A Biliteracy Mindset

Want to know what biliteracy looks and sounds like in a 4th grade DLBE classroom? Know the research behind WHY biliteracy is among the finest empowerment pedagogies out there our MLLs? Sigenme pa’ aprender….

Biliteracy abounds in this 1st grade DLBE Mandarin-English classroom in Brooklyn, NY.

Twenty-four fourth graders sit in neat rows, eyes glued on their teacher as Soledad leads an animated discussion on colonial protestors in the American Revolution. This is a dual language (Spanish-English) classroom in Brooklyn NY, and the students (mostly first- and second-generation Mexican-Americans), are fully engaged.

Soledad shows them a political cartoon featuring colonists holding signs with slogans like “No Stamp Act” and “No Sugar Tax.” She then asks them to turn and talk about the clues that reveal how the colonists felt about the British power over their economy. 

She’s preparing them to answer the day’s prompt: “Do you think England felt threatened when the colonists were unhappy with them? Why or why not?”

Kris throws up his hand and explains that he knows the colonists were unhappy with England because they “protested.” Soledad lights up at Kris’ use of vocabulary he learned in previous lessons, then nudges him further, encouraging him to use the word “rebel” in his response.

While she works to add dimension to her students’ understanding of this historical moment, Soledad is also nurturing their biliteracy: modeling the academic register, pressing on student output, encouraging student dialogue, and celebrating academic vocabulary usage. 

This, my friends, is biliteracy in action.

What’s the big deal about biliteracy?

If you’re even half the language nerd that I am, you will understand the big deal when I say, biliteracy means full language and literacy development in two languages. And this is something we can offer our students by bringing a biliteracy mindset into our classroom. A biliteracy mindset simply asks us to view a heritage language as an asset rather than a deficiency. To help students use their heritage language as a tool by leaning into translanguaging and metalanguage practices.

It looks like creating space for emergent bilinguals’ reading and writing skills to evolve and be acknowledged. It’s one of the most authentic and direct forms of empowerment pedagogy. Oodles of research* proves this fact. (Yes, oodles is a quantitative term used in the top tier journals of ed research. Did you not know this?)

*Here are 2 studies about biliteracy should you care to explore this claim further: (1) This study by the Literacy Squared Group (2) This study by Susana Ibarra Johnson and Ofelia Garcia.

So turn on that biliteracy mindset

You’re a teacher. You’re pressed for time. You don’t have the funding to access additional support and resources. You care so much, but you are so burnt out.

That’s why I’ve built a biliteracy toolkit for you to carry into your teaching space. In fact, I’ve dedicated an entire chapter of my forthcoming workbook, Disrupting the Monolingual Bias, to exploring the impact of biliteracy and the many ways you can apply it in your classroom.  (The book is slated for publication in late 2023, so stay tuned!)

Are you interested in metalanguage? Or maybe the term itself makes you want to bury your head in the sand. I’ve been there; I think we all have. But what if I told you that you already have a metalanguage practice? What I can help you develop is a heightened awareness of how you are using these practices already, as well as language and activities that will help you apply them with more clarity and greater effectiveness.. Do you think your students might respond well to my “Mapping Metalanguage to Read Alouds” activity? It’s a close reading exercise where you adopt a paraphrasing method that embeds grammatical understandings in pursuit of more robust reading comprehension. What a gift to offer your students the tools they need to build reading comprehension and deepen their understanding of how language works. And the best part is- this method can be used on any language (or bilingual) text!  

Amp up your biliteracy mindset this fall by subscribing to my newsletter. Or, go one step further and nudge your principal to book a discovery call so we can do this important work, en comunidad.