Laura Ascenzi-Moreno
episode 25 to the classroom podcast
November 6, 2023
My guest today is Dr. Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, a NYC-based scholar who studies bi and multi-lingual education. She has several papers about reading assessment practices and considerations for students who speak multiple languages. We also discuss reader models such as the Simple View and Active View, and which are more aligned with biliteracy research, and considerations for phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension instruction for bi and multilingual learners. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Angie Forero and Cristy Rauseo for a conversation about practical takeaways for the classroom.
Jen Serravallo:
I'm so excited to welcome today Dr. Ascenzi Moreno. Welcome.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Thank you so much, Jen, for having me.
Jen Serravallo:
I just love how you write about having an asset based approach to bilingualism and bilingual education. I wonder if you could start off by talking a little bit about what that means--to have an asset based approach.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Definitely. I think before thinking about what an asset based approach to bilingualism is, we have to connect it to a general asset based approach. There's a long tradition of scholarship that's rooted in the Funds of Knowledge by Luis Moll. And I think what was so powerful about that work was a focus on the knowledge, the customs, the traditions that people have that should be valued in school. And I think underlining all of that is this idea that being different is normal. And sometimes we as teachers and as educators, we expect standardization even when the kids come in in kindergarten. We want everyone to have the same experiences. But I think an asset based approach is really rooted in this idea that all children have funds of knowledge that they come into, whether that is linguistic, like for bilingual children or otherwise different traditions, et cetera. So I think teachers really need to think about how to kind of move or shift away from this idea of standardization and rather embrace the idea that differences, even if they're very different from what's valued in school, are launching points for strengths. So now to your question about bilingualism, I think when we think of an asset based approach to bilingualism, it is of course the funds of knowledge that are connected to students' linguistic backgrounds, but it also is understanding that students' linguistic backgrounds are connected to their identities. And sometimes we only see bi or multilingual learners as students who need language rather than seeing them as a complete whole, that their linguistic identities are connected to: their ethnicity, race, to their family, cultural history, et cetera. So I think an asset based approach to bilingualism really recognizes all of that.
Jen Serravallo:
So can you compare that to what would be sort of a monolingual or English centric perspective that I think is probably more common in schools than not?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Well, I grew up in New York City, and I just wanted to mention this because I think I grew up with this dominating monolingual English perspective, which pervades, I think both parents and educators, which is that to be able to succeed, you need to speak English, that success is measured by English proficiency. That knowledge can only be expressed in English. And I think that we see this with regard to reading. I think about reading all the time, and I think that there's this idea that teaching reading is really equated with English proficiencies. So students that are readers, if they can read in English, if they can talk about books in English, if they can write about books in English, and I think what I would like to shift teachers to think about is that knowledge can be embedded in any language and reading can happen in any language, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Haitian Creole, et cetera. And that needs to be valued as well. So I think we need to think about shifting away from saying, oh, kids are not readers. Oh, those kids have no books at home. But rather thinking about which practices are there. A quick example from my own life, my mom is an immigrant from Columbia where oral language is huge, and I actually didn't grow up with books in my home. I had very few books. I had the encyclopedias that you buy at the supermarket. I don't consider those amazing books at all. And so if a teacher were to come and see my home, I think they would think that it was impoverished literacy-wise. But in fact, it was a magical space where my mom told me stories about growing up in Bogota Colombia, and growing up on a farm and playing with her brothers and sisters and the river and the soup. And so to understand that a monolingual English perspective really doesn't allow us to see what students may have that make them literate is really important to acknowledge and to move away from.
Jen Serravallo:
And I think that story also says that literacy is bigger than just printed words on a page that stories can be told and heard, and that's all literacy practices as well, right?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Absolutely. I'm a big proponent of thinking out of the box in terms of traditional literacies, and it makes me think for so long as a teacher, we would do these beginning of the year surveys where we say, what's your favorite author? What are your favorite books? And to think about how to add to that, what stories are told in your family, what songs are being told, where do you read with others in your community, all these things, these questions, really can develop a full portrait of language practices that our students have.
Jen Serravallo:
Absolutely. I think a lot of the privileging of words on a page and English focus in schools comes because kids are assessed on very high stakes assessments and people feel pressure. We've got to show growth, we've got to show achievement. We've got to show that we're increasing proficiency scores year over year. I know you write mostly about formative assessments and in-classroom assessments, and I thought we could talk a little bit about some of your views and some of your tips that you have for teachers in that regard. In a recent article in the Journal of Literacy Research, you and your co-author Kate Seltzer write about the myth of neutrality and validity around reading assessments and how we need to consider raciolinguistic lenses when looking at assessment and assessment practices. And I know this is a big topic, but can you give listeners just sort of like a little 101 crash course on what you mean by this idea of "the myth of neutrality and validity of reading assessments?"
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Absolutely. I'm going to tell a story. I hope that's okay.
Jen Serravallo:
I love that. Go for it.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
So first of all, I want to say that I love teaching reading. I love reading. I love continually thinking about how to best educate readers. And so I do think it's important that students continue to grow. So all of my research has been rooted in that. And as a teacher, I loved reading and I actually liked doing the authentic reading assessments that teachers often are asked to do because you get to sit next to a child and really have a conversation and listen to them read. But one of the things, I was a dual language bilingual teacher in East New York, Brooklyn for more than 10 years. And during that time I realized, wow, I'm collecting all this data, but I never look at it side by side. So I collect data about children reading in English. I collect data about children reading in Spanish, but I never sit down. And let's say it was you, Jen, and say, okay, let me see Jen as a whole reader, not as a reader in English and not as a reader in Spanish, but holistically, I didn't do that. And then when I became a literacy coach, I noticed the same thing. We were collecting data on students to help put them into groups, but we weren't really developing holistic portraits as readers. So that was really the catalyst for my doctoral and postdoctoral work where I observed teachers. I worked with teachers thinking about translanguaging and reading assessments and developed a vision for something called responsive adaptations that I'll talk about a little bit later, which is very, in a nutshell, multilingual ways to adapt assessments so we can understand who the reader is. But one day when I was presenting this work at a school, some teachers were obviously really bothered by it, and they started saying, well, no, we can't do that because that is kind of challenging the validity of the assessment. It's going to make bi and multilingual readers seem stronger than what they actually are. And I left that meeting really upset, and I thought, oh my God, I thought that I was proposing a flexible, intellectual, way for teachers to think about reading assessments that would support really truly understanding bi and multilingual readers. And instead, the teachers were opposed to it because they were saying that the assessments should actually prove that the students were struggling. And if they didn't, then there must be something wrong with the assessment. So I teamed up with Kate Seltzer, who's an amazing scholar who worked on something called the "critical translingual perspective," and we worked together to analyze data, and we realized that when teachers were talking about students of color and the assessment showed that they were struggling, they were like, oh, yeah, well, this is expected. They don't have books in their home. They're still learning English. While one sample of teachers worked in a French English dual language school, most of the children were white European, and when their language during an authentic reading assessment kind of came to bear on their reading, they were like, oh, it's okay. It's just a matter of time. When they get it, they're going to acquire the language. It'll be fine. So with that comparison, what we realized is that the teachers have, it's not just about tweaking the assessments that's going to bring equity to assessment, but it is also bringing teachers' awareness that certain ideologies circulate around assessment, and we have certain beliefs about what is valid and neutral.
Jen Serravallo:
That's a really helpful story. So let's talk about these "responsive adaptations," which take into account students' language practices during the assessment process. Can you give some examples?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Absolutely. So first I wanted to talk about what it means to be a reader. As a multilingual person, I use English, Spanish mostly, but I married someone who's Italian, so I also use Italian in my life. And so as a reader, for example, if I read a text in Italian, which is my newest language, I am able to understand it pretty well because now I've been speaking it for a while and reading it. But if you asked me questions about it, I would feel most comfortable responding in either English or Spanish because my Italian was just learned off the fly talking to people I don't, I've never been in an academic setting. I don't know how to really sound like a literate person, let's say, or I just don't have experience in that context. So that is just to say that if we are to think about reading as a construct, reading can't be conflated with language proficiency because you can't say that I can't read in Italian, I can, but my language proficiency doesn't allow me to express it. So that's kind of the heart of these responsive adaptations. If we were to tease apart reading and language proficiency, which is really hard, just to understand reading and not to understand reading tied to language proficiency, then we need to allow students to translanguage throughout the reading assessment. So in my work, I've thought about reading assessments, and they're usually different parts like the introduction, then listening to the student, documenting what they're saying, and then comprehension. So I'll give you two examples. One is documenting. When children are speaking and you're documenting how they read, you might take note of some of the errors that they make. And one of the things that I think we haven't done in the past is analyze and see if those errors are a result of reading or the result of a student acquiring a language. So for example, even though I'm an English speaker, when I see the letter, I often pronounce it as /ee/. Like the other day I was talking to someone, I said, Mika, I was talking about this person's son, and she's like, it's actually Micah. And I was like, oh, okay. So if students may be reading, they have multiple features from different languages, so as they're decoding, they may use that. So if I see the word bird, if I'm a Spanish speaker reading that maybe for a second time I might say beard, which sounds like a beard that grows on your face. So inquiring and asking, seeing, is that really an error based on language or is that based on reading? Because that means that the teacher has to do something different. If it's a language based issue, then you just talk to them about language. So like an E, English is I is /eh/ or /ee/, et cetera. With retelling, I think it's really important to have students use all their linguistic repertoire and even their drawings. So if they're talking about a book that they read, they should have an opportunity to talk about it or to write about it or draw about it in whatever language best demonstrates their comprehension. So going back to a book that I'm reading in Italian, if I'm able to write about it in English, and that is how a teacher assesses my comprehension of the book, that really gets to the construct of reading and not to language proficiency.
Jen Serravallo:
So all this makes me think we have to really understand as teachers, what are we trying to get from this assessment? What are we trying to learn about the child so that we can respond with appropriate instruction? And I have definitely been in situations like you're describing, where there's a fear of going outside of the parameters of the way that the assessment's written for fear of..."cheating?" I don't know. It's not going to be true to the assessment. It's not fair. It's not right to allow them to respond in a language other than English. But really if what we're trying to figure out is do they understand the story and they're going to be limited in their ability to tell us what they understand because of a language difference, then that's not fair. That's getting back to the neutrality and validity piece, right?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Exactly. Yeah. So I think a really important concept, and as a teacher educator now, I am the undergraduate deputy at Brooklyn College, so I'm very familiar with the type of education that pre-service teachers are getting. Unfortunately, I think there needs to be more assessment literacy in pre-service education and for practicing teachers. So one important idea is this idea of "construct." A construct is the variable that you're trying to measure. So if we're trying to measure reading, then what we're measuring are aspects of reading, decoding, comprehension, et cetera, fluency, those things, if we're going to measure them, we can't conflate them with language, otherwise we're measuring, we're not measuring what we expect to, there's too much noise. We're measuring language. And we may want to measure how you read in English. We may want to measure how you read in Arabic, but that means then we have to be intentional about our instruments and what's included.
Jen Serravallo:
And I taught New York City public schools. I had kids who spoke Spanish, multiple different dialects of Spanish, Russian, Haitian Creole, Urdu, all in the same class. And so as a teacher trying to practically administer assessments and identify what students need additional support from language and what children need additional support from a reading specialist. But you write about how language learners are often considered struggling readers and are misidentified as having reading challenges. So how do you tease that out as a classroom teacher who is working with students who speak multiple languages?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
That's such a great question. And obviously if you're a bilingual teacher, it's much easier, but if you're not, there's still ways that you can do this. First, I think that students are misidentified as struggling readers when they're not provided with opportunities to translanguage or use different types of languages that they use at home. One way to do that is by having, you could do voice recordings, you could do writing, you could do video, and these could either be shared with colleagues. I know that puts effort on other educators to help, but let's say I don't speak Urdu I think it's important, maybe the child can write. We are living in an amazing time where we have all these apps that can help us. I was in a school just earlier this year where I saw a teacher working with students in math, and she had some newcomers who spoke Russian, and she was talking into her phone and it was speaking in Russian. So there's so much that we can do 10 years ago that we couldn't. So there are ways that teachers can experiment with various apps in order for them to be open and provide opportunities for home language. Again, language proficiencies are often confounded with literacy. So going back and understanding is this an issue that has to do with reading or with their language development? And Alison Briceño, Andria Klein have an excellent article, which is "A Second Lens on Formative Assessment." I love that article because they look at not only pronunciation, but they also look at the ways that students acquire irregular verbs in English. Sometimes kids say, work-did instead of worked, and how do we tease apart? How do we have an understanding of language so we can tell the difference? And I think those are two really great ways of supporting teachers to start out in thinking about, yes, I can infuse my reading assessments with a more multilingual perspective.
Jen Serravallo:
I wasn't planning on asking you this, so feel free to take a pass if this is a little too left field. But what I'm thinking about right now is I've just come off of reading a couple of different think pieces by Mark Seidenberg and Tim Shanahan about the Simple View of Reading: language comprehension times decoding equals reading comprehension. And I'm thinking about how taking a multilingual perspective on that model sort of complicates it.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Jen, that's such an amazing question that we all need to grapple with because there are so many bi and multilingual learners right now. And now with the science of reading, we really need to think about how can we complicate the field. I really love the Active View of Reading that was put forth by Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright, because I think that it's very aligned with biliteracy research. So in the Active View of Reading, they have bridging processes. They also talk about cultural and contextual knowledge. They talk about learner motivation, self-efficacy, all these things. These components, I think, model more what biliteracy development is. So we know from the long history of biliteracy development and literacy on research on bilingual readers that metacognition is important, that the relationship between word learning and vocabulary and comprehension is important. And we see all of this modeled in the Active View of Reading. So I think that we need to, as bilingual advocates and educators, we really need to think about what theory would best support multilingual readers, which in my mind, after looking at the SVR, Scarborough's Rope, and the Active View Reading, I really think there's a lot of potential there with Active View of Reading because it supports, I think, instruction that leads to bridging processes that leads to more metacognitive work. One of the issues that I've seen, my current work is looking at foundational work in bilingual classrooms. And one of the things that I'm concerned about is that students are doing a lot of phonemic awareness without comprehension. So in essence, they're working with a lot of nonsense words. And what we know from a lot of research, including Nanny LaSalle's work, is that really in the end, what we need to pay attention to bi and multilingual learners is comprehension in the long run. And so if we break apart always or for more time than what's necessary foundational work from comprehension, I think that in the long run, that'll hurt bi and multilingual learners.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, I think that too. I think about, I understand a little bit of assessment using nonsense words to try to tease out how they're applying phonics skills to a word that they could have never seen before. I kind of get that. But using it during instruction, when you have an opportunity to introduce students to words, especially a multilingual learner who's working to learn vocabulary along with learning decoding rules, it me seems like a waste of time and potentially confusing to be using nonsense words.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Well, I think a really important question for all educators at this time is to think about is the instruction that I'm doing meeting the intended purpose for bi and multilingual learners? So if I'm doing, let's say, a phonemic awareness activity with students, are they getting the phonemic awareness skills and practice, or are they confused? Are they not gaining vocabulary, for example? So I think we need to think about that. And because there are some nonsense word kind of activities I've seen teachers do, but for emergent bilinguals, they may do more of that than monolingual learners.
Jen Serravallo:
I wonder, do you have anything else to say about assessments or instruction when it comes to word level reading for bilingual students in particular?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Well, sure. I try to read everything I can, and I want to mention I'm in lots of other scholars into this, that conversation.
Jen Serravallo:
That's wonderful.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Yes. So Cardenas Hagan, I don't know if you know her work. She really looks at foundational instruction for multilingual students, and she says that the knowledge of the different components: letter sounds, alphabetical knowledge for bi-multilingual learners could be complex because students bring in their knowledge from other languages. So how we use sounds to decode is more complex for bi and multilingual learners. So I think that that's really important. Again, this goes to one of your earlier questions. What's like, how is asset based pedagogy for bilingualism different from a monolingual pedagogy? Is that to assume that all children have the same pool of resources when they come into kindergarten is one that leads to teaching, which may not be as powerful as we want it to be. So if we have Spanish English speakers to think about how their pronunciation may affect their decoding, what are some ways that things we know about letters that we can actually do these cross-linguistic connections in class? I don't even see that in dual language classrooms where we say to the kids E is EH in Spanish and it's EH or E, how is it different? How is it the same? Let's think about these things. I think that's really critical. The other thing is sometimes I think we have a tendency as a dual language teacher to mirror the Spanish instruction to English instruction. I really recently read this article by Bonafaci, who's an Italian researcher who said that languages that have shallow orthographies like Spanish and Italian, that their letters always are stable. They always sound the same…
Jen Serravallo:
Predictable.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
That they don't need the same level of decoding work that students who are speaking deep orthography, so German, English.So what I see in schools is we always do the same thing, 20 minutes in English decoding 20 minutes in Spanish decoding, and it mirrors throughout the grades. And I think we really need to think about if that's necessary, if for emergent bilinguals or bi multilingual learners, we really need to focus on comprehension in the long run, then maybe we don't need the same schedule. Maybe we need do more comprehension work once the decoding is down in that other language. So lots of things to think about, and I hope that there can be a space where both bilingual scholars and monolingual English scholars come together and really think about these things seriously because there is so much at stake.
Jen Serravallo:
I'm thinking writing instruction and how to honor translanguaging and multilingualism in writing time and how to support them and how our assessments for writing. I wasn't planning on asking you this, but do you have anything to say about the writing connection here too?
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Yeah, I mean, I think of myself solidly as a reading scholar, but I do think about writing often, and I think translanguaging can be very useful throughout the writing process. So it doesn't, like, let's say I'm writing, I don't know, give me something like a small moment story. Over a couple of days or a descriptive report about something, an animal or I don't have to do all the drafting, the note taking, the editing in English. I could do some of it in Spanish. I could go home and talk to my parents. Let's say I'm writing about penguins, I dunno. And I could ask, my parents, could look on the internet in different languages. I can gather information in different languages. And I think this is really important because can you imagine how much more knowledge can come into that piece if students are able to transliterate? Now, I really believe that teachers can say for this piece, it needs to be in English or for this piece, it needs to be in Spanish. And so now we need to do the work of how we translate what you gathered into this. And that's the a really amazing point of learning, language learning. I think it's an incredible opportunity, but I think that there are ways to insert translanguaging into the writing process that makes it really rich.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, I agree. I think there's just so much that a writer needs to orchestrate to get the words down on the page. And I think about even teaching a monolingual English student how to add periods at the end of a sentence, capitalize the letters, but also think about the content and what you're writing and your transition words and your phrases and use good word choice. And that already is so much to think about all at once. So if you think also now I'm writing in a language that's not my first language, or I'm still working to learn this or develop proficiency in it, being able to translanguage while drafting or using whatever language I feel most comfortable in to gather information, like you said, it could just lift the level of the writing and develop, I think, more confidence and free up the writer to be more fluent with their writing.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
And again, it's thinking about what is writing, right? And who is a writer? If you are a writer, then you have to use all of your powers, your observational powers, your language, and your language powers, et cetera. So thinking about that peer work as well and allowing the space for her students to use their home languages. And I think this means that teachers need to give up the idea that they need to know everything that's being said.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, I think that's a great message to trust the children and to use the amazing tech tools we have to translate anything that you want to translate to double check. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Laura, for your time today. I've really appreciated this conversation. I think your scholarship adds so much to the field, and I'm excited for teachers to listen in.
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno:
Thank you, Jen, for inviting me. It was really a pleasure to have this conversation with you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Cristy Rauseo and Angie Ferrero. Thank you so much for joining me.
Cristy Leal:
Hi, thank you.
Angie Forero:
Yes, it was incredible. One thing that came up for me is the importance of multiple measures of assessment using measures like WIDA, for example, to measure language proficiency and then possibly measuring reading in the student's primary language and in the target language as well. And of course there's so many other things that teachers need to consider, but that's where talking to colleagues and getting support with one another and having conversations about that is so important.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Angie, just in case there's people that aren't familiar with WIDA, can you just explain a little bit what that assessment looks like?
Angie Forero:
It’s an assessment to give you a sense of students' language proficiency. There's different components to it. You are really thinking about students' language across different measures.
Cristy Leal:
I had so many things going on in my mind. I have the 3000 posts here because what she was talking about, just building bridges between the two languages. It cannot be just one island here and the other there. And it flows better in a bilingual classroom because it's there and you can see it. But when it's not the setup, it's not like that and they just have to go out to pull out or another classroom. I like what she said, it's just one student processing two things. But then what about the teacher who doesn't know this? So it's teacher preparation and teacher understanding. And what about the teacher who doesn't speak the language, and then how do they manage all those We're juggling a thousand little things besides reading and writing. And then with assessments, I like what she was saying about what are we trying to measure? And I think that's what is always on my mind when I'm assessing and we are in this assembly line one assessment, turn it in one assessment, turn it in, but then I want to get all, and then I never see the data anymore or a lot of people don't see the data, but sometimes what I see is I want to see this reading assessment for 10 minutes because I am fascinated to see what pattern they applied or why are they mixing or why are they mixing it. And then because I am bilingual, I can understand why they did that, but the teacher who doesn't like how can we support that so that they are responsive and they don't put it into like, oh no, they don't know how to read or they don't understand or they need more. I don't know. It's a tricky…
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's so complicated. And I think it's an enduring problem that some assessments are used for the purpose of reporting or scoring or leveling and they're turned in without having the time to really evaluate them. So that's one level to this challenge is like, what are we really doing this assessment for? What's the purpose? And then can we trust whatever the assessment's telling us? Because is it really telling us about reading as we think it is or is it really telling us about language? And I think about my experience, to your point, Cristy, where I am not bilingual. And not only that, but I had students in my class, 32 kids, New York City classroom speaking, five different languages at home, plus some English speakers as well. I don't have the knowledge about Russian or Urdu to be able to tease out what from this assessment is a language learning issue and what from this assessment is a reading issue.
Cristy Leal:
I mean I think, I don't know. Practically as an assessment, I don't think there is one thing to do, but I do think the kids need to be seen and understood and you are whatever you're bringing, even if I don't understand it, that matters and that counts. And I want to understand, I had three exchange students from Sao Paulo who would speak Portuguese the last few weeks, and I don't understand Portuguese. I can understand a little bit of some things, but I was like, I'm going to learn one word every day. But seeing it as an socio-emotional piece of accepting, and you're welcome here, then that's what I think matters a little bit more.
Angie Forero:
Just to piggyback off that idea, if we as teachers believe in a student-centered classroom where it's not just the teacher imparting knowledge, but that we know that students bring different ways of knowing and being, ways of practicing literacy, and we welcome that in the classroom, then, we're open to learning from them as well. So that means that we don't have to know their language, that we might put them in groups where there might be a peer who is bilingual and who's able to translate for us, or that we use different apps and technology to support us in understanding the language. So I think we have to get creative as teachers and not be scared just like kids take risks in the classroom. We as teachers have to open up the space to open up ourselves, really our practice to take risks and invite this because that's what ultimately we want to validate our students' cultures and language practices.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. I think about one year I taught third grade and I had students who came to my classroom in third grade and it was their first time being in school ever. And they spoke Spanish at home and they spoke Spanish in the country they came from. And I have to be honest, my thought was they don't even know their alphabet. I went right to the deficit. What they don't know. And I think what she started by talking about-- the importance of an asset-based lens--is what do they bring and valuing the literacies. That might be oral literacy, might be storytelling, might be listening comprehension, and that they do have language skills. They just might not be written language skills yet. That's such an important orientation as well. It's a real challenge, I think takes a constant reminder and mindset on the part of the teacher to say, I understand where we're going, but not to look at it as what are they missing, but what strengths do they bring and how can I build off of those strengths from known to new?
Angie Forero:
Absolutely. I think that is so important. I think that circles back to how we started the conversation where we think about multiple measures for assessment. So knowing what are your students bringing to the classroom, what are their strengths? Oralcy is a strength in my culture, in my background. I could just think of my mom and how she told a lot of stories and going into the classroom, if teachers had used that, knew that about me as a strength, maybe it could have been possible that I might not have to write out the answers to comprehension questions in terms of reading and possibly build on that, asking me those questions, my being able to talk it out and translanguage as a, I'm talking it out. So I think that is so important, and Jen, just to speak about that the asset based is so important. And teachers, I think that's one thing that we have to support teachers with as teacher educators and working with teachers, is to get a sense of how do they view culturally and linguistically diverse students? Because we're going to fall back on stereotypes and biases. And as teachers oftentimes, like you said, I'm glad being honest about that. I think that that was the case for myself as well. We we're so stressed and we're overworked and we kind of fall like, oh my gosh, I have so much to do. And that could push us toward that deficit minded approach. So I think that all of that is really critical to have conversations with your colleagues about if you're a head, a coach, a supervisor, department, administration, administration, department within administration, department head.
Cristy Leal:
I think the principals are key, because to what you were saying, we can do the time we have and even after school we work nonstop. But it would be better if we can have those spaces within the day, the classroom or not the classroom, the school day, or I remember one school I had Wednesdays was half a day. And then we will meet in learning communities to have those conversations with your colleagues and that principals know the value. It's not like assessment, windows close, give me assessment, move on to the next thing. I need to have it so that I can inform my teaching and not just punch a number in a spreadsheet and forget about it.
Angie Forero:
Can I bring up one more point, a final point? I thought it was really important. It's really important to emphasize using translanguage as a bridge, to support kids in and raising meta linguistic awareness. She talked about it a little bit with the idea of the letter sound correspondence and how in different languages, for example, Jaime, my dad's name is a lot of people pronounced it Jamie. And so bringing up kids' names and asking them as the knowledge bearers, how do you pronounce this letter in Spanish? And okay, let's think about how we would pronounce this in English or whatnot. And so that you're creating, that, you're raising metal linguistic awareness at the phoneme- grapheme level, and then also at the word level, how there are nuances and meanings and having kids think about that as well, and a certain word in Spanish and how that might sound, what that meaning might be in English and what might be the nuances. So I think that's important work and translanguaging can really be a powerful way to bring that forth, bring that forward.
Cristy Leal:
And kids are so interested in that. The kids are fascinated with it. Well, can I tell you a funny story? When I taught first grade, the first week of my first year of teaching, first week of school, I had kindergartners in my classroom and it was like this assessment of a pre-assessment for literacy, and then there's all these pictures of circle or bubble, the first letter of this word, and it was a corn in the cob. I knew that it cannot be how in Venezuela we say corn because jojota. I knew that was just a Venezuelan word, but I was like, it's maiz. What else could it be? So anyway, I'm doing that, and then this kid comes and asks me about it, and I'm like, I see all these letters. And it was like an E L and a P, and I was like, wait, there's, it's not a jojota, it's not a J, it's not, I know that, but it has to be an M. So I'm like, stop the assessment. It's like everyone number five is wrong. That is, the letter is wrong. Just mark it off. You can skip that. Move on to this is August, October is this fall festival in the school, and then there's this card that said a elote with something like cream or something. And I was like, what's elote? And then it's like, oh, that's corn. I mean, immediately I'm like, oh my God. There was an E!
Jennifer Serravallo:
The assessment.
Cristy Leal:
There's never an e. I was like, I mean, petrified. Every time I see a elote, I think of those poor kids who the teacher did tell that there was a word. It was a Mexican translation of something. And I've never ever heard elote in my life. So I mean, these kids graduated by now, so they should be fine, but…
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I think that story just shows it's not even just about language. It's about language and it's about dialects and it's about culture, and it's about all of these things coming together. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciated both of your insights.
Angie Forero:
Thank you, Jen.
Cristy Leal:
Thank you.