Carla España & Luz Yadira Herrera
to the classroom: Episode 13
May 15, 2023
Jennifer Serravallo:
Welcome, Dr. España.
Carla España:
Thanks so much for having us here today.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And Dr. Herrera. So good to see you again.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
Thanks Jen. So good to see you too. Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I am so excited to get a chance to talk to you both again about your scholarship and your beautiful book En Comunidad. Let's start by talking about a few key terms that are regularly used throughout your work and are important for our listeners to understand. So the first one I was thinking it's really important to understand is this concept of language practices. I'm wondering if you can give us some examples of language practices when we're talking about multilingual students and why it's important for teachers to understand this concept. Carla, do you want to start us off?
Carla España:
Sure. I think what's powerful in thinking about the ways that bilingual and multilingual beings communicate in using the term language practices is that it goes along with the term language repertoire or full language repertoire. And for example, when I taught sixth grade transitional bilingual in sixth grade dual language bilingual in New York City at Don Pedro Campo School I noticed that there were students who were using varieties of Spanish and different varieties of English. So I came from Chile when I was five years old, and I grew up in a household speaking different varieties of Chilean Spanish. And so when I would communicate, I would use words, proverbios, palabras, different types of sayings from my very Chilean childhood, and I would bring that to my classroom with these Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central American students. And I would get these shocked looks like, what are you saying? What does that mean? And I would do the same thing when they were describe things. And it was this beautiful moments across my teaching career with them was that they use different features of Spanish from the areas that they were from. And so I would have charts in my classroom that would show the different ways we call certain things and not that one was better than the other. They were just different. And we were going to learn all of them in our classroom. And so by using that term with the phrase language practices, it opens us more to welcome the varieties of ways that we speak and not be confined to one type of language that might be used in a learning setting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And would you say there's also sort of an intentionality that you're in assuming here?
Carla España:
Yes. We're trying to disrupt those language hierarchies that exist everywhere due to colonialism and they keep existing. We have to unlearn so much, especially in the fields of bilingual education or even in English medium classrooms when we have students who are bilingual and multilingual. And so by disrupting that we're saying we are going to welcome the different language practices, the different ways they communicate, when they write, when they read, when they speak. And so that's a powerful, very intentional move to create a different narrative.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think a related equally important term translanguaging, again, with an intentionality around this idea of using different languages and with intention. And I'm wondering maybe Dr. Herrera, you can take this one, can you give us some examples of translanguaging? And again, why is it important for teachers to understand this?
Luz Yadira Herrera:
Yeah, so Carla had mentioned, right, it's about opening up the ability for students, for us, for all of us to use language freely without those boundaries that are often imposed in a variety of settings, including schooling or schools. And so translanguaging is really about recognizing that we have this dynamic rich language repertoire, all of these dynamic language practices that we can use to make sense, to make meaning, to make connections. And so when we translanguage we're going beyond those boundaries of language that again, are often imposed and are able to just flow freely and be able to make those connections and those deeper meanings.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think sometimes...my classroom experience, I taught in a dual language school in New York City and many of the kids who were Spanish English bilingual were in the dual language program. And I was in a monolingual classroom. So I had children who were Spanish speaking from Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico. I also had someone from Kyrgystan who spoke Russian. Someone from India who spoke Urdu. I was one of the beauties of teaching in New York City, and
Carla España:
You've got love it
Jennifer Serravallo:
...all these languages and also within each language, different cultural practices. And I'm thinking, and I speak English and just a little bit of Spanish. So I'm pretty much monolingual and as a monolingual teacher, how do I make room for this translanguaging knowing that I've got all these different languages showing up in my classroom.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
And I think that's something that I always go back to what our mentor, Ofelia Garcia tells us that we have to ourselves as teachers, we have to position ourselves as co-learners in the classroom, be able to note all of the richness in our classrooms and view our students as the experts of their own community language practices. And so how do we navigate that? Well, we can create spaces for them to know that they can do that. They can feel free and affirmed to use all of their language practices when they're talking with each other, when they're reading and jotting notes on the margins of their text or with Post-Its or whatever it might be to make sense and make meaning of whatever it is that they're reading. Because when we are interacting with the text or with our world, we're using all of our language practices, all of our linguistic repertoire to make sense of it.
Carla España:
Think if I can add, I'm really inspired by the work of scholars who talk about the translanguaging space being intentional in my lesson plans to say, I'm going to have a time where we're going to after a read aloud and we have our discussion usually about our themes in the book and maybe the content of our literacy units. If we're doing character analysis or whatever it is I will be intentional about saying we're studying language as well. So Quintero in her book, My Papi Has a Motorcycle, uses some words in Spanish in the narrative, but also Zeke Peña, as an illustrator in the speech bubbles, has that as well. Why not take a moment and pause and say, what does that do for us as readers? What do we feel? What do we interpret? And so whether you call it language study and you have these charts where you're analyzing word choice not only for literary techniques, but also looking at language practices.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
And I wanted to add that such an exciting time in children's literature right now because we see this in action through the words of these celebrated acclaimed authors like David Bulls, who is one of our favorite authors Mexican American author, and he wrote two novels in verses like a prequel sequel, and They Call Her Fregona, his newest novel in verse, has language features from English, Spanish, and Korean. And we think, well, our youth, we're seeing so much from pop culture in terms of we see, I mean Bad Bunny, all of those influences are all over. It's also going to show up in our language practices, and we have to be able to recognize that and embrace that in the classroom and celebrate it and create these intentional spaces for it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love this. Okay, amazing. Okay, so third and just as important is the name of a method you write about in En Comunidad, which is Critical Bilingual Literacies Approach related to what we just talked about, but there's more to it. Can you explain a little bit what you mean by this term and maybe some examples?
Carla España:
So we were thinking about what grounds our work, and as a teacher, maybe when you come up through your teacher preparation program, they ask you to write your teaching philosophy. Or if you have your meeting with an administrator and they ask you about your goals before you get observed and get feedback, those kind of conversations and your, you pause and you say, "Wow, what would I call my approach to teaching? What's foundational in my work?" And for Luz and myself, it was really important to consider those patterns. What keeps coming up. And for us, there were four key elements to our approach to teaching. One is that we have to have this constant self-reflection on our ideas about language.
Let's say you have a teacher, you're an administrator, and you hire a teacher who studied, who's a white monolingual woman who then went to Spain, studied Spanish, comes back, is bilingual, wants to teach dual language bilingual, and you're as an administrator, you're like, yes, but then you have a black Honduran also teacher somebody applying to be a teacher, and they know Spanish from Honduras, and you have this judgment, you're like, nah, but the one who studied in Spain is going to be a better teacher of Spanish than this other one. Where is this coming from?
The second one is that we noticed that we have to constantly unlearn these hierarchies about language. And that means revisiting what we were told in our families especially within our own communities with Latinx upbringing, when we think about when was Spanish shamed and generations, we have generations who had to assimilate, who had to survive, and then they were told not to speak Spanish. And so all of that passes on.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
So the third one is just being able to apply a lens of a power when we were thinking about literacy practices, when we're thinking about language practices. How do we view the world right through this lens of language literacies and power? And I think that'll sort of give us an idea about how much we privilege one language variety over another and the way that sort of plays out in classroom spaces, for example.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
And the fourth one is about celebrating our dynamic language practices, translanguaging and creating those intentional spaces and in classrooms and otherwise to celebrate and encourage those dynamic practices of language.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I wonder if there're teachers listening who are teaching in places where there are policies limiting the languages that kids can speak in the classroom. That still happens, right? You must speak English in this class. You must only speak Spanish in this class, or you must only speak English all day. Or in this school, we only speak English.
Jennifer Serravallo:
How do we make space for this vision that you have in those kinds of more oppressive districts or states?
Luz Yadira Herrera:
I mean, it's definitely a policy issue, but it's also policy coupled with ideology like Carla mentioned. That's why that's our first principle in critical bilingual literacy. It's like how do we combat those ideas that are very much harmful to our children? And we have, of course, whole entire states who have passed English only laws. We, we've had that in California for about 20 years until 2016 when voters finally overturned Prop 2 27. We have that still standing in Arizona, an English only law. So we have definitely, policy has been a big thing. It happened in Colorado, it happened in Massachusetts, it's been overturned there. I think Arizona's the only one that's still standing unfortunately. But how do we combat that? I think that we combat it by just learning how do we learn best? How do we make sure that we're not limiting or putting those sort of boundaries or barriers around our kids when we're teaching?
Because of course, we can't really control what students actually do when they're engaging with the text or with some content. They're still going to internally probably use all of their available linguistic resources to make sense of things.
And I think that sometimes some of the more strict language separation policies often happen actually in dual language, bilingual settings, because schools often have this policy where it's maybe 50 50 or 90 10 or depending on what the model is, where they say, okay, today we speak English only or during this block we're speaking Spanish only, or whatever other target language is. And sometimes that comes from wanting to protect the non-English language, basically, it's coming from that idea, well, children are getting English everywhere else. We have to protect this space. And that's understandable. However, what we can't do, and again, Ofelia García tells us is we can't isolate language because we just don't learn that. We learn new things based on our understanding of what we already know. We build on what we already know. And so when we're opening up instead of limiting spaces for children to make meet, meaning make connections, and I think it's going to be counterproductive.
Carla España:
Your question is great, Jen, about how do we combat this? How do we confront this misconceptions and really harmful policies? I think a model that I've appreciated across the years was the City University of New, a New York State initiative on emergent bilinguals. So CUNY NYSIEB had they joined, it was scholars, so all these researchers with teachers, with administrators, with statewide funding and support so everybody got on the same page. So it wasn't like, oh, we're going to make sure teachers get this one workshop a year or this one workshop a month. It was, oh, principals are going to be involved if you want us to partner with you and support this growth in your school. Every single person who interacts with the children will need to be involved in this and learn about translanguaging and learn about translanguaging pedagogy and what this looks like. And now they have on their sites, on the CUNY NYSIEB website, there are all these guides for how to do this work. There are videos with principals talking about how they started programming to support their students when their schools didn't have that. And I think that's really motivating, right? And say that that is a possibility. It's happened. And if we can all get on the same page instead of saying, we're only going to support teachers or only talk to principals, I believe everyone needs to be supported in this conversation.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely. And when you talk about administrators, I think one of the pressures a lot of them have is we've got to show progress year over year on standardized tests. And one of the questions they ask of approaches often is this research based, is this going to improve--at the end of the year--is this going to improve outcomes? And so there is a reason to support practices that are culturally and linguistically affirming for the heart and soul and wellbeing, social emotional wellbeing of the child. They also want to know, are there reasons to support these practices? Because they're going to help kids read better. They're going to help them comprehend better learn language and vocabulary is going to improve. Will I see the results from that metric? And what would you say to that? What does research show?
Luz Yadira Herrera:
Oh man. So our colleague Laura Acenzi-Moreno actually does a lot of research around assessments. And we have to also think about, well, assessments. How are they normed? What are they really measuring? Are they really measuring what they're supposed to be? Are they really accurately telling us how much our students have actually grown? And it's, it's really tough. It's really tough conversation because of course, teachers are going to be going to be expected to perform. And obviously everybody's expected to take certain tests at the end of the year.
Carla España:
I'm horrified by assessments that aren't valid and they're not assessing what our children can do. And so that for me is an equity issue. And so if I'm going to be making decisions as an administrator and these tests aren't equitable because they're given already an advantage for students who are monolingual white English, speaking from your dominant standardized English mainstream then that's an equity issue. And for all these DEI initiatives and DEI position statements, and roles, I'm horrified by this.
Those are the conversations I had as a sixth grade teacher. So I would pull up how the students were reading and writing in my classroom when they started in September, across the year, I had audio clips. I would record them reading books across the year, and they would see all this progress in Spanish and in English. It was a dual language bilingual program. Wonderful. And then would come whatever, March, April, and they would take that standardized English exam in New York. And then I had the conversations, but I would prepare families for that and say, this is the injustice of this system. And I taught the students this graphic with a filter, and I was like, this exam will allow some people to come through. Some people will not succeed. And this is how they define success, but we define success very differently in this classroom.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I couldn't agree more. And so much is hanging on these tests and the critical questions you're asking of, should we even care what these tests say? And they're not really representing the kinds of progress we see every day in the classroom.
Let's talk about books. Let's talk about text selection.What kinds of lenses should teachers be applying when it comes to text selection so that they're both language affirming and culturally affirming?
Luz Yadira Herrera:
I can start, and we always, of course, refer back to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop. I mean, who taught us a long time ago that books are mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. And absolutely we have to have those opportunities for children to be affirmed, like you said, culturally and linguistically and just have the ability to see how others live as well.
For me, it's about, well, who do we want to have in our world? What kind of children do we want to support? How do we want to make sure that we are creating opportunities for children to connect with each other, to build understanding of how others, or how everybody or experiences different things and deals with different kinds of situations. How do we create opportunities for children to build empathy for different circumstances?
We have a really powerful opportunity with the beautiful children's middle grade, YA lit now to do that, to create those spaces, to engage with those themes and topics. And so that's something that I think we are just so fortunate right now to live in this time and hopefully in a place that does not limit what you can or cannot read in the school.
Carla España:
Well, I also think about how we are complex as human beings. And I would hope that in our providing books for children, we show that complexity. For example, in my sixth grade bilingual classroom, when I looked at my books on the topic of immigration, I noticed that they were all mostly about immigration from Mexico. And even that narrative with under that umbrella was very limited. And so take topics that you're teaching thematically and think, am I showing complexity of the human experience under that umbrella? What does that look like?
Jennifer Serravallo:
You two should create some kind of, not that you don't have enough to do, but some kind of kind of an inventory, like a more formalized inventory. Cause I'm thinking about the amount of knowledge that teachers would need to have about different cultures, countries, histories in order to really accurately say, am I telling or am I showing only a certain story, a certain person's story?
Carla España:
And that would be a living document, that would be a document that would constantly get updated, which right is coming with our next third book project. So it's going, yeah. Yeah. So I think with Penguin Random House, they reached out to us to create collections on different topics. So with them, that was our second project. We created a handbook called Affirming Bilingual Multilingual Students: the Translanguaging and Collections. And so we have these six topics around community, changemakers, identity, immigration, migration. And then under those topics, we have picture books, early readers, middle grade, and young adult novels that fall under that topic. And the handbook has some language study lessons so that we can look at the word choice in those books and also discuss the themes so that we're really grateful for, because we were given that kind of freedom and access to a lot of books to do that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Wonderful. Make sure to send me a link to that, and I'll link to it in the show notes so people can check that out. You talk about this idea of creating curriculum around themes in En Comunidad and it's amazing that you've done that work and help teachers get a jumpstart with selecting texts as well. Why is this important, this idea of creating themes to organize your curriculum work with kids?
Luz Yadira Herrera:
So when we thought about, "what would be really helpful for educators?" we were both in the classroom before we went to higher education, but we think about, well, what would be helpful for educators in terms of thinking about critical bilingual literacies being informed in their approaches of teaching through this perspective that we developed. And so we came up with this way of thinking about teaching and learning around the three T's, what we call the three T's: topics, texts, and translanguaging. What are some topics that are going to be culturally linguistically sustaining to the students that you teach that are going to be meaningful, maybe something that their community or the community is grappling with? So that's the topics part. The text. How do we collect or curate texts that are going to not only develop our understanding or deepen our understanding of this topic, but are also going to be affirming of our students' language, cultural practices, and of course, being intentional with the translanguaging. How do we support our students' dynamic language practices? And so when we think about teaching and learning in that way, we can be, again, this word intentional about how we create spaces for students in the classrooms to talk about issues that matter, to make meaningful connections and education. And sometimes that's missing in schools. The why part is missing in schools. Why are we doing something? Well because of whatever it's in the curriculum or because of it's going to be on the test. And for us, that's not good enough. It's about really connecting the learning with our lives, with our experiences and centering students in centering students. We can do that.
Carla España:
Yes. Thank you, Lu. I love those words of "that's not good enough. No." I was thinking that also for this population that went with our first book with En Comunidad sometimes that immediate go-to from whether it's professional development, administrators, books that you get, curriculum. Often for this population of teaching students who are bilingual, multilingual, or if you have a newcomer who needs to learn English, and that's the narrative around their existence in school. The go-to the first thing, it's here's some worksheets, <laugh>, or here's, they need the top 10 strategies for making sure they acquire the English language, which I'm using air quotes, because you can never acquire a language. It's constantly growing and changing. And that's the narrative around maybe they want to support. Well then, well, usually it's assimilationist narrative of we got to get them to learn English. And so here are these quick things that you can do.
And so we wanted to say, "Not enough." These are human beings that need that. Right now, we've had, I just, a friend of mine told me at a school in New York, a principal got 40 newcomers like this and had to prepare the school for students who are coming from Venezuela or they're coming from different places, and what are the students caring with them? And so they're bringing with them their own literacy practices, the way they see the world and the way they interpret things. And so how can we support them with more a full package to say, we acknowledge your existence. And that includes supporting you as a reader and as a writer through your reading skills and strategies that we're going to teach you. It also supports you in these holistic themes so that we can talk about these topics and you could feel like we are seeing you as a full human being or else it's just going to be this decontextualized like worksheets that people often go to for these, oh, quick things you got to learn.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
And that's the thing right there. That's the word decontextualize, right? Education. And that's what we are trying to undo in our workshops, in our conversations with people, in our writing. How do we make sure that our students are receiving or are able to have this experience of their education being contextualized so that it makes sense so that they can create connections and actual learning opportunities.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think there's just a move right now to a lot of state level decisions to just buy pre-packaged boxes that are approved and are standards aligned. And your message is so important because it matters who are the children in front of us. And it matters that teachers have time to make these thoughtful decisions to curate text sets, to engage with the work of creating curriculum that's relevant and culturally affirming and sustaining.
Carla España:
We're hopeful. We've had with three different partnerships, or four, there's like San Antonio, Austin New York City Wooster, Massachusetts there. We've had these partnerships where it's been ongoing planning sessions with teachers. And so we'll share a little bit of our book and our approach, and then teachers will plan and develop whole units around this. They're given that time they're compensated for it. This is important. Compensate our teachers for that extra time that they're spending especially those who are translating a bunch of materials too. That's important. Provide them the space and time and then the professional learning support.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Last question. I'm hoping you could each give an example of a lesson, because your book has such great practical, lift off the page, use right away lessons in it, maybe one that you can imagine in a K-2 classroom, maybe one you could imagine in a 3-5 classroom where some you described are being intentionally scanned for and implemented.
Carla España:
I can talk about a K-2 lesson. In our book in chapter six, we have a framework for teaching poetry. And we talk about poetry as healing, well, poetry first as teaching, we learn things through poems, poetry as teaching, as healing, and as resistance. And I started doing the beginning of that work when I was helping second grade, a second grade team in El Barrio in a bilingual bicultural school in New York City. We support students with their fluency. So we do a lot of shared reading with the poems. We had one poem a week, so we constantly went back to it, but we have a different lens for the poem.It was during the time I was there when Hurricane Maria had hit Puerto Rico. And so we had one or two students come and they had lost a grandparent in the hurricane, and there was just barely traumatic for the Puerto Rican community and those of us who are also connected to them. So it just became this really powerful few minutes a day.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So in addition to the fluency practice, obviously there was care in which poems you selected. That's part of the healing. And then was there also, did you have a little mini discussion every day? Did kids pair off, just help teachers envision how to do it?
Carla España:
Yeah, so we had some days it would always be launched by the teacher doing most of the reading in the beginning. And then students started practicing reading together. The way the room was set up, it was very conducive for conversations. Thank you, second graders in tables of four. So it was really, and then we brought them once the whole transition of coming in and talking groups, we could then bring them as a whole class to the meeting area. And that's when we wrapped up as a whole class discussion.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Wonderful. Thank you. And Luz, upper grades, upper elementary,
Luz Yadira Herrera:
Upper grades, so maybe upper elementary, maybe middle grades even. I'm thinking about some of the work that we write about in Chapter five, which is about how do we take an informed stance against injustice? And so I'm thinking about lessons that I did with seventh graders and the objective was to learn about the experience, the plight, of children who were undocumented in unaccompanied undocumented children that were trying to go from Central America, migrate from Central America through Mexico into the US and being detained at the border and being held at the border until they found a sponsor or they had their day in court. And so we wanted to understand that issue from primary sources. Well, so we studied and we heard testimonies, children's testimonials. We listened to them, we watched them. We also tried to understand the topic from using secondary sources. So really the discussion about primary and secondary sources, okay, what is the news saying about this? What is this political cartoon depicting about this topic? What do you see? What do you wonder?
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's a beautiful example of just such meaningful work. And also if you're thinking about it from a reading skills perspective, you've got multiple genres, you've got perspectives, you've got interpretation, synthesis. So they're still doing all of the standards or reading skills that you're accountable for, but doing it in such a meaningful, relevant way I can completely visualize it, and it's really beautiful.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So Carla, Luz, thank you so much for joining me today for your time, for your scholarship. Thank you.
Carla España:
Well, thank you for your thoughtful questions, and for your support. We appreciate it.
Luz Yadira Herrera:
Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Take care of both of you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Okay, I now welcome my colleagues, Clarisa, Cristy, and Angie, for a conversation about what we'll take to the classroom, so many ideas, what do you all think?
Angie Forero:
I just want to start off by saying it, it's so much more than just what we do as teachers. It's from what Luz and Carla were talking. It's a whole mindset and it's a mindset shift that we have to engage in and support teachers with.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, and I think that important for you,
Cristy Rauseo:
That mind shift, right, has to be constant, right? Ongoing. It can't be just when you're planning, trying to do it intentionally, but as you're teaching it, as you're doing it every day, day by day. So for instance, today I was kept coming back to what I was doing today. I was doing a quick read aloud with my students a read aloud assessment, and I have several students that only speak Spanish, and I was reading it in English. And as I stopped and had them think about first of all it them thinking about the character and can you describe the character or thinking about that? And I kept seeing the face of one of my students that he was just stuck. I mean, he just couldn't start writing. And as soon as I acknowledged him and I said, "Mateo, puedes escribir en español? Que estas pensando? Escribir en español." His eyes lit. And he's like, what? Thank you. I can write it in Spanish! And you saw immediately he started writing, and then I read it, and he was definitely making a connection with the character, thinking about the internal reflection of the character, like everything. So I think just little things like that are very important, that acknowledging them in every way with their culture and their language.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's a huge thing really, if you think about it. And I think back to what they were talking about with the validity of assessments. So if we're judging kids by just how they produce their thoughts in one language, you would never have known that Mateo had all those ideas and all those inferences and all that ability to synthesize the text and come up with his own thoughts. You would just never know.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Cristy, what are you thinking about?
Cristy Rauseo:
I think about my own history of growing up in Venezuela and speaking Spanish and now living and teaching in Texas and in New York. And I'm like, wait, I didn't know a lot of things, a lot of words that people would assume that I know.
I've learned so many new words now and that I've never knew as a bilingual person, but it's because that although also relates to what they were saying about being open to learn and being those co-learners from our own students, especially if we are not part of that culture, how do we present ourself into that space and say, how do you say that?
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that because I think about our goals of helping kids to develop vocabulary. We've got these strong research links between the amount of vocabulary kids know and how well they're able to comprehend and so forth. But to expand your mind to say, we're not just trying to teach you more English words, but learn more Spanish words and learn Spanish words from different language practices, from different cultures it just opens things up even more and is more affirming for children.
Angie Forero:
Yeah, absolutely. And I hear what you're saying, Cristy. I'm first generation Columbian American, and so when I came here, my mom only knew Spanish. So I was in a Spanish-speaking household, and all we did was translanguage. But I didn't know what that actually was and how amazing what it had been if teachers had affirmed my culture, my language, and it would've opened up my world so much more. So I think that that's such a powerful thing.
Cristy Rauseo:
Yeah. And do you have some strategies, Jen, in your book, in the Spanish book, the modismos and the cognates, that is great to explicitly teach because it's allow, it's is that it's just opening up to students. This is a thing, is your superpower. You can use this to understand even more. And along the way, you're going to learn another word in English, but you're still making sense of what's in front of them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was trying to ask them about this idea. I was trying to ask 'em about this idea of if another language more deeply, doesn't it help you to learn that second language, so because of cognates, but for a lot of reasons why, right? That developing multiple languages, it's a superpower. I love that you said that, Cristy. Absolutely. For cognates and for lots of other reasons. Clarisa, what were you going to say?
Clarisa Leal:
No, I was just going to say going back to that, yeah, the idea of cognates and the idea of vocabulary and your whole, all the strategies on the book, on The Reading Strategies Book on building vocabulary, I think are so powerful. So if you're teaching a strategy, for instance, in a strategy group for vocabulary, and you let students use that word and the language their native language or that they feel more comfortable with, and then you can do the translation for them. If you're a bilingual teacher, for instance, the student, I mean, if I'm teaching or we're talking about characters, let's say, and we're focusing on how the character feels and how the character's feelings change. And the student says the character was feeling "emocionado" and you're like, instead of saying, no, the way that you say it is excited. You're saying, oh, you're right. The character was feeling excited and have them kind of repeat that word. So you're kind of acknowledging, you're not telling me that's not the way you say it, it's only we speak it in one language, but you're letting them flow and move through that language.
Angie Forero:
Can I open up to writing, because you're just to make a connection around writing. And it is understandable if teachers have a target language that let's say that students need to publish in a target language. Well, it's not to say though, that they can't, trans writing is a process so that they can language throughout the process. So there will be times where we can say we're orally rehearsing something. Definitely encourage students to translanguage and use their full linguistic repertoire because our brains are not compartmentalized. I mean, our brains don't have Spanish side English, whatever language side. And it really opens up so much possibility for kids. And I think that's just something to name.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And to add on that, there may be times when the child decides, no, I really do think there needs to be some Spanish in the finished published piece because I'm telling this family story and my grandmother speaks Spanish. And it's weird to have it be that I'm translating her language in this story. I want to use Spanish here. And I love their point about it being an intentional craft move on top of being linguistically affirming.
Cristy Rauseo:
I love what Angie said about allowing them in the oral rehearsal. I teach in a immersion school. So yes, I do have a target language and kids, one kid in my class is from a Spanish background. So the other students, when they're orally rehearsing, I don't want them to stop that process. So I do I translanguage when I speak normally, I know that if there's a Spanish speaker in the room, I feel sometimes more comfortable in English, but then switching really quickly because I know they're going to get it.
I remember one specific example, this kid was like, how do you say Pajama Party. Pajama party is top on the list of words that I teach now, first because it comes in all the personal narrative things. And then I was say, how is another way you can, what are you doing at pajama party? And then I said, I can give you the name of it right now, and there are two words, but then I want you to think, what do you do? And then they're start describing, and I started writing it, and it's like a party you go with well, it was like "una fiesta donde cuando duerme en la casa de su amigo" when you sleep in your friend's house. And I counted the words, these are so many words that you already knew. And it's the same thing, but it's called [inaudible] like <laugh>. So it's that balance of don't just write it in English, but then in the revision process, go back and say, how do I explain this? If it's a specific word, maybe I can ask my teacher or something. But having that option and having that ability to say, in another process of my writing, I'm going to go back and like you said, Jen, maybe I do want to leave it in English, or I want to do in whatever language,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Which is another layer of the goal of word choice, I'm deciding do I want to use a lot of words to describe what this is? Do I want to use a specific word or do I want to keep it in another language? Those are all decisions that a writer is making as part of their craft. Clarisa, what were you thinking?
Clarisa Leal:
Yeah, no, I'm just thinking that it goes back to that strategy show, not tell in The Writing Strategies Book which is again, a very powerful one. And how we can do it just like Cristy, I loved how you described that with your students, just allowing them to not necessarily say the word that they don't know, but just describe exactly what it entails or how can you describe it in a different way without saying, saying the word and allowing the space to say it in Spanish or in English or in their own language. And again, something else that I'm thinking is making sure that we can model that through mentor texts and allow them to be exposed to texts that show that they can show the language going back and forth.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, thank you three for having so many great ideas for both reading and writing to take some of what we've learned from Dr.España and Dr. Herrera straight to our classroom. Thanks so much for being with me today.
Clarisa Leal:
Thank you, Jen. Thanks so much.
Cristy Rauseo:
Thank you for having us.