Enhancing English Learning: Building on Linguistic and Cultural Repertoires in 3 School Settings: A Project Report for NSW Department of Education 2018

Abstract

Recent Australian Census data (Australian Bureau of Statistic, 2016) has revealed that 2.8% of Australians are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and 49% of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one overseas-born parent. Data has also revealed that Australians come from nearly 200 countries around the world; identify with over 300 different ancestries and speak more than 300 languages. Approximately 21% of people speak a language besides English at home. Australia’s diversity is realized in its classrooms; although unevenly distributed many Australian classrooms include young people from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, young people who speak many different languages and dialects of English. In 2016, NSW government schools contained 33.1% of students from language backgrounds other than English (NSW Government Education, Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, 2017: 1). While teachers working in diverse, mainstream, multilingual classrooms recognise that two or more languages bolster each other and that knowledge and abilities acquired in one language are potentially available for the development of another (Cummins, 1979), they often grapple with ways to acknowledge and then build on their students’ linguistic strength and complexity (Anderson and Stillman; 2013; Gutierrez, Bien, Selland and Pierce, 2011) in meeting academic language demands. Equally challenging is supporting student learning by learning about building on the linguistic and cultural assets of parents and the wider school community. Equitable learning environments are created when young people’s learning strengths and needs are recognised, making it more important than ever to find ways to support teachers to build on the knowledge and skill young people bring to school. Building on extensive pilot work (D’warte, 2013, 2014) and a further mapping pedagogies study (Somerville, D’warte, Sawyer, 2015) funded by the NSW Department of Education, this project further developed and refined research and pedagogical methods that have been shown to not only increase EAL/D students’ engagement in learning, but also support students and teachers in making explicit links between students’ home languages and dialects and English. This study further extended this work to position students in all classrooms as researchers of the ways they use language everyday i.e., investigating their reading, writing, talking & listening and viewing practices in one or more languages, inside and outside of school. In this study, young people were involved in rich tasks that required them to collect data, analyse data and then report on their data in targeted across curriculum lessons. This study investigated the possibilities this offered students and their teachers in meeting outcomes across key learning areas for example in Math, Science, History and Geography. Importantly, this study also investigated the inclusion of bilingual reading practices - Dual language book reading, (Naqvi, McKeough, Thorne, & Pfitscher, 2012; Naqvi et al, 2012) and the opportunities this provided for school and community relationships and the active participation of parents and the wider community in children’s learning both inside and outside of the classroom. This program involved the reading of books in English and an another language simultaneously, page by page with teachers reading in English and a parent or community member reading in another language with three different languages read in a week. Finally, this study sought to enhance teacher knowledge by positioning teachers as classroom researchers (Munns & Sawyer, 2013; Mayes & Sawyer, 2014), investigating student learning and documenting practices and strategies that offered opportunities to learn about and with students and build on their students’ and the wider school communities’ home languages to enhance classroom learning.