Teaching Young Dual Language Learners to Be Writers: Rethinking Writing Instruction Through the Lens of Identity
When I was serving an LDS mission in Lisbon, Portugal, I was told a great joke. My companion and I stopped a man on the road to gauge his interest in hearing our message. Unsurprisingly he didn’t, but he did pay me a fantastic compliment: he asked me which part of Portugal I was from. He was quite surprised when I explained that I was actually American.
He then told me the joke:
“What do you call someone who speaks two languages?”
– Bilingual.
“What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”
– Trilingual.
“What do you call someone who speaks one language?”
– American.
I laughed at the irony of the situation because the American in this conversation was the one who actually spoke more than one language, but it did get me thinking.
In other parts of the world, the current generation entering and controlling the job market largely speaks two or more languages. Most of the younger generation I interacted with in Europe spoke their native language and English. However, here in the United States, most people do not speak a foreign language beyond a pre-school level.
Christopher Wagner of Boston College wrote a fascinating article for a recent publication in the Journal of Education. His article, “Teaching Young Dual Language Learners to Be Writers: Rethinking Writing Instruction Through the Lens of Identity,” explains that the number of children growing up in families who speak two or more languages or who speak a language other than English has steadily increased over the past two decades and represents one of the fastest growing populations in the world, including the United States.
The purpose of this article is to offer elementary educators and others who work with young DLLs an approach to waiting instruction that supports the development of DLLs who value writing and view themselves as writers.
For young dual language learners (DLLs), this process of learning to write and use language expressively differs from that of children who are monolingual English speakers. Yet these differences often remain unaddressed in curricula and in writing instruction.
Despite a recent “identity turn” in the literacy field that has shifted attention to how children’s identities shape writing practices and motivations for writing, common frameworks for understanding identity in literacy processes have been used only in a limited way to consider identities of both young children and DLLs.
This article reports relevant theory and research on the writing identities of young DLLs to explicate a framework of writing instruction that is informed by these understandings. This framework provides a model for elementary-grade instruction that supports the language acquisition and writing development of DLLs, including positive self-identification with writing.
For educators, specifically those in elementary education and teaching English as a first or second language, this would be a great article to read. I found it interesting, engaging, and easy to read.
The article in its entirety can be found by following this link.
Hayden Coombs 