Abstract
This chapter shifts the focus from the study of Language Awareness to what we are calling here Critical Multilingual Awareness. We propose ways in which teachers can be made not only to recognize the linguistic diversity of children and communities, but also to question the concept of language itself, as legitimized in schools. In understanding that national named languages and academic language have been socially constructed, teachers become empowered to become social activists so that all students are educated equitably.
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Keywords
- Bilingual teachers
- Bilingualism
- Critical multilingual language awareness
- Descriptive review
- Dynamic Bilingualism
- Ethnography
- Foreign language teachers
- Language awareness
- Multilingualism
- Second language teachers
- Teacher education
- Teachers as social activists
- Translanguaging
Introduction
In the twenty-first century, we have developed a substantial, although incomplete, body of knowledge about what teachers need to know and be able to do, to recognize, build, and/or develop the many language and literacy practices in twenty-first century classrooms and communities. Less understood, however, is how to educate all teachers in ways that ensure not only the acquisition of those understandings, but also the teachers’ enactment of those understandings in their teaching and their students’ learning. This chapter starts out by describing the different ways in which Language Awareness (LA) programs have been interpreted and developed to include what I call here Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) for all teachers, and also for bilingual/multilingual teachers. The chapter then turns to considering its main goal – how teachers can be educated to gain CMLA, important for all teacher education programs.
Early Developments: Language Awareness and Critical Language Awareness
Since the publication of Bolitho and Tomlinson’s Discover English: A Language Awareness Workbook in 1980, the term “language awareness” has been increasingly used especially in the language education field. Generally, language awareness (LA) or knowledge about language (KAL) in teaching has been used to encompass three understandings about language, its teaching and its learning (Andrews 1999, 2001; Wright and Bolitho 1993, 1997; Wright 2002; building on the roles described by Edge 1988):
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Knowledge of language (proficiency). The language user
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Includes ability to use language appropriately in many situations; awareness of social and pragmatic norms.
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Knowledge about language (subject-matter knowledge). The language analyst
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Includes forms and functions of systems – grammar, phonology, vocabulary.
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Pedagogical practice. The language teacher
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Includes creating language learning opportunities and affordances; classroom interaction.
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The Association for Language Awareness (ALA) defines language awareness as “explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use” (ALA home page). Its journal Language Awareness, published since 1992, states its goal as the study of
the role of explicit knowledge about language in the process of language learning; the role that such explicit knowledge about language plays in language teaching and how such knowledge can best be mediated by teachers; the role of explicit knowledge about language in language use: e.g., sensitivity to bias in language, manipulative aspects of language, literary use of language….
Wright (2002) distinguishes two roles for Language Awareness:
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As a goal of teacher education, it develops the teachers’ sensitivity to language, what Wright calls their “linguistic radar.”
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As a method, a task or activity type, teachers have students work with authentic language data.
In his classic book, Awareness of Language, Eric Hawkins (1984) describes “awareness of language” as a way of bridging all aspects of language education (Native language/Foreign language/Second language/Ethnic minority language/Classical language) that presently take place in isolation. Although language focused, Hawkins’ interest is not on teaching languages per se, but in promoting questioning about language to develop linguistic understandings and challenge linguistic prejudices. Hawkins proposes a series of topics for such a curriculum, one for all teachers, and not just language teachers: (1) human language and signals, signs, and symbols, (2) spoken and written language, (3) how language works, (4) using language, (5) languages of the UK, Europe, and the world, and (6) how do we learn languages.
Hawkins’ Language Awareness project was supported in Great Britain by The Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE) in 1984 and the National Congress on Languages in Education (NCLE) in 1985. In 1988, the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of the English Language in England (the Kingman report 1988) developed Knowledge about Language (KAL) as a possible component of the English National Curriculum. The purpose was to have teachers improve their competence in their own language, improve their language learning through comparisons between other languages and their own, and increase their linguistic sensitivity to other languages (Tulasiewicz 1997).
Language awareness curricula have focused on the standardized “target language ”, that is, the language the teacher is trying to teach in the classroom, with little understandings of the students’ varied language practices or their bilingualism, except as these “interfere” with the language being taught. These programs intend to develop the teachers’ understandings of the three components mentioned above:
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Their knowledge of the language she is teaching, how to use it appropriately
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Their knowledge about the language she is teaching, their forms, and functions
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Their pedagogical practice
Figure 1 depicts these traditional understandings of language awareness that have been espoused not only for second language and foreign language teachers, but also for all teachers of Language Arts. The teacher is really not required to have any knowledge of, or knowledge about, the “other” language practices of the students, or of bilingualism, or of understandings of the political economy and social issues surrounding language use. She is simply seen as a language teacher focusing on the schools’ construction of what is considered “academic” language .
Almost from the beginning, criticism of traditional Language Awareness projects began to emerge, most vehemently from Clark et al. (1990). They claimed that traditional Language Awareness programs that are offered as separate curricular programs treat language as legitimating a social and sociolinguistic order without regard to how this has been socially created and therefore socially changeable. LA focuses, the critics say, only on standard varieties of language, valued as superior to the language practices at home, which are then devalued. LA does not challenge the illusion of “naturalness, but reproduce it” (Clark et al. 1990, p. 256). Furthermore, there is a monolingual bias in the LA project, the critics claim. By proposing a Critical Language Awareness (CLA) project, Clark et al. (1990, 1991) advanced the idea that social forces shape discourse in a process of domination over speakers with less prestige and that students and teachers need to be able to reconstruct the social process and ideologies that underlie the conventions of language in school and society and act to transform them.
Major Contributions: Toward Critical Multilingual Awareness
This chapter builds on concepts of Language Awareness (LA) and Critical Language Awareness (CLA) (Fairclough 1990) to propose that there is a need for Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) in the twenty-first century. Multilingual schools, now prevalent in the world, bring to the foreground a myriad of language practices, some which differ significantly from the ways in which the standard variety of nation-states is used.
As the multilingual turn in scholarship (May 2014) caught up with the multilingual nature of schools all over the world, scholars started to pay attention to raising awareness of the existing multilingualism through education programs. In Europe, the late 1990s and early 2000 brought a flurry of activity that corresponds to what we may call Multilingual Awareness. For example, Perregaux and his associates in Switzerland developed multilingual material that included migrant languages to make children conscious of the linguistic diversity in their communities (Perregaux 1995). The European Commission funded a project in five countries directed by Michel Candelier – the Evlang program (see Candelier 2003). Hélot and Young (2006) launched the Didenheim project , in which young children were engaged with many languages, including those of the community in which they lived. The objective of these Multilingual Awareness projects has been to raise among teachers awareness of language diversity and provide them with the ability and the desire to exploit this linguistic diversity to build a democratic society. These Multilingual Awareness projects correspond to the goals of the Council of Europe of “education for plurilingualism,” including educating “for linguistic tolerance, raise awareness of linguistic diversity and educate for democratic citizenship” (Council of Europe 2003, p. 16). And yet, not everything is “rosy.” For example, in Spain, Euskara is only studied in the Basque Country, Galician in Galicia, and Catalan in Catalunya, pointing to little interest in internal multilingual awareness among Spanish citizens that might threaten the Spanish state. In fact, some multilingual awareness programs pay more attention to dominant languages than to their communities’ own regional and immigrant languages.
Multilingual Awareness projects have not borne fruit in the Americas to the same extent as in Europe. In Canada, despite its official bilingual and multicultural standing, the struggle over French and English has led to much scholarly and programmatic attention to the development of French among Canadians, and particularly its sustainability among Francophones. But beyond immersion bilingual education programs for Anglophones, and the so-called heritage language programs for specific ethnolinguistic communities, little has been done to promote the country’s multilingual awareness. The same can be said of the United States, where traditional bilingual education programs have been developed for its language minoritized populations, and especially Latinos who are emergent bilinguals, but where bilingual practices, as well as the languages other than Spanish among Latinos an others, are excluded and not validated. The so-called dual language bilingual programs are more popular among Latinos who see them as their only opportunity to develop their bilingualism, than among those who speak English or languages other than Spanish at home. Despite their scholarly popularity and their growth, “Dual Language” bilingual programs remain scarce. In Latin America, notwithstanding the growth and development of Intercultural Bilingual Education, Spanish-speakers remain ignorant of the many languages of the indigenous communities and of the high language diversity of the region. Thus, multilingual awareness programs have not caught on in the Americas to the same extent than in Europe.
In Africa and Asia, multilingualism is a fact of life in many regions, but multilingual awareness programs in schools are few. Children become multilingual in the street and become aware of the community’s multilingualism in daily interactions, but schools ignore these multilingual encounters and insist in teaching monolingually or through transitional bilingual education programs in one language that give way, in most cases, to the former colonial language.
There seems to be a rift between European educational projects with regard to language diversity and those in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Whereas European projects support linguistic tolerance and plurilingualism, with sometimes little interest in exploring the historical and social conditions that produce that plurilingualism , those in other regions are ways of redressing the historical oppression of certain groups, with little attention to truly supporting the plurilingualism of its citizenry and linguistic tolerance among all.
Teachers in all European schools are asked to develop students’ awareness of plurilingualism and linguistic tolerance, although they are rarely confronted with the histories of oppression and social inequalities that produce the minoritized status of both regional minorities, including autochthonous and indigenous peoples, and especially immigrants. Teachers in schools in the Americas, Asia and Africa that cater to minoritized populations often learn about the histories of colonization and oppression that have produced the subjugated status of the minoritized speakers they teach. Although students develop understandings of the social, political, and economic struggles surrounding the bilingualism/multilingualism of the group, they rarely acquire awareness of the rich multilingualism in their classroom, beyond the languages sanctioned by schools. In the Americas, Asia, and Africa, teachers who teach minoritized groups (many times bilingual themselves) are asked to develop students’ understandings of the histories of oppression. But mainstream students are never confronted with the understandings of how this linguistic diversity was created in the first place.
Work in Progress
Teachers in schools in the twenty-first century all over the world must develop both types of awareness – (1) an awareness of plurilingualism and appreciation of linguistic tolerance, and its merits for democratic citizenship and (2) an awareness of the histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression that has produced the plurilingualism in society.
Besides becoming aware of plurilingualism and developing linguistic tolerance for multilingual citizens, and understanding ways of redressing the historical oppression of certain groups, a true multilingual awareness project for the twenty-first century would also develop in all teachers a critical understanding of how language use in society has been naturalized. Schools have reproduced dominant ideologies of monolingualism, and in limited occasions of multilingualism as two or more standard varieties, without regard to the dynamic bilingual/multilingual practices of the students who are being educated. Teachers involved in a Critical Multilingual Awareness project would develop an additional understanding – the understanding that language is socially created, and thus, socially changeable to give voice and educate all students equitably. Teachers who can carry out a Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) project would have to engage all students in developing a consciousness of language as social practice and a voicing of their own multilingual experiences, thus generating not only a new order of discourse, but also a new praxis, capable of changing the social order of what it means to “language” in school.
In talking about language awareness in the context of multilingual schools, Shohamy (2006, p. 182) refers to understanding the ways in which languages are used “in undemocratic ways to exclude and discriminate.” She further posits that “language awareness needs to lead to language activism.” It is this social and language activism that a Critical Multilingual Awareness program must promote.
CMLA is not a separate educational program available only for certain specialized teachers who work with minoritized populations. It is part of the educational project for all. And thus, all teachers must develop these understandings. To the understandings of language that Language Awareness (LA) programs have promoted in the past, the Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) project requires other understandings. They are outlined in Fig. 2.
The components of a Critical Multilingual Awareness project differ significantly from those in Fig. 1. First of all, the emphasis is not on language itself, whether one national language or another, but rather on the speakers of those languages whose language practices differ significantly from those that schools promote. Secondly, bilingualism is not proposed as additive, with the addition of a whole additional language, but as dynamic (García 2009). The language(s) of school is not understood as given, but as constructed, and translanguaging, the fluid language practices of bilinguals, is acknowledged as an important voice-giving mechanism and as a tool for learning, creativity, and criticality (García and Li Wei 2014). Thirdly, teachers are expected to have not only knowledge of the speakers of the languages and their bilingualism (their knowledge of, and about, their languages and practices), but also of three additional factors: (1) the plurilingualism in their midst, (2) the histories of the speakers and their struggles, and (3) the social construction of the language of school in order to keep privilege in the hands of few. A CMLA project has as its focus the potential of language education to change the linguistic hierarchies that have been socially established and thus change the world and advance social justice.
The fact that teachers focus on the speakers of the language, and not on the language itself, means that teachers understand how multilingual students use their languages to make sense of their multilingual worlds, and not simply as defined by the school. Teachers recognize that students use their entire language repertoire to learn and be, even if the teachers themselves are not bilingual. They are familiar with the students’ home language practices and are aware of them, even if they do not actually know “the language” itself well enough to speak, read, or write. Teachers also understand that the language of school is constructed – whether one, two, or three languages – and acknowledge that multilingual language practices are always different. They show support for their students by never assessing them in one language or the other, without regard to how their language practices interact. They always give students the opportunity to show what they know and are able to do using their entire language repertoire, regardless of language features used. Teachers value the students’ translanguaging as an important semiotic resource and at the same time support the students in selecting features from their repertoire that are appropriate to the situation at hand.
Although these are understandings that all teachers must have, bilingual teachers who are teaching in bilingual programs need, in addition, knowledge of both languages, not just awareness of the students’ dynamic language practices. This is because bilingual teachers also have the task of developing the bilingualism and biliteracy of children. In school this also means learning the standard variety of two languages. What is important for teachers to realize, however, is that this cannot happen without first leveraging the students’ language practices, their translanguaging, in an act of critical multilingual awareness. That is, bilingual teachers must understand that developing the students’ facility in using two or more societal standardized languages cannot happen without first empowering them by using their own authentic voices. Bilingual students’ translanguaging needs to be first acknowledged and leveraged, so that they can be strengthened not only in voicing their own experiences, but also in their bilingual identities.
What is most important for bilingual teachers is to become aware of the students’ bilingual practices, of their translanguaging , and to leverage this translanguaging to develop their students’ understandings, creativity, and criticality. Developing a translanguaging pedagogy (García et al. 2017; García and Kleyn 2016) is thus essential, both to nurture the translanguaging capacities of students and to develop standardized varieties of one and the other language as used in school. Thus, bilingual teachers’ CMLA project must include all the components of CMLA depicted in Fig. 2 and, in addition, understandings of the ways in which each of the societally constructed “languages” are differently used in many societies and communities, and in their students’ lives. Figure 3 presents the components of Critical Multilingual Awareness that Bilingual Teachers must develop.
Now that we have described the Critical Multilingual Awareness project for teachers, the question is how to engage prospective teachers in teacher education programs in the CMLA project. The following and last section discusses this.
Problems and Difficulties: Building Teachers’ Critical Multilingual Awareness in Teacher Education Programs
The Why of CMLA for ALL Teachers
Given the complex multilingualism of the school-aged population throughout the world, teacher education programs must do much more than just “adapt” what they have done in the past for the multilingual children in classrooms or in bilingual or trilingual education programs. When school systems throughout the world are increasingly populated with multilingual children, it behooves teacher educators to put language difference and bilingualism at the center of the teacher education enterprise. Most teacher education programs pay little attention to multilingual differences, educating their teachers as if all students were “native speakers” of the dominant language of the nation-state or “native speakers” of some other language. Sometimes, teacher education programs include a required course in the teaching of the majority language as a second language or in bilingual/multicultural education. But a single course is not enough to acquire the sophisticated critical multilingual awareness that teachers need today, especially in developed societies with increased immigration and the complexity of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007). And these courses seldom address the fluid ways in which multilingual children use language and their dynamic bilingualism. Critical multilingual awareness must be a thread that runs throughout the entire teacher education curriculum for all.
The How of CMLA for ALL Teachers
The question for teacher education, however, is how teacher education programs can go about instilling these understandings of, and disposition towards, critical multilingual awareness in their prospective teachers. In addition, teacher education programs need to develop prospective teachers’ abilities of how to use this awareness pedagogically to change the world. With Freire (1973), and other transformative educators, I believe in a critical multilingual pedagogy that is situated in practice. I base this transformative pedagogy on the four elements developed by the New London Group (1996) for their multiliteracies pedagogy:
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Authentic Situated practice and immersion of students in such practice;
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Overt Instruction to develop awareness and understanding of practice;
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Critique of practices as socially particular through Critical Framing;
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Transformed Practice through experimentation with innovative practices, including translanguaging, that are a result of reflection and critical framing.
In the following section, I develop the what of this transformative CMLA teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.
The What of CMLA for ALL Teachers
It is clear from the above discussion that a course in multilingual awareness, or a linguistics or language course, can do little to transform the critical multilingual awareness of prospective teachers. Instead, the explicit instruction about language and multilingualism that prospective teachers get must be combined with authentic situated practice, critique of practice, and the resulting transformed practice, in order for learning to take place.
Throughout the years, I have developed ways to immerse prospective teachers in multilingual, multiliteracies, and multimodal practices, to critique such practices as traditionally understood, and to transform practices and pedagogies in order to construct a translanguaging pedagogy. I developed such ways in my years of experience educating bilingual and TESOL teachers at The City College of New York, as Dean of a School of Education in Brooklyn, New York, that had a large bilingual and bidialectal student body, as faculty in bilingual education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and specifically in the development project that colleagues and I launched at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York – New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals) (see, for more information, García and Menken 2015; García and Sánchez 2015). I share some of the components of how to engage prospective teachers in a Critical Multilingual Awareness project below.
Descriptive Review of a Bilingual Child’s Language Use
Elsewhere (García and Traugh 2002) we have described how descriptive inquiry , a disciplined process of research in teaching and learning, can enable a group to cut through generalities and abstractions, make the complexity of the lived reality more visible, and enlarge understandings that can generate ideas for action. One way of enabling teachers to understand bilingualism in its complexity is to engage them in observing children closely and describing them fully, working to withhold judgment or interpretation and being respectful of the child as the maker of words and worlds. Basing ourselves and extending the Descriptive Review of the Child process proposed by Carini (2000), prospective teachers are taught to describe one child fully under six headings – physical presence and gesture, disposition and temperament, connections with others, strong interests and preferences, modes of thinking and learning, and use of languages with different interlocutors and in different contexts (For more on the Descriptive Review of the Child, see also, Himley and Carini 2000).
The purpose of this close observation and careful description is twofold. On the one hand, the child’s language use is heard, made visible, and described within the context of many authentic activities, and not in isolation. This is important so as not to reify language, forcing ourselves to see language not as object in itself of simple academic pursuits, but as an instrument used by the child to think and create, and used by the teacher in describing the student. On the other hand, the child’s language use is seen and described from the child’s own perspective, and not from a sociopolitical or sociohistorical context – contexts that may shape how the child uses language, but that are important to separate from the child’s actual language use.
Another purpose of the Descriptive Review of the Bilingual Child is to bring this detailed description back to the community of practice, sharing it with fellow prospective teachers. Fellow prospective teachers (and the instructor) listen attentively as the reviewer shares observations. Afterwards, they first ask information questions, opening up possibilities for further reflection. The process ends with participants, one at a time, giving recommendations to the reviewer to generate new ideas, new practices, new viewings, and re-viewings of the child’s language and literacy use.
The advantage of the Descriptive Review of the Bilingual Child is that it enables the prospective teacher not only to become a better observer of language use, but also a better user of language, as she/he works to be descriptive and withhold judgment of the child’s language use. Another advantage is that based on what Carini calls “human capacity widely distributed,” it builds a community of practice, a collaborative community, in which prospective teachers start to see how their students actually use language and why, thus spurring teachers to further social action, developing new material, new curricula, new pedagogies, and new educational programs.
Ethnography of Communities of Practice and Critical Sociolinguistic Study of the Linguistic Landscape
Prospective teachers in teacher education programs that develop CMLA are also given the tools to look closely and describe richly the “linguistic landscape ” (Gorter 2013) of the school community or those from which the children come from. To do so, they are initially sent out to document – using photography and videos – the languages they see in the public signs, in the newspaper, and in magazine stands, etc. Prospective teachers then listen to conversations and sounds in the street and make recordings of that discourse. They are encouraged to document not simply who speaks what language to whom and when, the classical Fishmanian sociolinguistic question (Fishman 1965). Instead, they are asked to listen carefully for instances of translanguaging and to document how people language, with whom they language, and when. They interview leaders in the community, as well as common folk, about their language practices, and about the sociopolitical and socioeconomic struggles the community faces, especially in relationship to their language practices. They also gather information of the institutions/organizations that support the use of the community ways of speaking, how the institutions take up or reject these practices, and of the struggles those organizations face with the dominant community, as well as within the minoritized one. An important part of this language ethnography is the linguistic practices in the home of the child itself, and in particular, the funds of knowledge of the parents (Moll and González 1997). In the twenty-first century, it is also important that prospective teachers develop a broad understanding of language use and that they include in their descriptions the multimodalities – the images, music, art, graphs, videos – that make up today’s ways of using language and that are used simultaneously, especially by youth.
Prospective teachers are then encouraged to compare the language use data and the information they have gathered with the print and information they find in the Internet about the language, as socially constructed by the nation-state, and with texts they read for class. Based on the authentic data that they have gathered, prospective teachers are engaged in a close analysis of language use in the community. The instructor becomes a facilitator in this endeavor, as much as a co-learner (Li Wei 2014). Prospective teachers become familiar with Internet sites, and with translation capabilities of the Internet, tools that will enable them to become lifelong learners about the languages and literacies that they will continue to encounter in their changing communities.
Problem-sets for different language use situations are collaboratively generated in class. For example, banks of examples of translanguaging in media and print, as well as in oral discourse, could be generated. Video clips of different language and literacy uses in the home could also be developed. These problem sets would then be subjected to further analysis and could be the focus of explicit language and literacy instruction by the instructor or by other students. These problem sets also serve as ways of building social, political, and economic consciousness about language use in different contexts and for diverse purposes. Prospective teachers become conscious of the process of domination that involves the language of school, or what many call “academic language .”
Descriptive Review of Language and Literacy Practices in Teaching
Using Descriptive Inquiry in ways that we described above, prospective teachers are also engaged in close observation and description of how language and literacy is used by teachers and students inside classrooms in different contexts and practices – dialogue, lessons, assignments, and assessments – both among students and between students and teacher. Prospective teachers become conscious of when bilingual students actively use translanguaging or resist it, as well as when their own translanguaging facilitates learning or not, and how the classroom community’s language use is different from that described in teachers’ manuals or in grammars. In sharing the description with other prospective teachers in other classrooms, complex views and understandings of the language of school and their language policies are generated. Collaboratively, the group examines how the particular discourse is used by the teacher and students to include or exclude others and how discourse works within particular social practices.
Occasionally, the prospective teacher tapes herself with the children, again describing closely the language used and sharing it with the collaborative group as a way to build texts of practices that could be subjected to explicit analysis and as a way to encourage transformation of practices. The instructor explicitly points to promising practices and strategies and assists in the microanalyses of some discourses.
In describing language and literacy practices within the classroom, the prospective teachers can also draw from the data they have gathered outside the classroom and in the community. This comparison can serve well to help teachers anchor language use in particular domains and for specific purposes and genres. Critical framing of the different events can generate transformed practices.
Makers and Consumers of Multicultural and Multilingual Texts, as well as Translanguaged Texts
Both in the more theoretically oriented courses, as in the more practice-oriented courses, teacher educators are engaged in producing and consuming multicultural and multilingual texts , as well as translanguaged texts. The teacher education curriculum includes, whenever possible, multilingual texts, sometimes with translations, other times in the original language. Furthermore, bilingual texts are sought, and prospective teachers study children and youth literature produced by authors who not only write in one language or the other, but who write translanguaged texts (for more on this see, for example, Hélot 2014). They reflect on the effect that another language in a text makes on the reader and why bilingual authors might have made that choice.
Prospective teachers are encouraged to also write their own double-entry journals, where they react to the academic texts they are reading from their own personal perspective, contributing their background knowledge and experiences, as well as their cultural and linguistic practices and understandings to make sense of the text. Students are given the freedom to use all the features of their language repertoire to write these reactions/reflections.
Again, these double-entry journals are shared with their fellow prospective teachers and the instructor, as a way to build multicultural and multilingual understandings of the same text and to generate different understandings from multiple perspectives. These are put alongside academic texts and other multilingual multimodal texts, encouraging teacher candidates to become comfortable with the diverse language practices in texts and what these might mean, as well as who produces them, distributes, and consumes them, and why.
Curriculum and Pedagogical Meaning-Makers
As prospective teachers are made “wide awake” (see Greene 1995) by the attention paid to detail and description of the varied language use of the child and the communities of practice in which they participate, including school, they start to develop abilities to develop curriculum and pedagogical practices that build on these understandings. The curriculum courses in a teacher education program then engage prospective teachers in using all this authentic material of dynamic language practices to build a curriculum.
Prospective teachers then try out the curriculum in actual classrooms where the classroom teacher, the university instructor, and the students themselves serve as sounding-boards for exploration and transformation of pedagogical practices. This includes the development of a translanguaging pedagogy, important for all teachers in order to listen to the currents of knowledge and passion among students, sometimes not readily audible or visible.
These prospective teachers also understand that children must be given opportunities to show what they know and are able to do with multiple linguistic practices. Thus, they learn to assess students carefully, after much observation, and allow them to use all the linguistic features at their disposal to complete tasks. And when they assess language and literacy, they learn to do so differentiating between what I have called language-specific proficiency and general language proficiency (García et al. 2017). That is, prospective teachers learn to assess students’ general linguistic ability – the ability to express complex thoughts effectively, to explain things, to persuade, to argue, to compare and contrast, to give directions, to recount events, to tell jokes, to make inferences, and to identify main ideas in reading, to produce text types for various purposes etc. – regardless of the use of language forms that have been preapproved for school use.
Language and Social Activists
All descriptions, collaborative sharing of understandings, materials, products, and explicit teaching practices developed through the steps described above result in action that has the potential not only to transform practice and pedagogy, but also to transform the lives of children and communities. This action is sometimes at the individual level, i.e., helping a child’s family with translation services, but sometimes it is at the level of local and even national policy. For example, one semester a group of prospective teachers in NY learned about the difficulty of immigrants learning English, since there were no free English language classes available. They gained understandings not only of the inequity that this presented, but also of how this affected their children’s learning and their own teaching. With the help of a local immigrant rights organization, they organized a letter campaign, went on radio programs, and spoke to politicians. As a result, funding for adult classes in English was increased the following funding year. Another semester, a prospective bilingual English-Spanish teacher decided to develop an end-of year theater production in the school in which she was doing her practicum. In the past, there had been two end-of-year shows: one for English-speaking families and another for Spanish-speaking families. This time the prospective teacher decided to develop a production that used translanguaging and that also incorporated the other languages of the school besides English and Spanish. She worked with the students in writing a script that through translanguaging made the story comprehensible to both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking audiences, and she acknowledged the languages other than English and Spanish by also giving them voice in certain roles in the play. Although on the surface this action of the teacher does not seem like social action, it was in fact transformative. For the first time, the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking communities enjoyed the children’s class as a whole. Families who were bilingual saw their home language practices reflected in the play. Those who were monolingual learned about other ways of expressing emotion, ideas, and good wishes. And by giving a role to languages other than English and Spanish, the play reflected the multilingual ecology of the school, and the multilingualism of the Mixteco and Quechua Spanish-speaking families in the classroom. The integration of the different communities of practice was achieved not by harmonizing their differences, but by accentuating them and making them visible. Thus, linguistic hierarchies were erased and ways of speaking of the entire school community were given important roles.
Teacher education programs must engage teachers in changing the sociolinguistic order and the ways in which languages have been constructed and hierarchized. This linguistic action is bound to also create social changes by giving voice to people who have been controlled and dominated through language conventions.
Future Directions
In the twenty-first century, it is critical multilingual awareness that all teachers need. This article has placed critical multilingual awareness within the framework of language awareness, extending it to include other important abilities and dispositions for the twenty-first century. In particular, however, this article describes ways in which teacher education programs can develop these understandings in all prospective teachers.
Related Articles in the Encyclopedia of Language and Education
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Chris Davison: Teacher-Based Assessment in Language Education. In Volume: Language Testing and Assessment
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James Cummins: Teaching for Transfer in Multilingual School Contexts. In Volume: Bilingual and Multilingual Education
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Ofelia Garcia an Li Wei: From Researching Translanguaging to Translanguaging Research. In Volume: Research Methods in Language and Education
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Ofelia García and Angel M.Y. Lin: Translanguaging and Bilingual Education. In Volume: Bilingual and Multilingual Education
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García, O. (2017). Critical Multilingual Language Awareness and Teacher Education. In: Cenoz, J., Gorter, D., May, S. (eds) Language Awareness and Multilingualism. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02240-6_30
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