Assignment B #4

“Aria” by Rodriguez is a powerful story about a Spanish speaking family that in learning to speak English lose much about themselves.  When the narrator, Ricardo, was in school he did not speak much because he “considered Spanish to be a private language.”  This caused his teachers to get frustrated with him as he would not speak in class and caused them to demand that his family speak more English at home.  According to Ricardo, what this lead to was: “as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Sentences needed to be spoken slowly when a child addressed his mother or father.”  This lead to Ricardo having a distant relationship with his parents and a disconnection with his happy childhood.  This likely would not have happened had Ricardo’s teachers been familiar with the work of Collier.  In “Teaching Multilingual Children” Collier offers seven guidelines to teaching English learners.  One of their main arguments is that a teacher should not “teach a language in any way that seeks to eliminate the first language;” unfortunately, this is exactly what happened with Ricardo.  Collier explains that in affirming the student by using their first language when they need to, what translanguaging,  that the student can actually learn English quicker; this is because the teacher can make comparisons between “grammatical patterns, pronunciation differences, vocabulary items, varying social contexts, and so on.”  We were able to see the power of translanguaging in Episode three of Teaching Bilinguals (even if you’re not one).  Here, teacher Elyn Ballantyne-Berry teaches ESL students mainly from Asian heritages.  To empower them and help them learn English, she uses a graphic novel that has English words but Asian characters they are familiar with.  When these students go to write about the novel, they are able to translanguage and write in English what they can and their native language for everything else.

This is a strategy I have used in my classroom, and it has been very successful; I documented my efforts with one emergent bilingual student last semester when I took a TESL course as part of my final tutoring project.  By incorporating the student’s interests into their learning, empowering them with translanguaging, and stressing the importance of their home culture and heritage their English language development was more accelerated than it ever had been! More importantly, the student felt like I was not trying to get them to stop speaking Spanish in order to speak English.  They understood that both languages were important for different reasons and that English was never meant to replace their Spanish.  Throughout our time together worked on practicing my Spanish so that they could see this was a two way street and that I too was hitting some speed bumps in learning that language!