story by Claire Miller
Dual-language classrooms give students the opportunity to learn different subjects in English and in a second, target language.
For two elementary school teachers in central Texas, their dual-language classrooms are spaces where students can work on personal writing projects in both English and Spanish.
Assistant Professor Rosalyn Harvey-Torres and three colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin co-authored a study published in The Reading Teacher about these two teachers’ efforts to encourage writing skills in multiple languages, and what educators can learn from their model of practice.
Ms. Alma and Mrs. Fierro*, the two teachers at the heart of Harvey-Torres’s study, take a “writer’s workshop” approach to their classrooms – they plan writing assignments that give students opportunities to write in English and Spanish about their lives and experiences in an authentic, meaningful way.
Harvey-Torres and her colleagues spent seven months during one school year observing these two classrooms and interviewing the teachers about their classroom practices that support writing in different languages.
Ms. Alma read her own writings to students and engaged them in conversations about how their personal writings included both English and Spanish. She would ask students about when they speak English, when they speak Spanish and when they use both languages, and then asked them to think about how they can use both languages in their writing. Then, she’d give them time to work on their writing independently or with peers.
Similarly, Mrs. Fierro’s class read books and magazines written by bilingual authors who use more than one language in their storytelling, and they discussed how authors from different genres and types of writing used language in their work. Then, students were encouraged to create their own zines – a self-published magazine – with their bilingual writings and designs.
Harvey-Torres and her colleagues argue that Ms. Alma and Mrs. Fierro’s classrooms gave bilingual and multilingual students a learning environment where different languages are valued and can be weaved into their writing lessons.
“Teachers have the power to show students that their stories have a place in the classroom,” they wrote. “Ms. Alma and Mrs. Fierro’s writing lessons sustained the languages and literacies of their students and further supported their development as strategic bi/multilingual writers. Although these teachers work in dual-language classrooms, their language-centered approach to teaching writing can and must be utilized across diverse educational settings.”
*The names listed for these two teachers are pseudonyms.