest their identities in these texts which then become ambassadors of students’ identities. When students share identity texts with multiple audiences (peers, teachers, parents, grandparents, sister classes, the media, etc.) they are likely to receive positive feedback and affirmation of self in interaction with these audiences.

What’s the Deep Structure Underlying this Kind of Instructional Practice? What Are the Implications for School Language Policy?

 Instruction aims explicitly to promote cognitive/literacy engagement and identity investment on the part of students.

 Instruction constructs an image of the student as intelligent, imaginative, and linguistically talented. Lack of English does not imply  Instruction acknowledges and builds on the cultural and linguistic capital (prior knowledge) of students and communities. if students’ prior knowledge is encoded in L1, then L1 should be encouraged as a cognitive tool;  Knowledge and skills transfer across languages – teachers should encourage and enable that transfer rather than restricting it. Bilingual instructional strategies represent an important complement to monolingual instructional strategies

The Starting Point for Developing School Language Policy: What Image of the Student Are We Sketching in Our Instruction?

(What Image of Our Own Individual and Collective Identities as Educators Are We Sketching in Our Instruction)

Capable of becoming bilingual and biliterate?

Capable of higher-order thinking and intellectual accomplishments?

Capable of creative and imaginative thinking?

Capable of creating literature and art?

Capable of generating new knowledge?

Capable of thinking about and finding solutions to social issues?

Nested Pedagogical Orientations

Nested Pedagogical Orientations

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Transmission-oriented pedagogy is represented in the inner circle with the narrowest focus. The goal is to transmit information and skills articulated in the curriculum directly to students.

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Social constructivist pedagogy, occupying the middle pedagogical space, incorporates the curriculum focus of transmitting information and skills but broadens it to include the development among students of higher-order thinking abilities based on teachers and students co constructing knowledge and understanding.

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Finally, transformative approaches to pedagogy broaden the focus still further by emphasizing the relevance not only of transmitting the curriculum and constructing knowledge but also of enabling students to gain insight into how knowledge intersects with social realities and power relations. The goal is to promote critical literacy among students (e.g., Sunny Man Chu Lau and Eithne Gallagher presentations)

Understanding Literacy Development in Multilingual School Contexts Literacy Achievement

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Print Access/Literacy Engagement

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Scaffold Meaning (input and output)

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Activate prior knowledge/Build background knowledge

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Affirm identity

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Extend language

Literacy Engagement

What Is It?

   Amount and range of reading and writing; Use of effective strategies for deep understanding of text; Positive affect and identity investment in reading and writing; Drawing on both the 1998 NAEP data from the United States and the results of the PISA study of reading achievement among 15-year olds in international contexts, Guthrie (2004, p. 5) notes that students “…whose family background was characterized by low income and low education, but who were highly engaged readers, substantially outscored students who came from backgrounds with higher education and higher income, but who themselves were less engaged readers. Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”

Empirical Support for the Role of Engaged Reading

Drawing on both the 1998 NAEP data from the United States and the results of the PISA study of reading achievement in international contexts, Guthrie (2004, p. 5) notes that students “…whose family background was characterized by low income and low education, but who were highly engaged readers, substantially outscored students who came from backgrounds with higher education and higher income, but who themselves were less engaged readers. Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”

Access to Print

results in

Higher Reading Achievement

“Reports of studies that do use rigorous research designs do show that increasing children’s access to print material generally does improve children’s outcomes. … Increasing children’s access to print material appears to produce more positive attitudes toward reading, increases the amount of reading that children do, increases children’s emergent literacy skills, and improves children’s reading achievement” (Lindsay, 2010).

The Deeper Roots of Underachievement

Isidro Lucas (1981): Study of Puerto Rican drop-out students in Chicago:

“All my dropout respondents spoke good understandable English.They hadn’t learned math, or social sciences, or natural sciences, unfortunately. But they had learned English…No dropout mentioned lack of English as the reason for quitting. As it evolved through questionnaires and interviews, theirs was a more subtle story—of alienation, of not belonging, of being ‘push-outs’… To my surprise, dropouts expressed more confidence in their ability to speak English than did the stay-ins (seniors in high school). For their part, stay-ins showed more confidence in their Spanish than did dropouts…I had to conclude that identity, expressed in one’s confidence and acceptance of the native culture was more a determinant of school stay-in power than the mere acquisition of the coding-decoding skills involved in a different language, English”. (p. 19)

Sociological Factors

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Power relations in the broader society play a crucial role in students’ achievement in school Students who experience academic failure predominantly come from social groups who occupy much lower status in the wider society. In some cases (e.g., indigenous groups, Hispanics in the U.S.), identities (culture, language, religion, etc.) have been devalued in the wider society over many generations.

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Effective education challenges coercive power relations in the broader society by affirming students’ identities at school.

What Do We Mean by “Empowerment?”

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Coercive Relations of Power = exercise of power by a dominant individual, group, or country to the detriment of a subordinated individual, group, or country (power over);

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Collaborative Relations of Power = collaborative relations of power operate on the assumption that power is not a fixed pre-determined quantity but rather can be generated in interpersonal and intergroup relations. Participants in the relationship are empowered through their collaboration such that each is more affirmed in her or his identity and has a greater sense of efficacy to create change in his or her life or social situation (power with);

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Empowerment = the collaborative creation of power

Planning Instructional Change within Schools: Articulating Choices and Taking Collective Action Instructional Options Current Realities Where Are We?

Vision for the Future Where Do We Want To Be?

Getting it Done How Do We Get There?

Content

How do we adapt curriculum materials to link with students’ prior knowledge and cultural background (e.g. purchase dual language books) and also to promote critical thinking about texts and issues (e.g. whose perspectives are represented in a text)?

Cognition

How can we modify instruction to evoke higher levels of literacy engagement and critical thinking?

Tools

How can we use tools such as computers, digital cameras, camcorders, web pages, etc?

Assessment

How can we complement mandated standardized assessments in order to present to students, parents, and administrators a more valid account of student progress? (e.g. a role for portfolio assessment?)

Language/Culture

What messages are we giving students and parents about home language and culture? How can we enable students to use their L1 as a powerful tool for learning? Can we increase students’ identity investment by means of bilingual instructional strategies (teaching for transfer)?

Parental Involvement

How can we engage parents as co-educators in such a way that their linguistic and cultural expertise is harnessed as fuel for their children’s academic progress?