Purpose 3: Process New Information and Deepen Learning

Throughout the year, we utilize multimodal resources to learn about science concepts. We regularly read articles from our textbook and often watch short videos that relate to our topic of interest. In addition to these resources, we keep science notebooks that are updated as we learn. I use these notebooks as an assessment for student learning, both formally and informally, throughout the trimesters. 

Next year, I would like to encourage students to fill out their science notebooks using any language they prefer. I will be able to assess students on their content knowledge and general linguistic performance by looking at their translingual science notebooks. García, Ibarra Johnson, and Seltzer differentiate general linguistic performance and language-specific performance as whether or not teachers are assessing for "exclusive use of features from a named language (e.g., Spanish, Mandarin, English) to perform classroom tasks" (2017, p. 80). Since I am not grading students on specific language features, I will be able to see students' general linguistic abilities, which can still help me to see where students may be struggling in both content and language. 

Often during math lessons, I pause instruction to give students the opportunity to turn and talk to a partner. I instruct students to share something that makes sense in their brain or something that they are still trying to understand. This gives students the opportunity to use each other as tools for learning. Opportunities for collaboration among peers is important so that MLL students can "learn from, and interact with, students who have more experience with the language that [they] are just learning" (García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; Celic, 2009; Walqui, 2006). To more directly address the needs of MLLs, these turn-and-talks will be multilingual in nature. Students will be able to turn and discuss the math concepts in any language they feel comfortable, so as to use their entire linguistic repertoires to make meaning.