In our increasingly multilingual and multicultural society, it is important to consider the impact of bilingualism on the development of language and how exposure to more than one language from a young age might shape an individual’s brain both structurally and functionally. In the recent past, bilingualism was thought to impede cognitive and linguistic development, effectively ‘confusing’ the child’s brain with multiple languages. We now know that this is NOT the case. (Arredondo et al, 2018)
A point that was universally agreed upon at The Reading League Summit is that, from a cultural, cognitive, and academic perspective, multilingualism is an asset. For students, vocabulary and background knowledge in their home language can lead to positive transfer when learning the language of instruction, supporting comprehension. Dual language instruction is an optimal setting for this.
The reality, however, is that most EL/EB students are not afforded the opportunity to learn in a dual language setting that instructs, at least part-time, in their home language. Thus, students must learn to read in a language they are learning to understand. Even in English-only settings, educators can still capitalize on the asset of a student’s home language by leveraging cognates, or words in different languages that have a similar phonological, orthographic, and semantic form. Educators can also use a student’s home language to highlight similar elements of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and grammar, and lessen the cognitive load of new learning by engaging in contrastive analysis, which is the comparison of two languages to determine the similarities and differences of specific elements. Teachers can support better comprehension skills by choosing texts that relate to children’s prior experiences and world knowledge. In this way, teachers can provide culturally relevant content that is more likely to be familiar to children and therefore more likely to be understood.
In this EdSource article (2023), Tim Shanahan states:
There are things that, depending on the language, might overlap with English and that the children might already know, in which case they don’t necessarily need to be retaught, or certainly not to the same extent as with a first-language student. For example, a lot of the sound-letter matches are identical across Spanish and English, so if the child already knows how to read in Spanish, the classroom instructor wouldn’t need to put a lot of time into teaching those things. On the other hand, there definitely are sounds that we have in English that don’t exist in Spanish. And studies have found that it’s useful to teach those quite explicitly and thoroughly.
These resources are useful in helping educators understand elements of language that may be similar or different across languages: