MunPat
I used to work as an ESL teacher at a small community centre in Montreal, where I taught students between the ages of 6-12 once a week. The students were multilingual speakers, who already knew French and Arabic. Before my first day at work, my boss told me that I was to ONLY speak in English in the classroom. She warned me that if I let students know I could speak French or if I allowed them to speak French, then they would not bother to try and speak English.
As a new and inexperienced teacher, I took her advice to heart in the beginning. However, I quickly realized that this practice was actually hindering my students’ desire to speak in English. They were having a lot of trouble communicating and understanding a language they barely knew. This was making my students frustrated and they were losing motivation to learn. I made the mistake of having monolingual expectations for multilingual speakers and was unintentionally making them feel as deficient speakers.
After realizing my mistake, I decided to focus more on my students multilingual abilities, instead of a monolingual goal. As multilingual speakers, not only do they have access to different linguistic resources, but their experiences also influence their language learning process (Cenoz & Gorter, 2019). I started using more French in the classroom and making cross-linguistic references between English and French. According to Jason Cenoz and Duck Gorter (2019), multilingual learners benefit more from their repertoire when teachers spend time highlighting the common features between different languages. Once I started encouraging students to make connections between the different languages they knew and to use their whole linguistic repertoire, they were much more engaged with their learning. They were no longer afraid to make mistakes, they took more initiative in their learning and even used their linguistic knowledge as tools to help one another.
My experience as an ESL teacher at this community centre taught me about the negative impacts the monolingual bias can have on second language learners. They are not new language learners, rather they are speakers of multiple languages and possess a rich repertoire of linguistic and cultural knowledge. However, as I learned with my boss, this is not a practice that is favoured or appreciated by everyone. Language teachers and students still face external challenges in regards to monolingual expectations. Hence, in order for multilingual speakers to thrive, there needs to be a societal shift in the way language learning is viewed.
Here is a link to an article that gives practical examples of how language teachers can better accommodate the needs of multilingual speakers: https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2020/10/raising_the_bar_for_ell_instruction.html
Question
- As a teacher or as a student, have you ever used different languages inside the classroom to help you teach or learn another language?
Reference
Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2019) Multilingualism, Translanguaging, and Minority Languages in SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 103(S1), 130-135.
