你好! ¡Hola! Bonjour! Hello! नमस्कार! xin chào!

Multilingual classrooms are abundant across the United States. As published by the US Department of Education, there were 4.9 million students in the United States who were labeled as English Learners in 2016. As classrooms continue to grow more diverse, attention must be brought to the multilingual and multicultural aspects in the classroom (Cummins et al, 2005).

In 2013, Dr. María Ghiso, a researcher, worked with a teacher, Mrs. Rangan, in a summer program with 7-8 year old children. The children were all learning English, and were from multiple backgrounds, with multiple home languages. In order to make the environment welcoming and fruitful for the whole class, Ghiso and Rangan focused the summer program to include the families and languages of the children (Ghiso, 2013). Here are some examples of how they created a thriving multilingual classroom and some tips on how you can do it yourself!

Identity at the center. Ghiso and Rangan gave the children opportunities to teach the class words in their language, noting that the teachers thought the children were knowledgeable and the teachers were excited to learn from them. Ensuring that the children talked about why their personal culture and language backgrounds were important valued the children’s experiences and identities (Ghiso, 2013).

Names are powerful. Ghiso and Rangan used the word “knights” as a collective name for the children, telling the children that they come with knowledge and positioning themselves as advocates for their learning and cultures (Ghiso, 2013).

Partnering with families. Throughout the summer, parents came to the class and shared knowledge with the students like sharing artifacts and participating in circle time. Because of this, families were honored as knowledgeable learning partners. Rather than seeing a language barrier, Ghiso and Rangan used district interpreters to make this work possible (Ghiso, 2013).

So, what might you do? Here are some ways to bring students’ home cultures and languages into your classroom:

• Family histories – have students interview a family member about an important family event (try starting with the question, tell me about a time you were brave when you were a child) and use that interview to create family narratives in the classroom.
• Read picture books in languages other than English! (Need to find some? Check out these lists of bibliographies from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center)
• Invite your students to be language detectives – as a class, find words that are similar in lots of different languages and find words that don’t translate easily to another language (Check out this blog post for some ideas)

It is important to remember that multilingual teaching can look different depending on the children. Children have different past experiences with language and have different levels with their home language or new language. Each classroom will be different, but that is what makes teaching so exciting! The sky is the limit when it comes to collaboration and exploration in the world of multilingual teaching!

Cummins, J., Bismilla, V., & Chow, P. (2005). Affirming Identity in Multilingual Classrooms. Educational Leadership, 63(1), 38–43. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.unh.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=507822358&site=ehost-live

Ghiso, M. (2013). Every Language Is Special: Promoting Dual Language Learning in Multicultural Primary Schools. Young Children, 68(1), 22–26.

U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics