Monolingual educators can celebrate multiculturalism by intentionally incorporating students’ cultures and experiences within instruction. Monolingual teachers can also pause to have students share how something is said or structured in their home language and compare that to English. I cannot speak those three languages, but I could still create opportunities for cross-linguistic connections. I shared how a possessive is communicated in Vietnamese, and students shared how it’s communicated in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While I was providing students with examples in English, I paused at the third example to ask students this essential question: One time, I was teaching students the concept of a singular possessive. brainstorm, draft ideas, and organize in writing using the home languageĪdditionally, one of the best things that monolingual educators can do is to help students make cross-linguistic connections, which is the ability to see the similarity and differences between languages (James, 2012).watch a video in their home language to gain content-specific knowledge.encourage guardians to read to their children in the home language.translate content-specific vocabulary words into the home language.annotate, take notes, and sketch note in the home language.read in their home language to learn about a concept.Monolingual teachers can facilitate home-language literacy by encouraging students who are literate in their home language to: We want our multilingual students to read and write using their home language. We want students to also be multiliterate in their home language and not just English. Having monolingual teachers advocating against English-privileging policies adds weight to the argument to end them. Monolingual educators also can resist proposed English-only policies or campaign to disband them. conference with others (e.g., friends, classmates, family members).This means they can celebrate and encourage students using their home language to: They can champion for students and colleagues to free translanguage. Monolingual educators can encourage multilingualism at schools. Brandon Beck, a monolingual educator in a dual language program and author of Unlocking Unlimited Potential, revealed things monolinguals can do to support language learners. With reflection, I now realize that monolingual teachers do play a significant role in ensuring that their students become more multilingual, multiliterate, and multicultural. I was deeply embarrassed about how I may have made the monolingual teachers feel. After the parent presentation, a teacher who was in attendance found me and said, “I feel really bad that I’m not a multilingual.” I knew right at that moment that I unintentionally undervalued the monolingual teachers. Not all the teachers at that school are multilinguals. I remember saying this one very controversial line: If I had a child enrolled in this school, I would hope they are placed in classrooms with a multilingual teacher. I also expressed how valuable the multilingual teachers were to the school as they can model and facilitate instruction in multiple languages. I talked about all of the academic benefits of using multiple languages and the heightened cognitive skills that come from the demands of manipulating multiple languages ( Kamenetz, 2016 ). I once was asked to present to parents about the virtues of being multilingual.
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