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Teaching for Transfer in Bilingual Education: Promoting Language Awareness and Literacy Engagement through Identity Texts
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Ponencia D.James Cummins (Catedrático de Investigación del Departamento de Currículo, Enseñanza y Aprendizaje en el Instituto de Estudios de la Educación en Ontario (OISE), Universidad de Toronto, Canadá): "Teaching for Transfer in Bilingual Education: Promoting Language Awareness and Literacy Engagement through Identity Texts" celebrada en el I Congreso Internacional sobre Bilingüismo en Centros Educativos el 16 de junio de 2010 dirigido a profesores de primaria, secundaria y universidades, a investigadores y responsables políticos interesados en la educación bilingüe y en metodología AICOLE (Aprendizaje Integrado de Contenidos y Lengua)
I want to thank Andrea for all she has done tonight.
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I want to thank all the directors,
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every department working on this project,
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whatever it was to request FHWA is getting done.
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We call on everybody to call on us in the right time
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so we can お前たちが出る日本語…
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so we can get all the FHWA back to our countries
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once and for all,
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and I want to thank you all.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Gracias. Thank you.
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It's also a tremendous honor for me to be here,
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and I would like to just personally thank
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the regional ministry
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and the organizers of the conference
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generally for the opportunity to be here.
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I've learned an enormous amount in the last few days,
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and I'm just amazed at the degree of hospitality,
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warmth, generosity that has characterized
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everybody in the conference,
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so thank you for the opportunity to be here.
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What I'm going to try and do is to react
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to some of the things that I've heard
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and some of the things I haven't heard
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in the conference today,
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but first I'd like to give you a sense
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of where I'm coming from,
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what's my engagement with these issues,
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what's my experience,
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so that you can better interpret the things I'm going to say,
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so I'm going to first of all try and locate myself
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in relation to the issues,
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and then, as I said, talk about things that I've heard
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that I think are important to reinforce,
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and then some things that might be worth thinking about
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that I haven't heard discussed very actively
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or widely in the sessions that I've been able to attend,
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and the goal of all of this is not obviously to criticize,
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it's to highlight the issue of how can we make CLIL
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even more effective than it already is,
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and I bring to this an engagement
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with the French immersion programs in Canada
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as well as bilingual programs in the United States
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and elsewhere,
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and I have several hats to wear in that respect.
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I've got the hat of a researcher who's done research
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on various kinds of bilingual programs
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in different parts of the world,
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but also as a parent whose kids have gone through
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a French immersion program,
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and I've experienced the pleasures and frustrations
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of seeing their experience
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and thinking about what it might be,
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how it could be improved in that context.
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But first of all, going back to the issue
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of locating myself in this situation.
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As probably some of you know,
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and probably others can tell from the deviant phonemes
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that are bouncing off the walls,
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my background is not originally Canadian.
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I grew up in Dublin in Ireland,
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and my first experiences of language learning
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and bilingualism came in Ireland.
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As probably most of you know,
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Ireland is two official languages,
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English, which everybody speaks,
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and Irish, which is an endangered language,
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it's the historical language,
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but was in a very threatened state
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at the beginning of the Irish Free State back in the 1920s.
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The government tried to revive the language
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through various language planning efforts,
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one of which involved education.
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The language was a compulsory subject in schools,
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and also there were a variety
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of bilingual programs implemented.
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These were called Gaelscóil in it,
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Irish-speaking schools, or Irish immersion schools,
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and I had the experience
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of both of these programs growing up.
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In the infant schools,
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Irish was taught just as a subject
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for probably 20 minutes, half an hour a day.
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I don't remember that far back.
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But when I was in the equivalent of grade one, age seven,
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my parents sent me to a Gaelscóil, to an all-Irish school.
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They sent me there not because they were fervent advocates
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for the revival of Irish.
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It just happened to be the school nearest
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the one that my older brother was going to,
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so we could go in on the bus together.
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So, you know, there was nothing very profound about it,
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and I assume I failed the test
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to get into that other school,
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so I had to wait another year or so.
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But I can remember initially not understanding
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much that was going on,
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but by the end of that school year,
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by April or May, I can remember going home on the bus
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with friends and speaking Irish with them.
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And so it was an example of what a colleague of mine
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in Toronto, Meryl Swain,
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has called bilingualism without tears.
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The tears started the following year
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when I went up the road to the more typical school,
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which taught through English,
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with Irish just taught as a subject.
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It was taught for 45 minutes a day,
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and every second of those 45 minutes dragged,
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because they presumably had done a lot of research
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on how to teach languages,
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but got it wrong somehow,
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because they managed to shove every method
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that has been proven since time immemorial
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to fail in teaching languages into those 45 minutes.
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They taught vocabulary out of context.
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We learned lists of words.
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We never got to a stage
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where we could do anything with the language.
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It was just a, we learned the skeleton of the language,
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and not something that was living.
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We'd write little assignments,
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and they'd come back not with any comments on the ideas,
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but all those grammatical mistakes marked up in red.
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The best description that I've heard
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of what those classes were like
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was that they were like grammar and syntax crisis centers,
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where the focus was just on the skeleton of the language,
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and not surprisingly,
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I ended up a lot less fluent at age 18
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than I was at age eight,
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despite a lot of pain and suffering in between.
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I did well on exams,
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and so that distinction
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between conversational fluency in a language
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and being able to do the academic work in the language
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is one that I've come back to in my professional life.
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I did my initial degree in Dublin,
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and then I went to Canada to do graduate work,
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and when I got to Canada,
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I was really surprised to find
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that there was a program in place
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called French Immersion Programs
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that looked very much like
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what I had experienced as a child in Ireland,
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in the Gaelskull.
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The target language was used
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for most of the instructional time in the primary years,
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and then it became a bilingual program,
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50-50 by about grade four or five,
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and I realized that the Canadians
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thought that they had discovered immersion.
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Everybody was very proud of this.
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Everybody was very excited.
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In actual fact,
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immersion programs of various kinds
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have been in operation in many countries of the world.
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They weren't necessarily called that,
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but what the Canadians did do
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was carry out an enormous amount of research
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on these programs,
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and I ended up doing my own research
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in a French-English bilingual,
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or what would, in the United States right now,
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be called a dual-language program,
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out in Edmonton,
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where I did my graduate program.
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Those of you who know where Edmonton is
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will know that it's most northerly
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of the big Canadian cities,
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and I spent five frozen years of my life there
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before escaping back to Ireland
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and do some more research in Gaelskull,
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and then coming back to Canada.
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So when I look at the research in these issues,
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my own experience is very much confirmatory
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of that research.
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Teaching second languages as subjects,
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where the focus is on the rules of the language,
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just on the vocabulary,
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tends to provide very disappointing results,
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and we see that in the Canadian context
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when French is taught as a subject.
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We've heard it here at the conference today
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about the dissatisfaction or disappointing results
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that come when English is taught just as a subject.
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Students can learn the language for five, six, seven years,
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and still not be able to carry on a conversation,
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and that's certainly the case in the Canadian context
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with what's called core French teaching.
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And what the immersion program showed
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was that you can get much better results
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when you use the language as a medium of instruction.
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So just to give an overview of the issues
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that I want to touch on in terms of what I heard
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that I want to reinforce,
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I think we need to come back to issues of definitions.
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We've heard the French immersion programs
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being talked about, Fred Genesee focused on them.
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We've heard content-based programs being talked about.
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We've obviously talked about CLIL,
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bilingual education is a term that's been thrown around.
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I think it would be useful just to clarify
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how all of these terms link together,
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so I'll mention some issues in relation to that.
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We've heard talk about the positive effects
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of bilingualism on children's development.
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Again, more and more research is pointing in that direction.
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We've heard talk, Fred used the visual metaphor
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of the iceberg that I suggested at one point
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about interdependence or transfer across languages.
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I think we can revisit what the pedagogical implications
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of that are.
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We've heard about the centrality of scaffolding meaning,
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and also the importance of integrating new concepts
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and skills with what we already know,
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the importance of prior knowledge.
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So these are all things that I'll touch on very briefly,
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and just reinforce the centrality of all of these issues.
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But there are also some things that I didn't hear much of
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about in the discussions.
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One of them is that we're not in a bilingual context
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in most urban centers around the world,
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we're in a multilingual, a plurilingual context.
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I think we need to take account of what are the implications
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of population mobility, of increasing multilingual realities
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in our urban centers.
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In cities like Toronto and Vancouver,
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more than half the students in the school system
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come from home backgrounds other than English.
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And so that has implications if we have students
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from these backgrounds in our CLIL programs,
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or immersion or bilingual programs.
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What does that mean?
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What's the implication of having additional languages
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in those programs?
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Should we just ignore them and go on with business as usual?
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Or are there some opportunities that that might present?
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Another issue that I think is important to revisit
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is what do we mean by English?
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What is language proficiency?
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What are we talking about
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when we talk about teaching English?
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And obviously, a lot of work has been done
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in the European context over the last few years
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with the Common European Framework of Reference
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for language teaching and language learning.
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But I think there are issues specifically
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in relation to English that provide
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some important opportunities for teaching the language
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when we understand the nature of the language.
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Literacy engagement is a term that I haven't heard.
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And obviously, it's in the title of my talk.
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There's a lot of research out there
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from both first and second language contexts
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that the best predictor of student achievement
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is the amount of literacy engagement
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that students are involved in.
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It's a stronger predictor than socioeconomic status.
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And so when we look, one of the critiques
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I would make of the French immersion programs,
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one of the disappointments, I think,
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is that there hasn't been the kind of focus
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on getting students engaged extensively with reading,
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reading extensively in the target language.
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And this becomes particularly an issue
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when we extend print beyond just the hard copy print
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into electronic media.
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How can we get students harvesting the language
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from what they're reading?
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How can we motivate them to read in a second language
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when it's much easier to read in the first language?
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I think if we can do that, the rewards will be tremendous.
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And so I want to talk a little bit about
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what that might mean and how we can do it.
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I haven't heard much about identity issues.
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I'm going to suggest that identity issues
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are absolutely central to planning
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for any kind of instruction,
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but particularly instruction in multilingual contexts.
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And one of the reasons, one of the hypotheses
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that I would suggest in relation to why
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typical second language programs
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where the language is taught as a subject
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have not been more successful
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is that students have never,
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many students never get beyond a threshold level
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where they can do something useful,
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something meaningful with the language.
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If they're always in a passive role,
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the language never becomes something that they own,
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that they can do things with, that they can be proud of.
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And I think if we understand the role
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of identity investment in learning,
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and particularly second language learning,
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it opens up pedagogical possibilities
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that I'll try and talk about.
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And then the final issue that I want to
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talk a little bit about is
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the role of students' first language.
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In the way French immersion programs in Canada
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were originally conceptualized,
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the goal was to keep the two languages apart.
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The first language was constructed almost as the enemy.
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And there was a lot of focus on ensuring
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that teachers stayed in the target language,
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teachers spoke only French.
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There was initially a goal for the teacher,
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or for the students not even to know
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that the teacher understood English.
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And so what I've called the two solitudes assumption
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has dominated French immersion programs in Canada.
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And it's fairly common in other kinds of programs too.
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I think there's obviously an important role
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for creating a space for the target language
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within the school, an extensive space,
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because that's often the only place
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that students get access to it.
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But I think there are costs also.
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And when we look at what we're potentially losing out on,
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because of the two solitudes assumption,
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I think it's worth revisiting, rethinking
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how we can teach for transfer,
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build on students' prior experience in their first language,
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and enable students to use their first language
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as a tool for learning.
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So these are the issues that I want to focus on.
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Because of time, I'm gonna go through them fairly quickly.
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But the conclusions that I want to make,
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just in case I don't get to them at the end,
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is that I think we can improve the outcomes
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of CLIL programs, bilingual programs, immersion programs,
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all of the above, by doing a number of things.
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First of all, if we understand the nature
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of the English language and its links to Spanish.
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Many people don't see English as a romance language.
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They see it as a Germanic language.
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It's not like the languages of Southern Europe,
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which we see as romance languages.
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But if we understand that English is a hybrid language,
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its everyday conversational lexicon
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comes predominantly from Germanic sources,
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but the academic language comes from Latin and Greek sources.
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And if we understand that,
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that opens up really important pedagogical possibilities
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in terms of drawing students' attention to language,
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building up language awareness,
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linking up what we're doing
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in the Spanish language arts program,
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the mother tongue program,
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with what's happening in English.
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And in the French immersion programs in Canada,
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because we've bought into this, I think,
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very problematic two solitudes notion,
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and we haven't done that.
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So I think if we teach for transfer,
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two-way transfer across languages,
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by complementing monolingual instructional strategies
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with bilingual instructional strategies,
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I think we can get further.
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I think, as I said before,
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we need to look closely at the research,
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talking about literacy engagement,
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and ask ourselves, are we promoting literacy engagement
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as actively as we might?
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Obviously, when students only have the teacher
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as their authentic source of input in the second language,
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then that's very limited.
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But there's a world of print out there
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that is authentic,
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that can be used to engage students.
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And if we can get students reading voluntarily
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in the target language,
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then that's gonna dramatically increase the input
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that they get in the target language.
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And then the third conclusion that I wanna make
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is that we need to give students
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a means of showcasing their bilingual identities,
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their biliterate identities,
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by showcasing the creative work
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they're doing in the two languages,
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by enabling students to develop
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what some people have called identities of competence
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through the creation of what I'm calling identity texts.
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And texts are being used broadly here.
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It's not just written text.
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It may be music that they create.
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It may be a webpage that older students create.
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It may be any project, any artifact,
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where students invest their identities in creating it.
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And it could be individual, it could be group.
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And then once it's out there,
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once it's published in some form,
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it holds a mirror up to students
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in which their identities are reflected back
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in a positive light.
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If we want students to take ownership of the language,
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we've gotta provide them with means
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of showcasing what they can do in the language.
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And this is an area where I've worked
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over the last few years
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with students from immigrant backgrounds
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in the Canadian context,
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and the affirmation of identity
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that students get under these conditions is tremendous.
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So this is where I'm going.
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Okay, definitions.
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I would use bilingual education as the broad term
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and define it as the use of two or sometimes more languages
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of instruction at some point in the student's career.
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So it's a very broad term.
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So each language is used as a medium of instruction
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to teach subject matter content
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rather than just the language itself.
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And so this refers to,
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CLIL would be included within this,
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French Immersion is a form of bilingual education.
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And the distinction that I would draw an operational
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and working distinction between second language immersion
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and CLIL is that typically
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in the second language immersion context,
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there's at least 50% of the instruction
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is through the target language.
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If it falls below that,
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Fred Genesee would call it partial immersion,
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but in the European context, we're looking at CLIL.
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CLIL usually involves one or two subjects being taught
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through the target language,
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but seldom goes above a 50% threshold.
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Content-based instruction is again a broad term
00:19:09
that within which both CLIL and immersion can be included,
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but content-based instruction
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can also include a monolingual program.
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So the second language teaching techniques
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or the kinds of things that we talk about
00:19:25
in terms of scaffolding
00:19:26
would all fall within content-based instruction.
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So if we're teaching immigrant children,
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the Spanish or in the Canadian context, English,
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we'll typically be doing that in a content-based way.
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And typically that'll be
00:19:39
in a monolingual instructional context.
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So this is just an attempt to clarify some of those issues.
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And this goes back a long way.
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The initial talk or the initial proposal
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that we should be teaching language across the curriculum
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goes back to the Bullock Report in the UK,
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which was published in 1974.
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So it's not a new concept.
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So we're building on things that have been
00:20:01
talked about for 30 or 40 years.
00:20:05
Another point that came up in several sessions
00:20:10
was the bilingual advantage.
00:20:13
The fact that there's a lot of research out there
00:20:15
talking about bilingual students
00:20:17
experiencing various kinds of advantages.
00:20:20
One research study that was done recently
00:20:23
that I think dramatically reinforces this,
00:20:27
and it's obviously very good news
00:20:29
for probably everybody in this room,
00:20:30
is a study carried out by a colleague in Toronto,
00:20:33
Ellen B. Allistock.
00:20:38
And they looked at residents of senior citizens' homes
00:20:39
or older people's homes.
00:20:44
And they got about close to 200 people in the study.
00:20:49
And they looked at people who were showing the signs
00:20:53
of the onset of dementia or Alzheimer's,
00:20:57
some loss of cognitive function.
00:21:00
And what they found was that the onset,
00:21:02
among the sample of people who were beginning
00:21:04
to experience these symptoms,
00:21:06
the age of onset was about four years later
00:21:08
among the bilinguals as opposed to the monolinguals.
00:21:11
So keep on using those languages.
00:21:15
It's good for your brain.
00:21:17
But I think that just reinforces what's come from
00:21:20
a lot of other studies showing positive effects
00:21:23
on children's metalinguistic awareness,
00:21:25
possibly greater flexibility in terms of thinking, et cetera.
00:21:29
Another point that came up in a number of sessions
00:21:34
is the fact that you can teach,
00:21:38
you can take time away from children's mother tongue
00:21:40
and teach through a second language
00:21:43
without any cost to the mother tongue.
00:21:44
And so under these circumstances, it seems paradoxical,
00:21:48
or when this happens, it's paradoxical.
00:21:53
And this was a major reason why in the Canadian context,
00:21:55
so much research was carried out
00:21:58
on French immersion programs,
00:22:00
because people couldn't believe that there were no costs.
00:22:01
And there was, when this became verified
00:22:03
through many, many studies, people were saying,
00:22:07
well, what are all those English language teachers
00:22:12
doing in their classrooms?
00:22:14
If we can take 50% of the time or more away
00:22:16
and it doesn't cost anything in terms of achievement,
00:22:18
what's happening?
00:22:21
But clearly what's happening is transfer.
00:22:23
I've used the term interdependence.
00:22:25
And I'm not gonna go into this,
00:22:28
but this is just a formal statement of that hypothesis,
00:22:29
which has been reinforced in bilingual programs
00:22:33
around the world.
00:22:36
I think you could call it principle at this point.
00:22:37
But it explains why students in bilingual programs
00:22:39
don't suffer negative academic consequences
00:22:42
despite spending a lot of time through a second language.
00:22:45
This applies not just to students
00:22:48
from majority language backgrounds,
00:22:49
but to minority language backgrounds.
00:22:51
So if we take any number of programs
00:22:53
that have been implemented for minority language students,
00:22:56
exactly the same principle applies.
00:22:59
They can spend time through the minority language
00:23:01
at no cost to their academic development
00:23:03
in the majority language.
00:23:07
And that's because when you're learning content,
00:23:09
you're learning concepts.
00:23:14
And those concepts are not fixed
00:23:15
in the language that they were learned in.
00:23:18
So they transfer.
00:23:20
So if a child, let's say an immigrant child comes to Spain,
00:23:21
say a 12-year-old child,
00:23:25
and she knows how to tell the time,
00:23:26
she knows that there are 60 seconds in a minute,
00:23:28
60 minutes in an hour,
00:23:30
then she doesn't have to relearn that concept all over again.
00:23:33
She's got it.
00:23:36
She's got to learn the new vocabulary
00:23:37
to express herself in the ways of telling time
00:23:38
and talking about it.
00:23:41
But the concept is there, okay?
00:23:42
The conventional way in which monolinguals
00:23:48
have, and many policymakers,
00:23:51
certainly in North America and elsewhere,
00:23:54
have thought about bilingualism
00:23:56
has been what I call
00:23:57
the separate underlying proficiency model
00:23:58
where the two languages are separate.
00:24:00
So if you spend time through a second language,
00:24:03
that's going to take time away from the first language.
00:24:06
And in actual fact, if this model were valid,
00:24:10
then again, everybody in this room
00:24:15
would be in a very strange predicament
00:24:17
because let's suppose that
00:24:18
some of you are speaking Spanish together in a group
00:24:21
and somebody like me who's got minimal Spanish comes up
00:24:23
and so you're polite and you switch into English.
00:24:26
You wouldn't be able to tell me what you're talking about
00:24:29
because it would be in a separate part of the brain.
00:24:32
And obviously, that's absurd.
00:24:34
This would be linguistic schizophrenia at its worst.
00:24:36
And clearly, that doesn't fit our experience
00:24:41
or the research.
00:24:43
But the research is saying,
00:24:44
this is another variant of the iceberg diagram
00:24:45
that Fred Genesee talked about.
00:24:47
We've got a common underlying proficiency
00:24:49
that allows for transfer across languages.
00:24:51
So if a student has acquired the concept of photosynthesis
00:24:53
in a science lesson, in a CLIL program in English,
00:24:57
that concept is understood
00:25:01
and he or she can probably talk about it in Spanish also
00:25:03
with exposure.
00:25:07
What transfers?
00:25:09
Several things transfer.
00:25:11
Primarily, we're talking about concepts.
00:25:12
So if somebody understands the concept of photosynthesis,
00:25:15
it's there, it doesn't have to be retaught.
00:25:18
We're talking about transfer of cognitive
00:25:21
and linguistic strategies.
00:25:23
So if we're developing good reading strategies
00:25:25
to help students comprehend text in one language,
00:25:28
then they can apply those strategies in the second language.
00:25:31
But what this implies here is that we need to,
00:25:34
or be very useful in teaching the two languages
00:25:37
and developing literacy in the two languages to coordinate
00:25:40
so that we're doing things
00:25:43
that are going to reinforce each other
00:25:45
rather than assuming that the two languages
00:25:47
have no connection.
00:25:49
So if students are developing reading strategies
00:25:50
in English in a CLIL program,
00:25:54
then having those strategies being taught
00:25:56
at roughly the same time
00:25:58
in the Spanish language arts program
00:26:00
would make a lot of sense.
00:26:02
We're talking about transfer
00:26:04
of specific linguistic elements, such as cognates,
00:26:05
and also transfer of phonological awareness.
00:26:09
These are the main things.
00:26:12
So other things that I heard that were reinforced,
00:26:15
obviously the importance of scaffolding.
00:26:19
This is the toolkit that comes from Applied Linguistics
00:26:22
that helps students get concepts
00:26:27
even when their knowledge of the language
00:26:29
is less well-developed.
00:26:31
We heard about, from Pam, obviously about scaffolding,
00:26:34
we heard about the importance
00:26:38
of activating students' prior knowledge.
00:26:39
And again, this raises an issue
00:26:41
that I think is worth revisiting.
00:26:43
If students' prior knowledge
00:26:45
is encoded in their first language,
00:26:47
well, that means their first language
00:26:50
is relevant to the learning of the second language.
00:26:51
And so how do we address the connections
00:26:53
between those two languages?
00:26:57
And what I'm gonna suggest
00:26:58
is that if transfer is going on anyway,
00:26:59
it may be going on in a haphazard way,
00:27:03
it may not be going on as efficiently
00:27:05
as it might for all students,
00:27:07
then surely it makes sense to give it a helping hand.
00:27:09
And so I'll come back to that point.
00:27:12
These are some of the things that people talk about
00:27:14
in terms of scaffolding language.
00:27:17
I'm not gonna go into them,
00:27:20
but they're things that everybody's familiar with.
00:27:21
Prior knowledge is a core element.
00:27:27
All of the cognitive psychology research
00:27:29
highlights the importance of prior knowledge.
00:27:32
There's a quote here from three American researchers
00:27:35
that I think says it fairly well.
00:27:38
They say, every opportunity should be taken
00:27:40
to extend and enrich children's background knowledge
00:27:42
and understanding in every way possible.
00:27:45
For the ultimate significance and memorability
00:27:47
of any word or text depends on whether children
00:27:50
possess the background knowledge
00:27:52
and conceptual sophistication to understand its meaning.
00:27:54
And so again, this highlights the relevance
00:27:57
of linking up what's happening in the first language,
00:28:01
in Spanish language teaching,
00:28:04
with what's happening in the target language.
00:28:06
So if we look at the content
00:28:09
of what students are learning in Spanish,
00:28:12
if we're learning reading strategies
00:28:16
or we're extending vocabulary,
00:28:17
then that's background knowledge
00:28:20
for what they're doing in English.
00:28:22
And so coordinating those two activities
00:28:24
makes a lot of sense.
00:28:29
If they're taught by different teachers,
00:28:30
then having the teachers talk to each other
00:28:32
in terms of what the overlaps might be
00:28:34
and how we can reinforce that underlying knowledge
00:28:35
and transfer across languages makes sense.
00:28:38
Okay, some of the things I didn't hear about
00:28:42
that I just want to highlight.
00:28:44
As I said, this is not a criticism at all.
00:28:46
It's just a reminder that there's
00:28:48
a broader context out there.
00:28:51
Population, mobility, and cross-cultural contact
00:28:53
are at an all-time high in human history.
00:28:56
And so in the Canadian programs,
00:28:59
there's an increasing number of students
00:29:02
coming into the programs who are from Chinese backgrounds,
00:29:04
Portuguese backgrounds, Spanish backgrounds.
00:29:07
And if we're talking about affirming students' identity
00:29:10
as a core element of what we should be doing,
00:29:14
then I think it's missing an opportunity
00:29:16
when we ignore students' first language.
00:29:20
And in the past, and still in some places today,
00:29:22
for example, in Germany and in the United States,
00:29:25
there's a fairly strong discourse
00:29:28
that is very contradictory to what we're talking about here
00:29:31
because bilingualism is not seen as an asset
00:29:34
when we're talking about migrant children.
00:29:37
Often the first language is blamed
00:29:39
as the cause of children's difficulty.
00:29:40
If parents would only speak Spanish or German
00:29:42
or English in the home,
00:29:45
then the kids wouldn't have this problem.
00:29:46
And so we get into a very subtractive orientation
00:29:48
that has no basis in research.
00:29:52
And what I want to suggest is that
00:29:54
if we have multilingual students in our classes,
00:29:55
and I think we should be actively searching for sites
00:30:00
where we can include those students,
00:30:04
then this provides an opportunity
00:30:06
to build up students' language awareness,
00:30:07
to help them engage in comparison of their languages,
00:30:09
to enrich all students' knowledge of geography,
00:30:13
knowledge of language,
00:30:18
by having students talk about their language.
00:30:19
So if we construct plurilingualism as a resource,
00:30:21
I think it can enrich what's happening in CLIL programs.
00:30:25
So that's just a note about the broader context.
00:30:29
If we look at the nature of English proficiency,
00:30:32
I've made a distinction that probably has been inflicted
00:30:36
on many people here between BICS and CALP.
00:30:40
BICS, basic interpersonal communicative skills
00:30:44
or conversational fluency, more simply,
00:30:48
and CALP, cognitive academic language proficiency,
00:30:51
or what I tend to call academic language proficiency now.
00:30:53
This reflects the nature of the English language,
00:30:56
which is a hybrid language.
00:31:00
There's a third category that is, I think,
00:31:01
important to note also,
00:31:03
and that's discrete language skills.
00:31:08
We're talking here about the rule-governed aspects
00:31:10
of the language, so things like phonics,
00:31:12
spelling, grammar, et cetera.
00:31:14
We spend a lot of time both in first language
00:31:15
and second language contexts on those.
00:31:17
They're important, but they're different
00:31:19
from academic language proficiency.
00:31:20
Conversational fluency is what all children
00:31:23
who are developing normally acquire in their first language
00:31:26
by the time they come to school.
00:31:28
So by age four, age five, students are fluent
00:31:30
in their first language, and yet we take those children
00:31:32
and we spend another 12 years teaching them language.
00:31:36
We call it literacy, we call it language arts,
00:31:40
but it's extending the basic knowledge of the language
00:31:42
that they bring to school into a much broader range of areas.
00:31:45
And so we're getting into academic language proficiency,
00:31:49
and I'd like to spend just a couple of moments
00:31:52
on what I mean by academic language proficiency.
00:31:54
This is just a sampling of a list
00:31:57
that some people put together a few years ago
00:31:59
of the most frequent academic words in English.
00:32:02
These are words that are not specific
00:32:05
to a particular subject area.
00:32:07
They're words that cut across different subject areas.
00:32:10
So you'll find a word like photosynthesis
00:32:12
or molecule in science, but you won't find it in literature,
00:32:15
at least not any literature that most of us would wanna read.
00:32:18
But if you look at these words,
00:32:22
I think most people here will notice something immediately.
00:32:25
The vast majority of these words come from Latin sources
00:32:28
and some Greek sources.
00:32:31
So if we look at how we nominalize verbs
00:32:33
like accelerate, contribute, fluctuate,
00:32:36
acceleration, contribution, fluctuation,
00:32:39
in Spanish it's C-I-O-N rather than T-I-O-N,
00:32:42
but basically the same pattern.
00:32:45
We have often root words that are preceded by a prefix
00:32:47
and then have a suffix.
00:32:52
And these follow particular patterns.
00:32:53
If we see the word pre in front of a word,
00:32:55
and we understand that pre is Latin for before,
00:32:58
that gives us access to the meaning.
00:33:01
But here when you're talking about a CLIL program
00:33:03
where Spanish and English are the two languages involved,
00:33:06
you have tremendous possibilities
00:33:09
for reinforcing students' awareness
00:33:11
of how the language works because there's a lot of overlap.
00:33:13
When you get into the academic area,
00:33:16
obviously you're not gonna get the same kind
00:33:19
of cognitive relationships for everyday language
00:33:21
because those come from Germanic sources.
00:33:23
If you look at some examples here,
00:33:28
typically in English, the high-frequency word,
00:33:30
the word we use in everyday context,
00:33:36
will come from Germanic sources, Anglo-Saxon sources,
00:33:38
and these will often have cognates
00:33:42
with languages of Northern Europe.
00:33:44
But English is an extremely rich language.
00:33:46
It has approximately twice as many words
00:33:48
in its typical dictionaries as any other European language,
00:33:51
precisely because it's drawing from these two major sources.
00:33:55
The low-frequency words in English
00:33:59
come from Latin and Greek predominantly.
00:34:00
So you've got velocity,
00:34:02
which links up with the Spanish word.
00:34:04
Encounter links up with the low-frequency synonym,
00:34:08
whereas meet is the more common one.
00:34:12
If we look at a word like infirmal, meaning sick,
00:34:15
the cognate in English is infirm.
00:34:18
Now not too many of us here are going to go to our doctors
00:34:20
and say, help me please, I'm feeling really infirm today.
00:34:22
But it gives access to words like infirmity or infirmary,
00:34:26
low-frequency words, but words that distinguish
00:34:30
those who have a very strong vocabulary in the language
00:34:32
as opposed to those who have just the basic vocabulary.
00:34:36
If you take, this is an example from Edgar Allan Poe,
00:34:40
one of his stories from the 1700s.
00:34:45
I'm not gonna go through this,
00:34:49
but if you look at the words I put in red,
00:34:50
they all have either direct or indirect cognates in Spanish.
00:34:53
These are the low-frequency words,
00:34:58
the difficult words in the text.
00:34:59
And so if a student is,
00:35:00
from a Spanish first language background,
00:35:03
is reading through a text like this,
00:35:05
and they come across the word encountered,
00:35:06
okay, this is a big long word, it's I don't know it,
00:35:08
I've never seen it before,
00:35:10
all they have to do is search their internal database,
00:35:11
their lexical database in their first language,
00:35:14
and immediately they find the word.
00:35:16
And so building up those linguistic detective skills
00:35:19
in students is an important strategy that we use,
00:35:22
or that should be used, I think,
00:35:26
in helping students to acquire the language.
00:35:28
Okay, another aspect, so basically to sum up
00:35:32
in terms of the nature of English,
00:35:35
if we understand the hybrid nature of English
00:35:39
and the fact that it is a Romance language
00:35:41
in its academic vocabulary, in its academic lexicon,
00:35:44
that opens up all kinds of possibilities
00:35:48
for making connections across languages
00:35:50
and exploiting cognitive relationships.
00:35:52
We're not doing that in the French immersion programs
00:35:54
in Canada because we've bought into,
00:35:57
we've oversubscribed to this two solitudes notion
00:36:00
that the two languages are kind of in opposition
00:36:03
to each other and have to be kept apart.
00:36:07
I'm suggesting that we need to talk about
00:36:10
how we can bring them together.
00:36:12
It may be that we spend part of the week,
00:36:14
an afternoon maybe, doing cross-linguistic work
00:36:17
where we talk about the connections between languages
00:36:19
and focus on building up students' language awareness,
00:36:22
or it could be in the Spanish part of the day,
00:36:25
we're doing things that coordinate
00:36:27
with the English part of the day.
00:36:28
Okay, literacy engagement.
00:36:30
This is a quotation from the PISA study.
00:36:32
PISA stands for Program for International
00:36:35
Student Achievement.
00:36:37
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
00:36:38
has been doing comparisons among countries
00:36:40
in reading and several other content areas
00:36:43
over the last 12 or so years.
00:36:48
What they find is that data on the reading attainment
00:36:50
of 15-year-olds in almost 30 countries
00:36:52
show that the level of a student's reading engagement
00:36:54
is a better predictor of literacy performance
00:36:57
than his or her socioeconomic background,
00:37:00
indicating that cultivating a student's interest
00:37:02
in reading can help overcome home disadvantages.
00:37:05
If we were to look at our programs,
00:37:07
and obviously I don't know to what extent this is happening,
00:37:09
but if I were to look at French immersion programs
00:37:12
in a Canadian context, what I would see
00:37:14
is that there's a strong emphasis on books and literacy
00:37:17
in the primary grades, the early grades.
00:37:20
Students are often bringing books home from the school,
00:37:22
from the school library, from the classroom library
00:37:25
to read with their parents.
00:37:27
Their parents may or may not know French,
00:37:28
but there's a strong focus on getting students into reading.
00:37:31
These are typically picture books,
00:37:35
so there's lots of support.
00:37:36
But after about grade two or three, this begins to fall off,
00:37:39
and it coincides with the time when students are,
00:37:43
their English language skills or English reading skills
00:37:47
have spontaneously developed in most cases in grade one
00:37:49
without any formal instruction,
00:37:52
and it's much easier to read books
00:37:54
in their more familiar language.
00:37:56
And so the only reading that students do
00:37:58
is reading within class in school, in the target language.
00:38:01
And I think we're missing out big time when that happens,
00:38:05
because where do you find low-frequency vocabulary?
00:38:07
Where do you find the language that goes beyond
00:38:11
the everyday conversational language?
00:38:14
You find it in print.
00:38:17
You don't find big long words, low-frequency Latin-based words
00:38:18
in everyday conversation.
00:38:24
Now, there are some people out there,
00:38:26
they exist in every university in the English-speaking world
00:38:29
who speak like a book, okay?
00:38:32
And one of the things I've noticed about these people
00:38:35
is they have no friends, okay?
00:38:37
This distinction is something that we're all familiar with,
00:38:38
unless we understand that to expand students' knowledge
00:38:43
of the language, we need to get into
00:38:47
low-frequency vocabulary.
00:38:48
It's part of the content, it's part of the science content
00:38:50
that they're learning.
00:38:53
So let's build up their awareness of how this works,
00:38:54
and their first language can be an important resource
00:38:57
in doing that.
00:38:59
But if we can get them reading, provide reward systems
00:39:00
for them to read in the target language,
00:39:04
that is gonna dramatically increase their access
00:39:07
to the lower-frequency words.
00:39:10
And grammatical structures and discourse structures
00:39:13
in English.
00:39:15
So this is the framework that I would use,
00:39:17
or suggest as a starting point for discussion.
00:39:20
It's not prescriptive, but it's a way of trying
00:39:24
to pull together a lot of what the research is saying
00:39:27
about how we can build strong academic development
00:39:30
in, when we're in multilingual context,
00:39:34
when we're talking about children who are learning
00:39:36
a second language, whether they're from migrant backgrounds
00:39:38
or majority backgrounds, what the research is saying
00:39:41
is that if we look at predictors of literacy attainment,
00:39:45
the strongest predictor, and it's not just the OECD studies,
00:39:49
there's lots of research out there,
00:39:52
the strongest predictor is literacy engagement.
00:39:54
So if we look at our programs, and we see that students
00:39:57
are not doing a lot of reading in the target language,
00:39:59
they're not readers at home, then this is something
00:40:03
that we should be focusing our efforts on.
00:40:07
Is our libraries in the schools where we've set up
00:40:09
these programs, are they adequate?
00:40:12
Are we encouraging parents to get books for their children,
00:40:14
both in the first language and in English where possible?
00:40:19
What kind of reward systems, are we encouragement,
00:40:23
are we giving to students to engage in this?
00:40:25
If we ask how we can get students engaged with literacy
00:40:28
when it's a second language context,
00:40:33
a lot of the research can be summarized in these four boxes.
00:40:35
We need to scaffold meaning, not just input,
00:40:39
we normally here talk about comprehensible input,
00:40:41
but output is also incredibly important,
00:40:44
and writing is important.
00:40:46
We need to activate students' prior knowledge
00:40:49
and build background knowledge, we need to affirm identity
00:40:51
and extend language.
00:40:54
If students are getting the language only in the classroom,
00:40:57
then we've gotta take every opportunity to extend it
00:41:01
as much as possible across the curriculum.
00:41:04
So I'm gonna spend a little bit of time
00:41:07
on these last two boxes since they haven't been talked
00:41:08
about that much.
00:41:11
This is a, let me give you the context here.
00:41:14
A project that I've been involved in over the last few years
00:41:17
has been termed the Multiliteracies Project.
00:41:20
We're talking about literacy not just in terms of print,
00:41:22
but all of the literacies that are associated
00:41:25
with digital technologies, as well as the multilingual
00:41:27
literacies that children are bringing into our schools.
00:41:31
So this project took place in a monolingual classroom.
00:41:33
There were students from a number of different
00:41:39
language backgrounds in the classroom,
00:41:40
and the teacher was interested in bringing in
00:41:42
bilingual instructional strategies,
00:41:47
affirming students, affirming to students
00:41:49
that their knowledge of their first language
00:41:53
was legitimate, that their first language was important,
00:41:54
that it was not in any way an impediment
00:41:57
to learning English, and finding a way to engage
00:41:59
newcomer students as quickly as possible
00:42:02
in literacy engagement.
00:42:04
So this was a story that was done in the context
00:42:06
of a unit on immigration, so it was a social studies unit,
00:42:08
where it was a culminating project.
00:42:13
The three students wrote a story.
00:42:15
They wrote a dual-language story,
00:42:17
and they were writing it for younger students,
00:42:18
and many of the younger students were also from,
00:42:20
of Pakistani origin, speakers of Urdu.
00:42:22
So they suggested to the teacher that they do it
00:42:25
in both languages so that the younger students
00:42:27
could understand it also, and their parents
00:42:29
could understand it.
00:42:31
Now, Mehdi had just arrived in Canada
00:42:32
about six weeks previously, so her English was minimal.
00:42:34
Suman and Kanta had been in Canada
00:42:38
for about three and a half years,
00:42:41
so their English was pretty good.
00:42:42
They wrote, the process that they went through
00:42:44
is that they first of all talked about the story in Urdu,
00:42:47
which was a language that was common to all of them.
00:42:50
They figured out what the story was gonna be about,
00:42:52
who the main character was gonna be,
00:42:55
what was gonna be in each page,
00:42:56
so all of the planning was done,
00:42:58
what the illustration should look like, et cetera.
00:43:00
Then they wrote the first draft in English,
00:43:03
and then they discussed it with the teacher,
00:43:06
the teacher made some suggestions, made some corrections,
00:43:08
so they finalized the English draft,
00:43:11
and then went back to Urdu.
00:43:14
They translated it back into Urdu,
00:43:17
and again, when you look at the videos of this,
00:43:20
there's all kinds of metalinguistic talk going on
00:43:22
about how you say this in Urdu,
00:43:24
or what would be the best way of saying this in English.
00:43:26
So the two languages were being brought
00:43:29
into productive connection with each other.
00:43:31
When this was done, we scanned it in,
00:43:34
it's up on the webpage of the project,
00:43:37
anybody from around the world can look at it.
00:43:40
I'll just give you a sample of what it looks like.
00:43:42
They invented a composite character called Sonia
00:43:45
that encompassed a lot of their experiences,
00:43:47
and this text goes like this.
00:43:50
Sonia's dad, for the first time, had his own car.
00:43:53
He drove the family to the new apartment.
00:43:55
The apartment had an elevator,
00:43:58
and Sonia actually thought the elevator was her home.
00:43:59
This is not fiction, this was one of their experiences.
00:44:01
She also thought that when she would press each button,
00:44:05
things would pop out.
00:44:06
Then when the elevator opened,
00:44:08
Sonia saw a lot of doors in front of her.
00:44:09
She thought they were all rooms in her new apartment.
00:44:11
Okay, so this is a charming story.
00:44:14
It's what we call an identity text,
00:44:16
because students invested themselves in this.
00:44:17
This was their story.
00:44:20
Their prior experience came into it.
00:44:22
Use of the first language enabled them
00:44:25
to plan it out in a way where they were operating
00:44:28
at the top of their cognitive abilities.
00:44:30
If you were to take the case of Madiha, who just arrived,
00:44:33
and so ask what she could do
00:44:37
if English was the only language that was accessible to her
00:44:39
or made accessible to her,
00:44:43
you might have got one or two painful sentences out of her.
00:44:45
In this context, because the social rules
00:44:48
of the game were changed,
00:44:51
she's the very proud author of a 20-page book
00:44:52
that's being read by thousands of people.
00:44:55
I want to give you a sense of what this was like for Kanta.
00:44:59
We presented with the four of the students
00:45:01
at a conference.
00:45:07
And hopefully this will work.
00:45:11
Hi, we're gonna start by introducing Kanta,
00:45:13
who's going to tell us a little bit about herself.
00:45:18
Hi, my name is Kanta.
00:45:21
I'm from Pakistan.
00:45:23
My first language was Punjabi.
00:45:26
My second language was Urdu,
00:45:27
and my third language was English.
00:45:30
I came here in grade four, and now I am in grade nine.
00:45:31
How did you feel writing the book in two languages,
00:45:35
and how did you see it helping you or the others?
00:45:37
It helped me a lot, and using two languages
00:45:41
helped us a lot to understand English better.
00:45:45
And when Madiha was actually new here,
00:45:47
and then, like, in Urdu, if you would write,
00:45:50
you would say three words.
00:45:54
In English, you would actually have to write five words.
00:45:55
So then, if you're thinking in Urdu,
00:45:57
you would be only writing those three words.
00:46:00
And then, so those sentence structures
00:46:02
didn't really make sense.
00:46:04
But while we were doing it, it made a lot of sense to her.
00:46:05
And then, how it helped me,
00:46:08
it helped me that when I was here,
00:46:10
and when I came here in grade four,
00:46:13
like, the teachers didn't know what I was capable of.
00:46:15
I was given a pack of crayons and a coloring book,
00:46:17
and to get on coloring with it.
00:46:20
And then, after, I felt, like, so valuable
00:46:22
that I am capable of doing much more than just doing that.
00:46:25
Like, I have my own inner skills to show the world
00:46:28
than just coloring, and then I felt like
00:46:32
those skills of me were important also.
00:46:35
So when we started writing these books,
00:46:37
I could actually show the world that I am something
00:46:38
instead of just coloring.
00:46:41
And then, so that's how it helped me.
00:46:43
And then, it made me so proud of myself
00:46:46
that I am actually capable of doing something,
00:46:49
and here today, I am doing something like that.
00:46:51
That I can actually show the world
00:46:53
that I'm just not a coloring person.
00:46:55
I can actually show you that I am something.
00:46:57
Okay, I'm gonna wrap up just in the interest of time.
00:47:02
But basically, what I'm saying here is that
00:47:05
I think if we revisit that fundamental assumption
00:47:08
that was made back in the mid-60s
00:47:12
when French immersion programs first started,
00:47:15
that the two languages should never meet.
00:47:17
And think about what we can do
00:47:20
when we implement bilingual instructional strategies
00:47:22
to complement monolingual instructional strategies.
00:47:26
We can do a lot of things.
00:47:29
We can exploit cognitive relationships.
00:47:31
We can develop students' awareness
00:47:33
of how the language works in both classes,
00:47:35
or both Spanish teaching and English teaching.
00:47:39
And we can develop their awareness
00:47:42
of how the language works.
00:47:44
The research says students tend to do this anyway,
00:47:45
but let's give it a helping hand.
00:47:48
We can have students create,
00:47:52
showcase their bilingual talents,
00:47:55
their multilingual talents by connecting the languages,
00:47:57
by writing dual-language texts
00:48:01
that increase the audience quite dramatically.
00:48:03
And by putting this material up on the web,
00:48:05
it generates a huge amount of pride in students
00:48:09
so the language becomes a language that they own.
00:48:12
It extends their sense of self.
00:48:15
And remember what I said,
00:48:17
one of the reasons why typical second-language teaching
00:48:18
has never worked very well,
00:48:21
except for a small minority of highly motivated students,
00:48:22
because the vast majority of students
00:48:26
never cross the threshold
00:48:27
where they can do anything with the language
00:48:29
that is meaningful to them themselves.
00:48:31
And so there's no affirmation in it.
00:48:34
You can see the kind of affirmation that comes
00:48:36
when students do something like this.
00:48:38
So there's absolutely no pedagogical reason
00:48:40
why students in CLIL programs
00:48:43
should not be writing bilingual books,
00:48:44
doing bilingual projects,
00:48:47
if we coordinate it across the different parts of the day.
00:48:48
And then the third thing that I'd like to highlight
00:48:51
that can add to all of this
00:48:54
is the importance of sister class projects,
00:48:56
where we connect up with sister classes.
00:48:58
They may be across the city.
00:49:01
It may be just another CLIL program within Madrid.
00:49:03
Or it may be a program in the UK, Australia, Canada.
00:49:05
But we do substantive, challenging projects together.
00:49:10
We publish the results together.
00:49:14
This goes way beyond pen pals.
00:49:17
It's got to be substantive.
00:49:18
It's got to be engaging.
00:49:20
It's got to be something that becomes an identity text,
00:49:22
where students will invest their identities
00:49:24
into creating it.
00:49:26
I think if we were to move in these directions,
00:49:27
we're going to increase literacy engagement,
00:49:28
because students will be doing much more research
00:49:31
where they're reading.
00:49:33
It's going to increase identity affirmation.
00:49:35
We're going to tap into students' prior knowledge
00:49:38
much more actively than we might be doing right now.
00:49:41
And we're scaffolding production
00:49:43
that's going to be at a much higher level.
00:49:45
So these would be the, if I were speaking to,
00:49:47
in a Canadian context, based on my knowledge
00:49:51
of what has happened and is happening
00:49:54
in many French immersion programs,
00:49:56
these would be the directions
00:49:57
that I would suggest we talk about.
00:49:59
Within the school, talk about what we can do.
00:50:01
But it's got to be a grassroots discussion
00:50:04
of what possibilities we have,
00:50:08
how we can enrich students' language learning
00:50:10
and literacy learning experiences
00:50:13
based on what we have observed in our own context,
00:50:15
and also what the research is saying.
00:50:19
So again, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here.
00:50:21
The progress that has been made
00:50:26
in a short amount of time is staggering.
00:50:28
I'm sure everybody here must be exhausted,
00:50:30
hopefully not just because of my presentation,
00:50:33
but because of all of the work you're doing
00:50:36
throughout the year.
00:50:38
But I wish you well in what you're doing,
00:50:39
and thank you again for the opportunity to be part of it.
00:50:42
Thank you.
00:50:44
Thank you.
00:50:45
Thank you.
00:50:46
Thank you.
00:50:47
Thank you.
00:50:48
Thank you.
00:50:48
Okay, we have about five minutes for a couple of questions.
00:50:59
The first question is,
00:51:04
we have another question as well.
00:51:06
Thank you, oops.
00:51:09
What strategies can we use to get our students
00:51:10
to read more books when they've got a bazillion number
00:51:17
of TV channels, DVDs, consoles, and access to internet?
00:51:20
Thank you for your presentation.
00:51:26
You've got to build on students' culture,
00:51:29
on the popular culture.
00:51:33
If they're watching TV channels
00:51:34
and they have their favorite programs,
00:51:37
or they have their favorite music that they listen to,
00:51:39
build on that.
00:51:43
So have students work in groups to build a soap opera,
00:51:45
build a role play, a drama,
00:51:51
based on things that they know
00:51:53
where they're going to use English.
00:51:55
And so I think we build on that.
00:51:57
We don't try and replace it.
00:51:59
But the teacher is in many ways the boss within the classroom.
00:52:01
You can set the requirements for what students do.
00:52:06
So if you have a requirement that students
00:52:09
carry out research, that they come back
00:52:11
and be able to talk about it in English,
00:52:14
that we have books that are engaging to students,
00:52:16
that they're expected to read,
00:52:20
and we talk about these books, we dramatize them,
00:52:22
I think that's going to help.
00:52:26
It's not going to be necessarily easy,
00:52:29
but if we establish this from the day the student
00:52:30
walks into the CLIL program in grade one,
00:52:34
or even before in the infant schools,
00:52:37
if students are listening to stories,
00:52:41
if stories are part of their lives,
00:52:43
they will want to read.
00:52:44
And so they've got to be able to identify
00:52:46
with what's happening in the stories.
00:52:48
They've also got to have the opportunities
00:52:49
to become writers, and to be the protagonists
00:52:50
of their own work.
00:52:53
They can do this in groups, you can scaffold it.
00:52:55
What the research is saying is that it's central,
00:52:58
and so it's worth the effort.
00:53:01
There aren't any formulas for doing it,
00:53:03
but if it's not highlighted enough in the curriculum,
00:53:05
then let's talk about how we can put it in there,
00:53:08
and learn from each other in terms of doing it.
00:53:10
Okay, we have time for two more questions, okay.
00:53:13
Given the research support for transfer,
00:53:16
what is the reasoning behind starting to read
00:53:19
in language two in Canada?
00:53:21
What the research says is it doesn't matter
00:53:24
what language you learn to read in.
00:53:26
It's the rationale for starting in the second language
00:53:29
was that they wanted it to be an immersion program.
00:53:35
And they found that students could acquire
00:53:39
decoding skills fairly successfully in the second language.
00:53:40
They'd had kindergarten totally through French.
00:53:45
They had some comprehension of the,
00:53:48
or they have some comprehension of the language.
00:53:50
And so teaching phonological awareness
00:53:52
and phonics skills in French can work fairly well.
00:53:56
You're talking about high frequency words
00:54:00
that you're using to do this.
00:54:01
And what we find is that typically students
00:54:03
by the end of grade one will have spontaneously transferred
00:54:05
their reading skills or decoding skills to English
00:54:08
without any formal instruction.
00:54:13
So what research in Ireland says,
00:54:14
what research in Canada says is that
00:54:17
it really doesn't matter whether you start in L1 and L2.
00:54:19
Ideally, I would like to see students
00:54:23
developing reading skills in both languages
00:54:26
more or less at the same time,
00:54:29
so that as they're learning to read in one language,
00:54:30
we're explicitly transferring some of those skills
00:54:33
to the second language.
00:54:36
And in a CLIL program, you can obviously do that.
00:54:37
Okay.
00:54:40
Due to the difference between English spelling
00:54:42
and pronunciation, for example,
00:54:43
encountered would be recognized phonetically spoken,
00:54:45
but an average Spaniard would read encountered, okay?
00:54:50
So the question is, shouldn't listening comprehension
00:54:55
be promoted more actively than reading literacy
00:54:57
since the transfer would be easier?
00:55:00
I don't think the transfer would be easier.
00:55:03
Students can figure out that the words have
00:55:05
most of the letters in common,
00:55:09
and that kind of initial confusion
00:55:10
is a learning opportunity.
00:55:13
Students will pronounce it incorrectly in English,
00:55:15
and that gives the teacher the opportunity
00:55:18
to provide corrective feedback.
00:55:20
So I don't see it as being an issue at all.
00:55:22
And I don't see literacy engagement
00:55:25
and a focus on reading and writing
00:55:30
as being in any way different or superior to
00:55:32
or inferior to a focus on listening and speaking.
00:55:37
What I'm saying is that if we postpone
00:55:41
or see literacy development as being secondary
00:55:44
to speaking and listening,
00:55:48
then we're missing out big time and opportunities.
00:55:49
Do you have time?
00:55:52
What are the main influences of learning a second language
00:55:54
in the process of constructing a student's identity?
00:55:57
Well, as everybody here knows,
00:56:02
when you speak two or more languages,
00:56:05
you can interact with a lot more people.
00:56:09
You have built competence,
00:56:11
and whenever any of us builds up expertise in any area,
00:56:13
we feel good about it.
00:56:16
And so when students develop
00:56:18
usable skills in the second language,
00:56:23
that says something about who they are.
00:56:26
They're intelligent, they're competent,
00:56:28
they're linguistically talented,
00:56:30
and that's going to have payoff
00:56:32
in terms of their overall sense of self
00:56:34
and their sense that they can succeed academically.
00:56:36
They're seen as, in many cases,
00:56:40
little linguistic prodigies,
00:56:43
these six-year-olds, seven-year-olds
00:56:45
who can actually hold a conversation in English
00:56:46
or in the Canadian context, French.
00:56:48
They get a lot of positive feedback for that.
00:56:50
So identity and language learning
00:56:53
are very, very closely tied together.
00:56:55
Okay, and one more quick question, okay?
00:56:58
Bilingualism, CLIL, immersion,
00:57:01
you talked about the differences
00:57:03
in terms of exposure to the target language.
00:57:05
Aren't there many other variables as well,
00:57:07
for example, contextual?
00:57:09
Well, in every bilingual program,
00:57:11
there are contextual variations.
00:57:14
Ireland is not the same context as Canada.
00:57:17
So the contextual variations
00:57:20
are going to vary across every bilingual program.
00:57:24
Between two schools in the Madrid region,
00:57:27
you're going to have different contextual variables
00:57:30
in terms of who the students are,
00:57:32
what the income level of parents is, et cetera.
00:57:34
So context is always going to be important,
00:57:37
and that's why I think it's important
00:57:39
to understand the core principles
00:57:41
that are operating across context,
00:57:44
but then how we interpret those
00:57:46
will be specific to our own context.
00:57:49
So that's why what I've tried to present
00:57:51
are essentially reflections rather than prescriptions.
00:57:54
What I'm saying is here's what the research is saying,
00:57:58
here's how we can synthesize
00:57:59
a lot of the central issues in the research,
00:58:01
but how you in any particular center or school
00:58:04
interprets this for your context
00:58:07
is going to be something
00:58:09
that should be decided in that context.
00:58:10
So obviously we have curriculum being developed
00:58:13
in a top-down way in most situations.
00:58:15
So that's the curriculum that we have to teach,
00:58:19
but also we have to, if we understand the research,
00:58:22
we've got to link that curriculum
00:58:24
with students' prior knowledge.
00:58:25
That means we've got to have students
00:58:28
brainstorming about issues.
00:58:29
If we're talking about photosynthesis,
00:58:30
to come back to that same example,
00:58:32
then we might start with asking students
00:58:33
what do they know about how plants grow?
00:58:36
Get students to brainstorm about that,
00:58:39
think about it, and get their suggestions.
00:58:41
And then we've built up the basis
00:58:44
for teaching that concept much more effectively
00:58:46
than if we just do it cold.
00:58:50
The curriculum that's handed down may say,
00:58:51
may not specify that we should do that,
00:58:54
but we can reinterpret that
00:58:56
in terms of what we know about the research.
00:58:57
So the context is always going to be important,
00:58:59
but basically immersion and CLIL
00:59:01
are two forms of bilingual education
00:59:04
that will be interpreted differently in different contexts.
00:59:06
CLIL programs in Finland and Italy
00:59:10
are going to be different than CLIL programs in Spain,
00:59:13
and that's not a problem.
00:59:15
Okay, I think that's all we have time for.
00:59:18
Thank you very much.
00:59:20
Thank you.
00:59:22
Thank you.
00:59:23
Thank you.
00:59:33
And we're going to have a few words.
00:59:36
- Valoración:
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- Idioma/s:
- Etiquetas:
- Miscelánea
- Autor/es:
- D.James Cummins
- Subido por:
- EducaMadrid
- Licencia:
- Reconocimiento - No comercial - Sin obra derivada
- Visualizaciones:
- 5419
- Fecha:
- 26 de enero de 2011 - 10:28
- Visibilidad:
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- Enlace Relacionado:
- Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid en colaboración con la Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid
- Descripción ampliada:
La Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid en colaboración con la Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid acogió el I Congreso Internacional sobre Bilingüismo en Centros Educativos que se celebró en Madrid en la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos los días 14, 15 y 16 de junio de 2010.
En los últimos años, se ha observado una implicación cada vez mayor en los países europeos respecto a la educación bilingüe con el fin de preparar a sus alumnos para sus futuros estudios, trabajo y vida en una Europa cada vez más multilingüe. Si el objetivo es conseguir una Europa multilingüe, el Aprendizaje Integrado de Contenidos y Lengua (AICOLE) sería el instrumento necesario para conseguir esta meta. Como consecuencia, el AICOLE ha provocado un gran interés en los últimos años en Europa, y especialmente en España.
Por otro lado la Comunidad de Madrid se ha convertido en una región de referencia gracias a su decidida apuesta por el bilingüismo en los centros educativos. Un ambicioso proyecto iniciado en el año 2004 que cuenta en la actualidad con 242 colegios públicos en los que se desarrolla una enseñanza bilingüe de gran calidad. Este curso 20010-2011 el modelo alcanza a la enseñanza secundaria donde se extenderá con la puesta en marcha de 32 institutos bilingües. Estas políticas educativas están produciendo resultados muy apreciables y han generado un gran interés entre los profesores que se sienten cada vez más atraídos por este tipo de enseñanza.
Por estas razones, este I Congreso Internacional sobre Bilingüismo en Centros Educativos ha estado dirigido a profesores de primaria, secundaria y universidades, a investigadores y responsables políticos interesados en la educación bilingüe y en metodología AICOLE.- Duración:
- 59′ 40″
- Relación de aspecto:
- 1.31:1
- Resolución:
- 480x366 píxeles
- Tamaño:
- 357.24 MBytes