Incorporating Languages I Don’t Know Into My Teaching

using Chinese within sentence frames

As I have mentioned previously, I have 9 students who speak languages in class that I don’t – Indonesian, Chinese, and Bangla. I also have Urdu and Pashto speakers but they have a little more English than the others, much like most of the Spanish speakers in my class of 28.

The majority of these new students are Chinese-speaking. Initially, I had them seated in pairs but mixed into other tables. I did this mixing thinking it would encourage more English usage, which it seemed to, but they were very disconnected from the class; like they were inside a bubble that they’d breach only rarely.

However, during a spelling bee last week, I had them all together at one table. Their job was to follow along with the written words as students, lined up, spelled them, and they were to raise their hands when a word was misspelled. I wanted to see if they knew the letters, and two did. Two others were able to follow along, though, and maybe didn’t feel comfortable raising their hands.

During this bee, I noticed that while they may not have been speaking in english, there was more language learning happening – they were closer to the front of my class and discussing, working out together what was going on.

So, this week, I created a table of 9 – with the 6 Chinese speakers plus 3 Spanish speakers, right at the front of the room. This also allows me to pool my resources – bilingual dictionaries and such – and focus on what troubles they may be having.

One thing we are working on right now are biographies of a person they know. I always put sentence frames on the board but now I add Chinese as a guide. It’s a bit mechanical but I feel it has to be right now because they simply can’t do sentences or even put the right english word after a frame on their own. I also put photocopied entries from our dictionary as part of the word wall.

I don’t know Chinese but I have studied Japanese, so I have some understanding of the use of characters and I assume the syntax is much the same, and therefore quite different from English. So I don’t know exactly how their translations work, but I primarily rely on one other Chinese student (who arrived to the country last year) who speaks Beginner English. Not only does this seem to help, but they are far more engaged during class. I think, on some level, they feel like valid participants in the class. I have also been trying to learn some chinese and they have been helping me with my pronunciation, which I think also helps make them understand that I value their language and am also comfortable making mistakes!

Using the first language is always crucial, if frowned upon by some, and really not easy when you don’t already know it yourself!

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