I would like to create anchor charts for math, science, and ELA to identify cognates and translations between students' home languages and English. The Wonders curriculum provides a premade list of cognates, which is great, and I will work with students to find other cognates and translations in math and science. This is a concrete way for students to make cross-linguistic connections and can benefit their language learning, writing, and speaking.
Students will be encouraged to use these cognate walls during turn-and-talk discussions, reading of new texts, writing assignments, and assessments. Giving students access to a rich linguistic resource such as cognate/translation walls will help students develop deeper vocabulary, and can help students with finding the right word in the right language.
The Wonders curriculum, while it does not offer direct translations of texts in the resources that I have, does have a Spanish version of the curriculum where I found this direct translation of an expository text. Additionally, many of Wonders' anchor texts are works that already exist outside of the curriculum. I would like to find more direct translations of Wonders texts so that students can compare and contrast two languages within the same genre.
In this expository text example, students would be able to read the text in both English and Spanish. Then, as a class, we would be able to dig into the structure and syntax of both texts. Looking at a direct translation of a text can help students to see the similarities and differences between languages. This is a valuable strategy that incorporates translanguaging and can encourage students to think critically about the language being used.
Additionally, this strategy helps to teach students what type of vocabulary to use in different genres of writing. This is an issue that I struggle to explain to students at times, and I think looking at a specific piece of text written in different languages will help student to see the different styles of writing present in these genres.