story by Claire Miller
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than one-third of children enrolled in Head Start early care programs and 15 percent of kindergarteners nationwide speak a language other than English at home.
Educators who teach the youngest learners are well positioned to help multilingual children develop strong early literacy skills, which include early writing skills, while they’re first learning how to communicate in more than one language.
In an article for The Reading Teacher, Gary Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings, and Associate Professor Chenyi Zhang outline several ways that educators can help Pre-K students develop their early writing skills in multiple languages.
Teachers can provide students with a variety of writing supplies and hang up examples of writing in different languages in their classrooms. They can also talk with parents about their students’ cultural backgrounds and the ways they incorporate writing at home.
Bingham and Zhang also suggest that teachers model the different ways adults use writing to communicate their thoughts and ideas, like making grocery lists or writing a note to a loved one. They can demonstrate how oral and written language are connected and use examples from English and other languages that their students speak.
“Encouraging children to communicate their ideas verbally, in either the home language or English, before they write provides educators a window into children’s thinking and their understanding about purposes for writing,” they wrote. “It also gives unique insight into the intended audience for the message, which can be used to guide children through the writing process.”
It’s also important for teachers to understand how different cultures teach their children to write. Bingham and Zhang explain that Chinese children are often asked to repeatedly copy sets of Chinese characters to memorize the correct way to write each word. For example, the characters for “dog,” “great” and “big” have some visual similarities but very different meanings and pronunciations. So, students who practice copying Chinese characters are learning handwriting, reading and writing skills all at once.
Knowing these linguistic and cultural differences can also help teachers when trying to assess students’ writing skills. If teachers know the languages their students speak at home, they can identify when students are using those languages in trying to spell, write and say specific words.
Bingham and Zhang’s article emphasizes how important it is for educators to understand and support students who speak and write in more than one language, and how their teaching practices can set them up for future writing success.
“For young emergent bilinguals to fully thrive in early education settings, teachers should be knowledgeable about how oral language maps onto written language across varied language systems,” they wrote. “While it is not expected that teachers will have a deep knowledge of all the languages young children might speak in classrooms, becoming familiar with written language systems can help teachers leverage home language experiences in ways that enrich reading and writing connections for multilingual learners.”