Embracing the Science of Reading and Multilingual Education
The Call for a Comprehensive Approach
Embrace the science of reading as a comprehensive body of knowledge.
Pair it with knowledge of how to address the social, linguistic, and cultural factors that impact students.
That was the call made to those who design and implement instruction for multilingual learners in a joint statement from The Reading League (TRL) and the National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL).
This community of experts contends that the body of scientific research should be used to “uplift practices that support students in developing proficiency in language, reading, and writing—in English and in students’ home languages” and that “nurturing the profound interconnections among knowledge, language, and literacy must be considered” (TRL & NCEL, 2023).
The Challenge of Implementation
However, these experts also acknowledge the challenge of translating this call to action into practice.
What might these practices look like in the current landscape of instruction?
“Amplify, Don’t Simplify”
Aida Walqui and George C. Bunch’s Approach
Enter the work of Aida Walqui and George C. Bunch: “Amplify, don’t simplify.”
With these words, Walqui and Bunch exhort educators to reframe their approach when preparing lessons for multilingual learners.
In the 2019 edition of Amplifying the Curriculum: Designing Quality Learning Opportunities for English Learners, Walqui and Bunch make the case for why it is necessary to abandon the traditional ways of teaching multilingual learners.
Instead they call for a high-quality education based on an inclusive and generative approach to instruction.
Shifting Away from Deficit Thinking
“English Learners bring to the table a wide range of multilingual and multicultural resources that make them not only candidates for the kind of learning increasingly advocated for in the 21st century, but also essential actors in efforts to create a more equitable and just society.”
Walqui and Bunch, 2019, p. 2
These multilingual learners are well suited to help us rethink how to prepare all students for 21st-century challenges due to the rich cultural capital they bring from their experiences.
Aspirational, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital developed through the experience of cultural transition allows the multilingual learners to bring a variety of assets to their new learning environments.
Walqui and Bunch call on educators to shift away from perceived deficits in multilingual learners’ abilities toward questions such as those proposed by Orellana and Gutierrez (2006):
- What do our students know?
- What can they do?
- What are their skills, contributions, or experiences that can be useful for them or for the world?
The High Challenge, High Support Pedagogy
Walqui and Bunch describe their Amplify, don’t simplify” approach as an ambitious “high challenge, high support” pedagogy.
Amplify means to enhance, elaborate, augment, extend, expand, and enrich the learning experience for multilingual learners. This approach is in direct contrast to “the simplified, discrete, and superficial” reductionist work of the past characterized by “teacher-dominated patterns of instruction and unenticing materials” (Walqui & Bunch, 2019, p. 21).
Amplify means to enhance, elaborate, augment, extend, expand, and enrich the learning experience for multilingual learners.
In more traditional approaches of English Language Development instruction, the curriculum is reduced, diminished, or condensed and presented in a setting that detracts, restricts, or separates multilingual learners from their classmates.
Amplifying the curriculum provides the kind of scaffolding that makes the curriculum accessible to the students while assisting them in gaining increasingly more complex understandings. It promotes students’ agency and sense of knowing about what to do in specific academic situations.
Most importantly, amplifying the curriculum integrates the conceptual, analytical, and language practices of a discipline so that students learn academic content and academic language simultaneously.
Amplifying the curriculum provides the kind of scaffolding that makes the curriculum accessible to the students while assisting them in gaining increasingly more complex understandings.
Practical Adaptations in Literacy Instruction
How Being a Reader Amplifies the Curriculum for Multilingual Learners
Professor Marco Bravo borrows Walqui’s and Bunch’s language to elaborate on his recommendations to those educators working with multilingual learners.
In a recent edition of Collaborative Circle, Dr. Bravo speaks of the need to alter our approach when designing instruction for multilingual learners:
“Too often the initial response of teachers working with English Learners has been to ‘water down’ the curriculum to make it easier for them. But this works counter to what they really need. If your students are third graders and you’re giving them second-grade material, this means that they won’t have access to the grade-level curriculum and they will fall further and further behind.” (Rourke, 2022, p. 7).
“If your students are third graders and you’re giving them second-grade material, this means that they won’t have access to the grade-level curriculum and they will fall further and further behind.”
Professor Marco Bravo
Dr. Bravo then highlights some ways in which the Being a Reader program is designed to intentionally amplify the grade-level curriculum for multilingual learners:
- through robust scaffolding and support,
- using visual representations,
- providing additional time for multilingual students to process information,
- leveraging the students’ native languages.
Elaborating on Language Features
Other adaptations that amplify instruction and augment the learning experience in Being a Reader include:
- recommendations for providing written language reinforcement to support participation in class discussions
- notes to alert teachers when they might need to “demystify” language (such as when a commonly used idiom or colloquial phrase appears in a text)
- suggestions for when students might benefit from an additional stop for discussion during a read-aloud.
- extensions that elaborate on particular language features of a text or study the significance of a purposefully selected excerpt
Implementing High-Quality Instruction
The Amplified Lesson Framework
To support implementation of high-quality instruction for multilingual learners, Walqui and Bunch present an explicit amplified lesson framework.
The tenets of learning that undergird their instructional design of amplified lessons align with those of Collaborative Classroom. These tenets include the value of diverse perspectives, a recognition of multilingual learners’ resources and experiences, and the importance of collaborative learning.
These tenets include the value of diverse perspectives, a recognition of multilingual learners’ resources and experiences, and the importance of collaborative learning.
The amplified lesson framework also includes many similarities to the design of effective instruction advocated for by The Reading League.
In the January/February 2023 issue of The Reading League Journal, Claude Goldenberg and Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan identify several elements of instruction that help boost multilingual learners’ achievement. The list includes the following:
- appropriate and challenging material,
- effective modeling of skills,
- strategies and procedures,
- visuals and displays of concepts and information,
- focused interactions with other students,
- application of new learning
Each of these elements is featured in Walqui and Bunch’s high-quality, amplified lesson structure.
The Consequential Shift
Amplifying the curriculum, not simplifying it, represents a consequential shift in the instructional design of lessons for multilingual learners.
Educators that adhere to this approach will need to consider the simultaneous existence of learning opportunities that rest alongside learning demands.
Walqui and Bunch summarize their ambitious pedagogy: “Amplifying the curriculum is not easy, but the enormous potential that English Learners offer to addressing our society’s current and pressing challenges make these efforts both absolutely essential and eternally rewarding” (Walqui & Bunch, 2019, p. 225).
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Aida Walqui is director of the Teacher Professional Development Program at WestEd and the Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) initiative. George C. Bunch is professor of education at University of California, Santa Cruz and winner of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2017 Second Language Research Special Interest Group Midcareer Award.
References
Goldenberg, C. & Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2023, January/February). Literacy research on english learners: past, present, and future. The Reading League Journal (4)1, pp. 12–22.
Orellana, M.F., & Gutierrez, K.D. (2006). What’s the problem? Constructing different genres for the study of English Learners. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1), 118—123.
Rourke, L. (2022, April). An interview with Dr. Marco Bravo: supporting English learners in the classroom. Collaborative Circle, iss. 5, pp. 4–8. Accessed from https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/collaborative-circle/.
The Reading League & National Committee for Effective Literacy. (2023, March). Joint statement: understanding the difference: the science of reading and implementation for English learners/emergent bilinguals. Accessed from https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Joint-Statement-on-the-Science-of-Reading-and-English-Learners_Emergent-Bilinguals-20.pdf;
Walqui, A. & Bunch, G.C. (2019). Amplifying the curriculum: designing quality learning opportunities for English learners. New York, NY: Teachers College Press and San Francisco, CA: WestEd.
Related:
Learn more about Being a Reader.
Supporting English Learners in the Classroom: An Interview with Dr. Marco Bravo