The Future of Education

It is argued that language, both oral and in writing, is central to learning (Lahey, 2017) in an increasingly globalized and digitalized world (de Oliveira & Smith, 2019). Cognitivism and constructivism theoretical perspectives stress talking and dialogue as key to learning (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2019). They contend that interactions between teachers and learners and among student peers where they provide one another feedback as well as receive it, promote brain development, enhance metacognitive skills, and offer an increase of opportunities to strengthen learners’ self-concept and stimulate their socio-emotional maturity. In this presentation the researcher will discuss a qualitative study of four cases where multilingual students are silent in different content lessons, arguing that this promotes a loss of learning. The cases are analyzed using a raciolinguistic theoretical lens (Flores & Rosa, 2015) to uncover that what is voiced in the classroom is at the expense of the silence of some students, or what Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson (1989) denoted as linguism and Flores (2019) identified as linguistic marginalization. The researcher will argue that teachers must break the silence of these students when learning content through language, by validating their rich and diverse linguistic repertoire while augmenting their fluency in acquiring the discipline-based register. Translanguaging as a pedagogical tool to promote language use conducive to learning will be explored. I will argue that to reframe language use to learn content in multilingual classrooms equitably, educators, both teachers and administrators, must assume a language-as-a-resource ideology, that views language as a human right and as an asset to the learning process.

Keywords – content learning; language-as-a resource; translanguaging; multilingual students; silence; linguistic marginalization

References:

Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., & Osher, D. (2019). Implications for educational practice of the science of learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 24(2), 97-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/1088691.2018.1537791

de Oliveira, L. C., & Smith, B. (Eds.). (2019). Expanding literacy practices across multiple modes and lanugages for multilingual students. Information Age Publishing.

Flores, N. (2019). Translanguaging into raciolinguistic ideologies: A personal reflection on the legacy of Ofelia García. Journal of Multilingual Education Research, 9, 45-60. https://fordham.bepress.com/jmer/vol9/iss1/5

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017- 8055.85.2.149

Lahey, T. (2017). Collaborating to address the challenge of academic language. Journal of Teacher Education, 68(3), 239-250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487117696279

Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Phillipson, R. (1989). Mother Tongue: The theoretical and sociopolitical construction of a concept. In U. Ammon (Ed.), Status and function on languages and language varieties. Walter de Gruyter & CO. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110860252