EDUTOPIA Article: Native Languages in Education

Incorporating Students’ Native Languages to Enhance Their Learning

Teachers don’t have to speak students’ first languages to make room for these languages in middle and high school classrooms. I loved my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Phillips. I will always remember how safe and welcomed she made me feel. I would watch her give instructions in English, not understanding a word of it, and I would copy what my classmates did. When Mrs. Phillips came over, I would speak unabashedly to her in Vietnamese. She would pay careful attention to my gestures to decipher my message and praise me with a smile in celebration of my work. You do not need to speak the same language to feel someone’s love. I also don’t remember her yelling at me to speak English. What would be the use of finger waving and saying, “Speak English!” when Vietnamese was the only language I knew at the time? As we embrace culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies, we are abandoning destructive English-only policies. Unfortunately, English-first policies often place other languages last—and, by extension, the cultures represented by non-English languages. What messages are multilingual learners (MLs) internalizing when the only sanctioned language they hear in schools is English? With an additive approach to language, MLs can learn another language without having to subtract their existing ones. To read more, click here >>> Incorporating Native Languages