Tackling Literacy Challenges for Emergent Bilingual Middle Schoolers

Do you ever have one of those days where you ponder, “What on Earth am I doing, and am I doing it right???” I did. Often. And they were often accompanied by tears and the heavy consumption of caffeinated beverages to get me through the day. Teaching English to middle school learners who are also emergent bilingual learners presents unique challenges if one of your goals is to ensure success, equitable outcomes or to leave no learning unfinished.

Over the years, I’ve found these challenges fall into four big buckets: classroom culture, instructional methods, curriculum content, and assessment. Let’s dig into each of these buckets and identify some of the most common challenges - it’s not you, it just is - and some strategies to address them.

In the first bucket, classroom culture, three challenges deserve our attention: cultural and linguistic diversity, socio-emotional states, and academic confidence levels. As educators, we must be prepared to create an inclusive learning environment that responds to learners from diverse cultural backgrounds in a manner that respects, affirms, and validates not only who those learners are but all that they bring to the classroom. But how?

My two big bucket strategy recommendations here are to

• Engage in ongoing professional learning that supports developing a greater understanding of the diverse cultural norms and values of your learners’ cultures.
• Integrate practices into your repertoire that demonstrate your increasing cultural awareness. It may be as simple as how you structure groups. Maybe it’s considering the images and messages displayed on your classroom walls. It could be as complex as learning simple phrases and greetings in your learners’ primary languages and incorporating that language into your social interactions with your learners. Start with “hello,” “good morning,” and “I’ll see you tomorrow” in their primary languages and build from there.

I’ll address this in detail in the March blog, so stay tuned for more on socio-emotional support and inspiring progress via inclusive classroom culture.

There’s a lot of overlap between the buckets that contain instructional methods and curriculum content. So, let’s consider them a super bucket. Digging into this, we find significant challenges often categorized as building BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and developing CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency).

You may have learners across various language proficiency levels in their primary language and English. You may have learners of varying levels of literacy development in their primary language, influencing their development in English literacy. Yet, we expect them to read, write, and respond using academic language like that in their grade-level texts. I know; the struggle is real!

Evidence-validated strategies for tackling this bucket would have you:

• Provide small-group instructional interventions to those learners struggling in language and literacy development.
• Integrate oral and written English language instruction into content-area teaching.
• Teach academic vocabulary explicitly and intensively over several days using a variety of instructional approaches.
• Provide regular, structured opportunities to develop written language skills.

Those four are robust instructional practices, so much so that they took entire chapters in my upcoming book. I can’t cover all that in this post, so I’ll devote the May blog to those vocabulary and writing strategies.

Our last bucket contains two items regarding assessment that warrant consideration: placement issues and navigating standardized assessments. Proper formative and summative assessment is crucial but often challenging. Most general education and content area assessments are not developed with emergent bilingual learners in mind.

Assessments contain significant bias when developed without considering a learners’ culture and lived experience. Too often, assessment outcomes reflect the learner’s English proficiency rather than their actual knowledge or intelligence. Imagine having to take tests in a language we were learning! So, what’s a middle school educator to do?

I suggest beginning with these two strategies that you can implement in your classroom:

• Recognize the bias in your assessments and then challenge them. That might mean working with your professional learning community to determine if there is a better tool for the task. It may mean that you discount the outcomes of questions that contain bias – where you have that ability.
• Provide multiple pathways for learners to demonstrate knowledge. One way to do that is to implement project-based assessments, portfolios, and performance-based assessments alongside your traditional exams.

Dr. Almitra L. Berry is an educational consultant, author, and podcaster. She contributed to the review of emergent bilingual supports in Connections: English Language Arts. Dr. Berry extensively covers emergent bilingual learners in her book Effecting Change for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners and several episodes of the Educational Equity Emancipation podcast.