PEDAGOGICAL DISCUSSION: PROMOTING MULTILINGUAL AND ENGLISH LEARNING ACTIVITIES
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P130-C7
2025-10-02
278
PEDAGOGICAL DISCUSSION: PROMOTING MULTILINGUAL AND ENGLISH LEARNING ACTIVITIES
As mentioned earlier, my own pedagogical response to the linguistic inequities experienced by ESOL students at schools like Northside is to promote both multilingual and English learning activities in the classroom. My decisions around when to encourage students to use their primary languages and when to promote (but not require) the use of English would depend on the knowledge, skill, and discourse development I felt needed to take place in the learning activities in which we were engaging. The teachers and students at Northside had much to teach me about such decision making.
Evelyn Lo, who was teaching finite math during the pilot study at Northside, reminded me how much students can learn from their peers through discussions and conversations about a task at hand, especially in large classrooms where one teacher has to respond to the questions of 30 or 40 students. In promoting peer teaching and learning, it is important that students have the opportunity to share knowledge as clearly as possible. For many ESOL students, this entails using a language other than English.
Mina's desire for debate in Anne Yee's classroom reminded me about the kinds of interactions that are valued in North American classrooms and the difficulty many ESOL students have in engaging in such interactions. Similarly, Timothy Chiu's play, No Pain, No Gain, taught me about the importance North American schools place on the display of English oral presentation skills and how difficult it is to acquire the discourse of making classroom presentations. For ESOL with limited proficiency in English, preparation for debating complex issues and making classroom presentations are often best taken up in students' primary languages and then rehearsed and shared with others in English.
On challenging linguistic inequities, I return again to the 1998 Literacy Foundation Policy. The policy's statement on diversity encourages both educators and learners to see the world in multiple ways and to use the knowledge that comes from multiple ways of seeing to create a more just and equitable society (p. 7). It is my hope that readers will use the ethnographic data, the commentaries, the pedagogical discussions, and the plays, Hong Kong, Canada, and No Pain, No Gain to engage in new discussions on antidiscriminatory education. I wish you all the best.
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