Literacy in a Second Language

As more people immigrate into the United States, our education system is seeing an increase in students who do not speak English. These students are often categorized as special needs students or placed in remedial programs. However, most of these students do not need to be placed in remedial programs; they need to be placed in a bilingual program that celebrates both their culture and language while also integrating the English language.


Language can take various forms. We have different dialects of the same language (i.e. British English and American English) and completely differently languages (i.e. Chinese and Polish). All these forms of languages can show up in one school system. The question here is how do we form a curriculum that celebrates the culture and the language of all students? Another question that educators can ask is how do we incorporate the different literacy practices our students use? The answer to this question is very difficult. One school may have as many as forty different languages that are spoken by the students and each student may have a different culture. It may be virtually impossible to incorporate all this into a curriculum. However, there are ways that educators can make students feel that their culture and language are important.


Mari Haneda in her article “Becoming Literate in a Second Language: Connecting Home, Community and School Literacy Practices” offers one way educators can include culture, language, and literacy practices into a curriculum. Educators can research households’ “funds of knowledge.” This will allow educators to create lesson plans based on what is relevant to their students (342). For example, an educator can give a questionnaire to his or her students that ask questions about their interests, after-school activities, favorite books or genres, favorite subject or anything else the educator may find helpful. The educator may also want to give a questionnaire to the parents asking about the different languages spoken at home, if they would like to be involved in the classroom or anything else that may help the educator. From this “funds of knowledge” the educator can form a curriculum that can incorporate the interests and culture of her students. As Haneda states in her article: “[the funds of knowledge approach] is deep respect for, and appreciation of, students’ home languages and cultures and an attempt to make students’ experiences in both home and school coherent and mutually reinforcing” (343).


One main theme that is reinforced throughout many articles is that we need to make education assessable to all students. In chapter six of K.T. Lomowaima’s book To Remain an Indian, the author argues that students will have a higher success rate if educators taught the students to read in their primary first language and then introduce English later (120). One example of this is the Rock Point School. They designed a system call “coordinate bilingual instruction.” The students learned to read in Navajo, then in English. In higher grades they added reading in English. They also learned math, science, and social studies in both Navajo and English (121). Data from this school system showed that the students from Rock Point outperformed Navajo students from English-only programs (121).


To make education assessable to all students, we need to make our curriculum relatable. Ernest Morrell and Jeff Duncan-Andrade’s article “What They Do Learn in School: Hip-Hop as a Bridge to Canonical Poetry” explains how educators need to find a way to relate material to their students. In this article the two teachers connected hip-hop to the district-mandated material. Often time’s students are failing academically when they show high intellectual abilities. What Morrell and Duncan-Andrade found was that students can’t relate to the material. These students are able to critically analyze hip-hop music but they couldn’t analyze the canonical material that they were given in school. By connecting hip-hop music to poems such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan" or Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” the students were able to relate to the hip-hop music while also learning to critically analyze a hip-hop song and then relating it to canonical poetry.


The main theme that comes from these articles is that educators need to respect the culture and language that students come from. Incorporating their culture and language in school will help close the gap between home life and school life while also showing the students that where they come from is important. This should be the main goal for all educators: allowing students to be themselves, showing students respect for who they are, and allowing students to relate to the material given in class.