What is Literacy?
Literacy plays an integral part in all children's linguistic development and academic success. Educators need to cultivate linguistically rich environments for their students, and to do this, it is important to support all the languages the child may speak.
Let's start by defining a few main concepts important to reading: phonics, phonological awareness, and comprehension. Literacy begins by learning about the relationship between letters and the sounds they make; this is called phonics. Once children have a good understanding of phonics, they can begin to recognize and manipulate sounds. Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that includes concepts such as segmenting sounds, blending sounds, and rhyming. For children who speak multiple languages, phonological awareness skills in one language will naturally transfer to another language. This is because some aspects of both languages, like phonics, sentence structure, or vocabulary, may align.
Once children develop phonics and phonological awareness skills, they can increase their overall vocabulary. In turn, word recognition becomes more automatic, which creates a greater space in the brain for processing what we are reading, in other words, reading comprehension.
Strengthening literacy skills is integral to supporting a child’s ability to learn. If a child lacks the phonological awareness skills required for literacy, they will face difficulty learning the curriculum required for their success in the classroom.
Supporting Multilingual Learners in the Classroom:
It is important to support both languages in the classroom because each language a child speaks is a tool for communication. Multilingual children need each language to adequately function across different areas of their lives.
Classroom interactions can support the development of literacy skills by exposing them to new words and concepts. Increased exposure to words in multiple languages can expand and strengthen overall vocabulary and word recognition skills. The transfer of phonological awareness skills across languages can be directly supported through the use of linguistically diverse materials in the classroom.
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Media
To best support the literacy skills of multilingual learners in your classroom, it is first important to embrace linguistic diversity within your classroom. Recognize that although children may speak English at school, this is not always the language they speak at home. Incorporate books that represent different cultures and languages. Learn what languages the children in your classroom speak and provide books for them to read in that language. Not only does this support multilingual students and their literacy acquisition, but it also creates a space for all children to learn about language and culture.
Interactive read-aloud activities can support the overall development of language abilities through increasing interaction with print and encouraging shared attention during reading. Read-aloud activities can also be used to encourage reading comprehension strategies by identifying setting, main points, characters, and their attributes using vocabulary from multiple languages.
Provided below is a resource that can be used to access books in multiple languages: http://en.childrenslibrary.org
Multilingualism and Classroom Routines
Another easy-to-implement way to foster literacy with multilingual learners is to incorporate their language into your classroom routines. For example, this could include greeting them in the morning, giving the daily announcements, or singing songs in the languages your students speak.
Inclusive Classroom Calendar
To be more inclusive, educators can incorporate a calendar that includes important dates recognized across cultures. This calendar can even include dates, the month, and days of the week in the languages that your students speak. Celebrate dates and holidays that are important to your students. On these dates, you can recognize the holidays by bringing in books about the holiday, creating arts and crafts on the theme, and even creating your lesson plans around the holiday theme being celebrated.
Provided below is a resource that can be used to further explore implementing cultural holidays in the classroom:
Multilingual Labels
To further build on literacy skills in your multilingual classroom, it is helpful to label common items around your classroom in different languages. Children are constantly moving around the classroom, and having labels on common objects around the room can provide language input and also give children an opportunity to read and see the letters of words in other languages. Both are important for phonics and phonological awareness development.
Implications
Supporting the literacy skills of multilingual learners means first recognizing that a child’s development of key literacy concepts (e.g., phonics, phonological awareness) in one language can transfer to the other languages they speak. This is why it is important to support both languages. Although on the outside we may see that a child speaks more than one language, in their brain, the languages are not separate but intertwined.
A few easy ways to support a multilingual learner’s literacy within the classroom include having culturally and linguistically diverse books, intertwining multilingualism and classroom routines, creating inclusive calendars, and labeling items within the classroom in many languages.
Each language a child speaks is a tool for communication and literacy learning. Classroom strategies incorporating multiple languages can help support the development of all languages for the diverse needs they fulfill. In this way, educators can make sure children have the language skills they need to thrive in every environment! Supporting all languages within your classroom will, in turn, help students cultivate strong literacy skills and help them to thrive academically.
References:
5 tips for building community in a multilingual literacy Classroom. (2024, February 27). Heinemann. https://blog.heinemann.com/5-tips-for-building-community-in-a-multilingual-literacy-classroom#:~:text=Encourage%20students%20with%20different%20native,each%20other%27s%20diverse%20linguistic%20abilities
Reading with Multilingual Learners. (n.d.). WIDA. https://wida.wisc.edu/teach/reading
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