Three Steps to Support Students’ Language Skills Development

To be successful, students must develop language skills that allow them to access all facets of society including job opportunities, social and cultural events, and personal growth opportunities. But language skills are based on more than simply mastering the mechanics of language. Each student’s identity and criticality must be nurtured and sustained while they develop their language skills so that they can maintain their cultural and linguistic identities within monolingual educational settings. Teachers can do this in their classrooms by:

1) teaching students critical frameworks

2) using texts that are both windows and mirrors regarding language experiences

3) engaging students in authentic learning tasks

Prior to deciding what critical framework to study with students, teachers should have an essential question for their lesson, select a text that serves as both a window and mirror, and an authentic task that develops their language skills. Let’s work through an example from Chapter 4 of Language of Identity, Language of Access (#LILAbook from Benegas & Benjamin, 2024).

 

Essential Question	How does Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) support self-advocacy to fight against injustices and oppression?
Text	Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team
Summative Task	Students will identify injustices in sports and write an argumentative paragraph showing how CCW can be used to fight against injustices and oppression.

1. Teaching students critical frameworks to nurture criticality

For students to apply a critical framework to the texts they are studying, they must first learn the concepts and language of criticality.

Criticality is defined as “an understanding of how power, anti-oppression, and equity operates throughout society” (Muhammad, 2020). In the example above, students need to understand Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) and the different types of capital to answer the essential question and successfully engage in the summative task. To understand this framework, students learn the concepts of CCW (Yosso, 2005; Cuauhtin et al., 2019) using a graphic organizer found in the #LILAbook. Chapter 4 of LILA offers more tools to teach the vocabulary and review the concepts with students. Students explore in particular linguistic capital, navigational capital, and resistance capital to address the essential question above.

2. Selecting a text that can be both a window and a mirror

The text selected to answer the essential question is the book Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. Teachers should decide if their students should read the entire book or an excerpt to study the experiences of Indigenous Peoples in boarding school. This text serves as a window because it affords the opportunity for students to learn about historical events regarding Indigenous Peoples. It is also a mirror because the stories that are narrated in the book reflect racialized experiences of marginalized populations including diverse language communities. This offers an opportunity for students to discuss reasons why this happens in society, and more importantly, shows how the Carlisle Indian Boarding School students took a stance against injustices and oppression. Through this, students develop language to talk about racialized experiences rather than internalize negative images when they experience racism and oppression. Students also develop positive language identities with stories that model how to advocate for justice. In fact, “the identity connection to the larger society stems from understanding who we are in the context of the communities we belong to” (Benegas & Benjamin,2024, p.22).

3. Engaging students in authentic learning tasks

The task students will be engaging in for their summative work is identifying injustices in sports and writing an argumentative paragraph on how CCW can be used to advocate for justice and against oppression. Through this task, students develop their language skills by organizing writing with the appropriate structure, using complex language to describe injustice and CCW, integrating quotes in writing by providing textual evidence to support their argument (Ch 4 of #LILAbook), and using complex sentences (Chapter 8 of the #LILAbook) to get their point across. This type of task not only develops more complex language for students, but it also engages students because the task is relevant to them or their communities. Sports are important in many communities. Some immigrant communities are avid soccer participants or fans, others relate more closely to football, and others might have their own connections to other sports. This also supports the development of the language of identity as students work through real-life applications connected to their realities as language learners. As they identify injustices in sports within the text and their life, students’ experiences are affirmed, nurturing the language of identity. It’s essential to “provide opportunities for students to read the world and identify how power dynamics shape their experiences so that they have the tools necessary to find justice and not internalize racialized experiences” (Benegas & Benjamin, 2024, p.22).

Developing students’ language skills is essential for them to have access to job opportunities, cultural and social events, as well as personal growth opportunities.

As they gain more complex language access in English, it is essential to provide opportunities in the classroom with topics that engage their language of identity and criticality. This will foster students’ positive multilingual and multicultural identities, as well as criticality, which in turn supports them to become change-makers in their communities in the pursuit of just societies.

References

Benegas, M., & Benjamin, N. (2024). Language of Identity, Language of Access: Liberatory Learning for Multilingual Classrooms. Corwin Press.

Cuauhtin, R. T., Zavala, M., Sleeter, C. E., & Au, W. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking Ethnic Studies. Rethinking Schools.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. Scholastic.

Yosso, T. J. (2005, March). Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.

Cover Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle | Sahan Journal