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It can be helpful to allow students to read or listen to content in their native language before writing about it in English. This allows them to think about concepts in their native language before writing about it in English.
PROCESS
Student's can annotate in both their home language and English to make sense of what they are reading.
Below is an example of what students could do from The Translanguaging ClassroomÂ
" Circling unknown vocabulary words or Spanish/English cognates
Writing the meaning of the word in English or Spanish
Underlining main ideas
Putting a star next to things you think are interesting or important
Putting a ? next to your questions, wondering, or moments of confusion"
Below is an example of a student translating vocabulary words and definitions into their native language. This activity allowed students to build background knowledge for the classroom but also metalinguistic awareness overall. Students were able to pick out the similarities between the word colonies in English and colonias in Portuguese.
Fourth Grade
for the general education classroomÂ
for 2023-2024 there were two Portuguese speakers and one Spanish speaker that could not read English at grade level
CONTENT
If course texts can only be found in English and are not easily translated it may be best to provide an alternate text that multilingual learners can read in addition to listening to or attempting to read the class text. This text may have the same content or theme but be in their native language or at a more accessible reading level. This will allow students to get the content knowledge they may be missing from a lack of English proficiency.
Love That Dog is one of the texts used in the fourth grade curriculum. Fortuantly it can be found online as a PDF so I was able to translate it through google translate into my students native language. This allows students to do a side by side in their native language and English.
"The use of side-by-side English/Spanish texts also provided all students with an important opportunity to develop and display critical metalinguistic awareness. For the students who were bilingual, putting their two languages next to one another allowed them to compare syntax, vocabulary (including Spanish/English cognates), word choice, and discourse structure. For those who were monolingual, seeing one text in two languages raised their linguistic awareness and enabled them to see how many similarities exist between languages that they may have thought of as totally separate and different" (Garcia et al, 2017, p.134)
Portuguese Love That Dog.pdfSpanish Love That Dog.pdfPage updated
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