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Bilingual Education

Bilingual Education Program Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: The methods for teaching young children to acquire a new language very in both philosophy and technique. The key to success in using any method depends on multiple factors. In this program, Dr. Eugene Garcia talks about language acquisition programs that allow children to become academically successful in languages required in school. Later, Dr. Maria de la Luz Reyes discusses the concept of spontaneous biliteracy and its impact on students developing literacy in two languages.

EUGENE GARCIA: Well, I think issues related to children learning language, first of all, is important to understand. There was certainly a historical debate about how children acquire language and how we acquire language as humans. And the debate was very straightforward. Well, someone has to teach it to you, or you just sort of magically learn it. Because children who are exposed to language, pick up the language. So if you're exposed to Russian, you pick up Russian. If you're exposed to Chinese, you pick up Chinese. And those are very different languages. They're in different bases grammatically, phonologically, et cetera.

So I think the debate has been resolved. So now we know that quite honestly adults don't systematically teach language to children. What happens is that we're essentially, we like to say, "wired" for language. As long as we're exposed to a particular set of opportunities to acquire language-- people talking to us-- we essentially are wired evolutionarily to essentially pick up that language-- its grammar, it's phonology, et cetera. Now, we don't pick up elaborate vocabularies and things like that, but that's pretty clear.

Now how that's relevant to children learning two languages or three languages or four languages is that the debate was, well, gee, learning one language is tough enough. Learning two and three, that's just more pressure on the child. The brain may not be able to handle it. Well, we know now through empirical work where children are learning more than one language and just observing them, and then more recently, if we can just look at how the brain operates when someone speaks to you, we learned that language and as someone speaks to you, the brain emphasis and the lighting up of the brain-- we call it the lighting up of the brain-- where the action is in the brain is very localized.

So you can learn, now we know, three, four, five, six languages as long as you're exposed to it. Why? Because at an early age, your brain essentially is making the kinds of adjustments, the neurological connections that are required mainly because it's highly localized so that children learning two languages is not any rarity. They can learn two. They can learn three. In fact, we have documentation of up to eight languages children can learn. Now, they're not going to learn the

Bilingual Education

elaborate vocabularies of each language, but they learn the grammars and the phonologies of those languages.

What's relevant to second language and to other learning is that we're not wired for reading. We're not wired for the academic material that we created as humans. Remember, language evolved. And so those selectivity activities that take on in learning language were essentially taken care of by quotes "nature". But along we came a few century ago and created things that we call schools. And we created academic content, and we created reading, and we created writing. Well, those are things we're not wired for.

Again, if you look at how the brain handles that, if you ask someone to read, now three or four parts of the brain are going to light up. So that means connections have to be made beyond the language section of the brain to other parts of it, parts that deal with physical movement of the eyes, hearing-- all the things that are connected with what we call schools. So the key thing about understanding bilingualism or multilingualism and then second language learning in educational context is these are very different sort of animals.

Learning language, we can do even as adults. If I were to put you in a situation where you're exposed to Chinese for six months, guess what? You'd pick up the basics of Chinese. You wouldn't pick up the academic basics of Chinese. You wouldn't learn how to read and to write because we have to teach you that. And we have to set up organizations called classrooms or teachers or schools to do that. Second language learning then is really about allowing children the opportunities in educational contexts to become educationally successful in languages that are required in those places called schools.

The one thing I want to point out is this is an international phenomenon. In today's world, migration, immigration from one place to another is very common. It always has been common, but now it's exacerbated mainly because of the internet and so forth. The boundaries essentially are essentially almost nonexistent. So people move, always have moved, but even moved more today.

What do you do with a child who comes to school not speaking English? What kind of program do you have? Given the fact that they come with a language, they don't come alingual, but they don't come with the language required in the school. And they don't come [INAUDIBLE] in many cases, with the academic content required in that language in that school. There are different ways to approach this in terms of programmatic activities, but all of them relate to answering one question. What is your goal? What is the goal of the place called school in educating these children?

If your goal is essentially to move them into the schooling language-- in the United States, it's English, no doubt about it-- then what is it that you do to move them as quickly as you can into English. Well, we'll call that a transitional

Bilingual Education

program. So it's recognizing that the child comes speaking a language other than English-- Spanish in many cases in the United States, but it can be one of over 100 languages in the United States-- to the extent that you can build on what the child brings but understanding that you're going to move them as rapidly as you can into the English academic arena.

If your goal is to essentially move them into English as rapidly as you can because you want them to meet the certain standards, and you're not so overly concerned about the retention of the child's primary language-- what we call the heritage language-- then you'll use a transitional program. A transitional program still recognizes the child comes with a language other than English. And so, you want to know how much you can about that language. You might want to have teachers who can speak that language, if you don't have teachers, someone from the community who speaks that language. The idea is to transition them in an appropriate manner into the English curriculum. That may take a year or two or three, et cetera, but the goal here is to move them into that language-- into the academic language, the school and language.

An alternative, if your goal is, no, we want to retain the language. We might want to call that a maintenance program. And the maintenance program is still aimed primarily at English language learners. We call them English language learners. It's someone who comes to school not speaking English. And the idea here is essentially to develop curriculum, which early on and maybe even throughout the entire environment of the child in school, essentially maintains that home language, that heritage language. Again, in the United States, there are maintenance programs in over a dozen languages-- French, German, Korean, Tagalog, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, et cetera.

And the goal here again is not to delay the instruction of English but to combine academic instruction in two languages. And what you have then is a student after a period of time in the educational program that can speak both languages. The degree to which you may want them to read and write may differ. So you may not necessarily want them to do mathematics in both languages, but you may want them to be able to read in both languages. So there are variations in what those goals are. But the key goal here is you want to maintain the heritage language and add English.

The other alternative is what we call dual language programs. Here, you make sure that you have speakers of the schooling language-- in the United States, it's English-- and speakers of heritage language, which are not English, come together. So the target is no longer just the child who doesn't speak English. The target is all children who want to learn two languages, and we call them dual language programs. Again, there are dual language programs in various languages, so again, back to French, German, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, et cetera.

Bilingual Education

But the goal here is actually to produce dual language students. And the idea then is to have a program starting early, pre-K if possible, in which the children are exposed to both languages, and they're exposed to each other. So English speakers are speaking English to heritage speakers. Heritage speakers are speaking their language to the English speakers. And from a language development perspective, this is almost ideal because kids are talking to each other.

And remember, in early grades, particularly pre-K up through first and second grade, kids will talk to anyone. They're not concerned about whether they're saying the right thing. They're just going to make friends. They're going to talk. They'll fight. They'll do everything. They do what kids do. This is sort of the ideal program if your goal is I really want the heritage language children to keep their language. I want them to have access to English and have access, not only to English from a teacher, but access to English from other children. And the data, by the way, in all these programs say all of them can work. It's just depending on quality of the teacher, quality of the program, and clearly, the kind of organization of the environment that really makes this work.

Overall is that the child comes to school not speaking English, we've discussed a lot about whether you want to make this an additive experience or subtractive experience. The research literature is pretty clear. Using the language and culture of the children as resource and moving them into adapting them now into an English curriculum content, all of that, seems to be an appropriate goal. It's whether or not you can add one thing to another. Child comes with, let's say Spanish in the United States. About 75% to 80% of children come with a heritage language of Spanish.

By the way, most of them are pretty rich language. They understand the grammar. They understand phonology. They communicate well. Now you're placing them into an English environment, which essentially is quite a challenge for them. Well, do you want to retain that Spanish? Do you want to add to that Spanish the English? Or do you want to subtract? Essentially say, no, we don't care what heritage language you speak? What we just want to do is teach you English. Even through the transitional programs that move children from the heritage language to English, still respect and attempt to build from where the child is to where you want them to go.

If there's anything we know about human development, and child development in particular, and learning more specifically is that we learn and we develop based on where we have been before. So it's not like you could start with a blank slate, and say, OK, we want you to learn English. Forget everything else you know, and then start this task. It's essentially trying to move from one set of learnings and developmental operations into ones where you want the child to go. And that's what we would call the additive approach.

Bilingual Education

Careful with the subtractive approach, which basically send signals to the children, and it also sends signals to the family that what they speak and who they are are insignificant. It's not the case because all that learning and development has taken place in context which can help you move the child into the learning and developmental context that you're essentially the architect of.

NARRATOR: As Dr. Garcia emphasized, all of these programs can work under the thoughtful direction of a knowledgeable teacher. In this next segment, Dr. Maria de la Luz Reyes shares research on spontaneous biliteracy, which can occur in any type of language program.

MARIA DE LA LUZ REYES: Over the last 20 years or so, I've been working on research primarily looking at how children begin to read and write in two languages. And I have discovered there's a handful of children that become biliterate without having instruction in two languages. And that's been a fascinating topic for me for a very long time because it also represents my own experience growing up and having been punished for speaking Spanish and yet becoming bilingual and biliterate against the odds.

Spontaneous biliteracy is really the ability to read and write in two languages when you haven't had instruction in both. That's what encoding and decoding meaning from text means. And I call this phenomena that kept appearing spontaneous biliteracy, similar to how Dolores Durkin called children's ability to read before they started school and before they had instruction, she called it spontaneous reading, so I borrowed the term spontaneous. And so I call it spontaneous biliteracy because it happens without instruction.

Spontaneous biliteracy, because it is spontaneous, is something that doesn't have to be taught, otherwise it wouldn't be spontaneous. So people wonder why were these children learning two languages and becoming biliterate in the transitional bilingual program where they don't teach both, and their goal is not for children to become biliterate. That's where it was happening actually. But I think the key was that the teachers allowed that space and that freedom for children to use whatever it is that they brought from home conducive to spontaneous biliteracy.

And you have to think of how you can respect or demonstrate respect or honor or value for other languages, other cultures. Maybe have materials available in two languages. Encourage children to be proud of who they are. And allow them some time to experiment with the languages. If you have that kind of space, that can happen in any classroom, in any kind of model that you might be working with now or later. But the thing to think about is that that's just good teaching practices for almost anybody. But if it involves another language, then you have to think about the other aspects of it.

Bilingual Education

That's the language and culture of the students who may not be native English speakers. And find a way to value that, demonstrate that respect, and have things that connect with that. That's really what's the core of the environment for spontaneous biliteracy. And then, kids who have the interest, the motivation, the agency, and are interested, then there's an opportunity for that potential to evolve. That's really all you have to do because you can't teach it, otherwise, it's not going to be spontaneous.

EUGENE GARCIA: When we talk about education in general, we are not yet where we can call education a science. The science of education presently does not exist mainly because it's a human enterprise. There are so many variables ongoing. Teachers are making decisions almost instantaneously, second by second, about what essentially makes a difference for children.

What we know from the literature, what we know from watching schools is if we put a good teacher in the right place, they do really good things. Now we know enough to know what that teacher does, but we don't know how she actually manufactures it on a moment by moment basis. And we don't have a particular procedure that we say, well, this is the one you really ought to follow mainly because circumstances change, language differences, cultural differences. Every moment is almost different.

However, a set of ways to see that moment and to understand that moment, to understand the child, and that's really why people are learning how to be teachers, is that we can't teach them enough so that when they make that decision, they'll have something that they have a theory, they a set of strategies that essentially can call on to make that moment maximally important for that child. So there's no one-size-fits-all. We have a number of different techniques, strategies, operations that we think are good for kids. How a teacher implements it, how a school professionally develops, how a college of education prepares someone, clearly important, it's not insignificant.

But it really comes down to three or four things. Remember, understanding what the child already knows. So that means you need to know that child upside down and backwards. You need to know where they come from, what language they speak, what culture they come from, immigrant status, et cetera. Then you need to know what operations I have available to me to build on it-- additive-- to add to what the child already brings to get them where I want to go. And I have some standards, both in terms of language and content that I want to marry to get that child there. How to do it. The teacher does it.