Biliteracy and Beyond: Teaching, Learning, and Writing with Joy

And so, after a five year hia­tus, I am beyond delight­ed to be bring­ing “Teach it For­ward” back to Bookol­o­gy. I invite you to come along for the ride as I con­tin­ue my jour­ney as a lit­er­a­cy edu­ca­tor striv­ing to share my reflec­tions and insight, per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al growth, and most impor­tant­ly, the joy of writing.

Since my last col­umn was pub­lished in Jan­u­ary, 2020 (just a few months before life as we knew it was turned upside down, thanks to Covid), I moved out of the class­room to work as a cur­ricu­lum coör­di­na­tor, returned to the class­room to teach 1st grade and took a two year break to tend to a new grand­ba­by. I have recent­ly embarked on a brand new role in a Span­ish Immer­sion school as the Eng­lish teacher. I am eager to explore and share what teach­ing and learn­ing looks like in a bilin­gual / bilit­er­a­cy school community.

Bilit­er­a­cy is the skill of not only speak­ing but also read­ing and writ­ing in two lan­guages. Flo­ra Lewis, a trail­blaz­ing jour­nal­ist who cov­ered inter­na­tion­al affairs for near­ly 60 years, once said “Learn­ing anoth­er lan­guage is not only learn­ing dif­fer­ent words for the same things, but learn­ing anoth­er way to think about things.” This sums up the most essen­tial goals of bilit­er­a­cy learn­ing: fos­ter­ing new, broad­er per­spec­tives, devel­op­ing crit­i­cal and flex­i­ble think­ing skills, and gain­ing a deep appre­ci­a­tion for diverse cultures.

Help­ing young peo­ple nav­i­gate lit­er­a­cy learn­ing in two lan­guages involves rely­ing on uni­ver­sal best prac­tices that are essen­tial in all lit­er­a­cy class­rooms; using cul­tur­al­ly rel­e­vant mate­ri­als, scaf­fold­ing stu­dents with visu­als when they are nec­es­sary and ben­e­fi­cial, main­tain­ing a strengths / asset-based approach, col­lab­o­ra­tion with fam­i­lies, and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing instruc­tion. Not an easy list that is ever ful­ly achieved, but one that is ongo­ing and fun­da­men­tal to cre­at­ing learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties where lit­er­a­cy and bilit­er­a­cy flourish.

What sets apart a bilit­er­a­cy learn­ing envi­ron­ment are a num­ber of unique and effec­tive strate­gies that incor­po­rate cross-lin­guis­tic trans­fer such as translan­guag­ing, “bridge” lessons, focus­ing on cog­nates and inte­grat­ing lit­er­a­cy with con­tent instruc­tion. Future “Teach it For­ward” columns will dig deep­er into these strate­gies as I share how they are being imple­ment­ed in my class­room, high­light­ing suc­cess­es and chal­lenges along the way.

As with most of my pre­vi­ous columns from years past (over 40 in the archives!) I leave you with guide­lines to keep in mind when select­ing titles to share with stu­dents and some excep­tion­al book rec­om­men­da­tions (bilin­gual or avail­able in both Span­ish and Eng­lish) per­fect for pro­mot­ing biliteracy.

Sug­ges­tions:

• Ensure Span­ish and Eng­lish texts are con­tex­tu­al­ly and cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­ate, not machine-translated.
  
  
• Choose sto­ries that reflect diverse Span­ish-speak­ing expe­ri­ences and affirm bilin­gual identities.
  
  
• Select books that rein­force struc­tured lit­er­a­cy in Span­ish — phone­mic aware­ness, spelling pat­terns, and morphology.
  
  
• Review con­tent to make sure it match­es stu­dents’ devel­op­men­tal lev­els and includes rich lan­guage and text features.