I grew up in Moscow in the former Soviet Union. When I was in the eighth grade, I enrolled in an intensive English course that met three hours a day, three days a week. By the end of each session, I had an enormous headache, which was unusual for someone so young.
I quickly realized that learning a language was not only incredibly hard work, but also a painful journey. No other school subject was that demanding. After one and a half years of this intensive coursework, I still wasn’t fluent in English (but I did make some progress). Despite these challenges, I found an unexpected sense of joy in the process of learning English.
I remember wondering how the difficult and exhausting task of language learning could be made more accessible, engaging, and even fun. And was there any way to cut through these tedious grammar exercises and all of the repetition? I wondered whether language learning could be more efficient.
These questions have really driven my work ever since.
An interesting journey
I’ve taught elementary grades in Russia and high school ESL to students in the US. Today, I’m a professor and director of the master’s in Bilingual/Multicultural Education and TESOL. It’s been an interesting journey, and literacy is, of course, a large part of developing language skills. In fact, we can argue that academic language is best maintained when the speaker has developed literacy.
In some of my first language attrition research, I looked at the changes in the first language of immigrants through a morphological, syntactic, lexical and pragmatic lens. My study participants were immigrant teenage speakers, both boys and girls, who arrived in the US between the ages of 1½ and 2 years old. They’d all grown up in Russian-speaking households and had similar socioeconomic backgrounds (i.e., college-educated parents who worked in the US.)
Half of the participants in the study had developed Russian literacy, and the other half had not. I recorded them at the age of 12 and then again at the age of 15. What was striking was how the literate speakers were able to maintain their native language – Russian – while living in an English-dominant environment and attending English-language schools. Importantly, these speakers also demonstrated remarkable pragmatic competence, including their ability to distinguish between respectful and familiar address forms, which is very important in Russian. They were also able to interrogate cultural stereotypes and adhere to socio-pragmatic norms in Russian. This suggests that we not only maintain the morphological and grammatical aspects of our first language, but also continue to access the key aspects of cultural and social interaction that are integral to our first language identity.
On the other hand, participants who had not developed literacy in their first language faced limitations in their ability to communicate effectively in their native language. In fact, communication breakdowns included all linguistic domains from phonetics to morphosyntax and pragmatics. In summary, literacy in both first and second languages is an essential component of bilingual development, informing their identities as biliterate, bilingual, and bicultural individuals.
The question is, how can educators and schools effectively foster and sustain first language literacy, recognizing its profound impact not only on linguistic development but also on cultural identity and overall communicative competence in a second language? Here are some recommendations:
- Encourage families to use their first language at home. Inform families very straightforwardly that speaking their first/family language and reading in that language at home is not only okay, but also crucial to a child’s successful overall development and English learning. Immigrant families look up to teachers and listen to them. If the teacher tells them that it’s essential to keep using their first language and that it will help their child develop English, the families will listen. Unfortunately, teachers may still recommend not speaking to the child at home in the native language. We have been making progress in this area, but there’s still work to be done.
- Understand the connection. It’s essential to recognize the profound connection between the identity of our multilingual learners and immigrant students and their ability to communicate in their native language. It’s particularly important because many first-generation immigrant families rely on their first language as their primary means of communication within their immediate family and with extended family members. Thus, first language maintenance is essential for these children to stay connected to their family and become functioning bilinguals.
- Foster additive bilingualism. If parents and grandparents don’t speak English fluently, it can create an emotional and cultural disconnect with the children if they lose their heritage language. As educators, we all play a critical role in fostering additive bilingualism, whereby students continue to develop their first language while acquiring English. The less desirable scenario is referred to as subtractive bilingualism, where students “replace” their first language with English altogether. Additive bilingualism has been the golden standard over the last 30 years as we develop bilingual education/dual language programs.
- Leverage the science of reading. Literacy platforms like Lexia Core5 Reading and other evidence-based programs incorporate explicit, systematic instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, aligning with research-backed best practices for effective reading development. It is essential to remember that the science of reading is a comprehensive program that expands well beyond phonics and provides a much more comprehensive approach to literacy development, with the focus on vocabulary growth and oracy development as its basics. Ongoing training in the science of reading, adapted for multilingual learners, is crucial and can include workshops on contrastive linguistics or the integration of content and language instruction. This would help teachers understand how different home languages influence English language development, and it’s very beneficial for general education teachers who may not have ESL or bilingual training.
Let’s make it more meaningful
One of the core principles of the standards for dual language education is that language learning should be embedded in a meaningful, real-world context. We’re using AI to manage that in a simpler and faster way than ever before. For example, Newsela’s literacy education provides current events and non-fiction articles at five different Lexile reading levels. It adapts the texts to any level and develops assignments for those texts based on the students’ proficiency level.
Looking ahead, we must continue to bridge the literacy research-practice gap. We can do this by making the research more accessible to educators. Teachers are expected to implement best practices, but they don’t always have access to the latest multilingual literacy research (or they don’t have time to explore that research and to develop ways to apply it).
I also share on the All For Literacy podcast that we should be creating more research-practice partnerships, whereby universities and schools co-develop literacy strategies based on real classroom needs (with researchers visiting classrooms to “see” where the needs are in person). In many cases, such partnerships depend on personal relationships between universities and K-12 schools. If we could expand and strengthen those alliances, it would really empower school leaders to implement evidence-based literacy strategies tailored to their unique student populations.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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