3 Ways to Make Your Classroom More Linguistically Sensitive This Year (On or Offline)
We need linguistically sensitive classrooms now more than ever. Here are three ways to welcome your students’ home languages.
Linguistically sensitive teaching is all about encouraging multilingual pedagogies in the classroom and making students and teachers more reflective and responsive to all languages! Whether you have two or twenty different home languages in your classroom, these ideas will help spark students’ creativity and bring your classroom community together.
Create time for storytelling
This is an excellent way to involve community members and parents in creating an accepting and welcoming linguistic environment. Invite parents or family members to come in and read a book in the child’s home language while sharing a few greeting words and cultural facts. This also works great in the context of a larger classroom project, where students work together to write a story translated in several languages. To start, you can find online books in over 70 languages here! Parents or family members can then be invited to the classroom to help with the writing, as students may be heritage speakers and unfamiliar or still learning the script that their home language is written in.
Using stories is an excellent way to promote languages that are too often overlooked in the school system and help every child (and parent!) see the value of their language.
If you’re working online, why not move story time to Zoom? Instead of a physical book, students can collaborate on a classroom blog in several languages, or use Google slides to create a beautiful PDF that can then be given its own page flip effect!
Designate a weekly classroom interpreter
This idea works wonders for newly-arrived students and helps lend a sense of autonomy and responsibility to others. Each week, choose one student to be the designated “interpreter” for a given language. This student will be tasked with helping other students who speak the same language, explaining classroom directions, tasks, and what’s happening throughout the day. I usually start this exercise by having us all watch clips of professional interpreters in the UN. Students enjoy seeing all of the languages represented, and this usually REALLY takes off if you can spring for a few props! I added a headset, name tag, and toy microphone, and soon, everyone wanted a turn.
Collect your favorite classroom tools together
Tools like Padlet and Wakelet are great ways to organize your favorites class songs, videos, online games, and memories centered around a particular language. You might consider designating a language of the week or month, and allowing one student to share something in their language (a song, a video, etc) on the classroom Padlet board. At the end of the year, you’ll have a beautiful collection of everyone’s home languages that you can share with parents or the rest of the school. It’s also a great place to share information for parents about the benefits of including students’ home languages in the classroom. Due to years of unfortunate bias against certain languages, I’ve seen some parents try to downplay their home languages as “unimportant” or “not useful” in an academic context. This is not only heartbreaking, but untrue — all languages are valid, and speaking any additional languages will provide students with numerous cognitive, social, and emotional benefits.
To give you an idea, the French association Bilingues & Plus has created a rich Padlet for parents about the initiative “The week of languages.”
