 Multicultural Education

and Language Teaching

 Craig Woollard

 Staff Development Coordinator

 What is Multicultural?

The British Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, defines "the doctrine of state
multiculturalism" as a strategy which has "encouraged different cultures to live separate
lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream".

BBC News, Saturday 5th February, 2011,

Munich Security Conference

 Definitions

of, relating to, or constituting several cultural or ethnic groups within a society:
multicultural education

Oxford English Dictionary

including people who have many different customs and beliefs:

Britain is increasingly a multicultural society.

Cambridge Online Dictionary

 Global Language Monitor

In 1960, there were some 250 million English speakers, mostly in former colonies and
the Commonwealth countries. The future of English as a major language was very much in
doubt. Today, some 1.53 billion people now speak English as a primary, auxiliary, or business
language, with some 250 million acquiring the language in China alone.

 ‘Words, words, words.’

Hamlet ACT 2, Scene 2

English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009, at 10:22am GMT. The
number of words in the English language was:

1 008 879.

Global Language Monitor , February, 2011

 The Growth of English

Word 999,999:
 Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation,
sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. This word achieved English-language popularity
through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.

French contains around 100 000 words, which is fewer than a tenth of the words in
English. Dialects in the north of China are so different from the language spoken in the south
that often the easiest way in which to communicate is in English.

 According to the GLM:

The Millionth Word was the controversial ‘Web 2.0′.Web 2.0 is a technical term
meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. Currently, there is a
new word created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day in English.

Every fortnight, somewhere in the world, a language dies… Already half the world’s
population speak just 11 mother tongues between them. Mandarin Chinese is top of the list,
English and Hindi (or the closely related Urdu) vie for second place, with Spanish close
behind…But if you look at the number of people who can handle a language competently, as
well as those who speak it as their mother tongue, it is obvious that there is only one great
white shark in the pool: English.

(Morrison, 2002, p.26)

 World Languages

 6,909 living languages

 421 recently extinct languages

Since language is closely linked to culture, loss of language almost always is

accompanied by social and cultural disruptions as well.

 Brazil

 The number of individual languages listed for Brazil is 236. Of those, 181 are living
languages and 55 have no known speakers.

Literacy rate: 88% (2005). Immigrant languages: Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Catalan-

Valencian-Balear, Irish Gaelic, Italian (50,000), Japanese (380,000), Korean (37,000), Latvian,
Lithuanian, Standard German (1,500,000), Turoyo, Ukrainian, Vlax Romani.

Stage 1 New to English - Bilingual English learners who might be able to engage in
classroom learning activities using their own mother tongue, but need support to operate in
English.

Stage 2 Becoming familiar with English - Bilingual English learners who can engage in
all learning activities but whose spoken and/or written English clearly shows that English is not
their first language. Their oral English is well developed but their literacy development in
English is such that they need considerable support to operate successfully in written activities
in the classroom.

Stage 3 Becoming confident as user of English - Bilingual pupils whose oral and
written English is progressing well and who can engage successfully in both oral and written
activities, but need further support for a variety of possible reasons, for example pupils who
are achieving considerable success in subjects such as mathematics and science but much
less in others such as English or in Humanities, which are more dependent upon a greater
command of English.

Stage 4 Fully fluent in English - Bilingual pupils whose use of English and
engagement with the curriculum are considered successful and who do not require
additional language support.

 Dictionary work works, right?

Asking students to look up words in the dictionary is what students find most
uninteresting… often in schools pupils look up a word and write it in a sentence. However,
dictionary definitions can be obscure. 63% of student sentences written were judged to be
odd.

Bringing Words to Life: Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan

 Lisa Delpit: Other People’s Children

 Lisa Delpit

When a significant difference exists between the students' culture and the school's
culture, teachers can easily misread students' aptitudes, intent , or abilities as a result of the
difference in styles of language use and interactional patterns. Secondly, when such cultural
differences exist, teachers may utilize styles of instruction and/or discipline that are at
odds with community norms.

If we are to successfully educate all of our children, we must work to remove the
blinders built of stereotypes, mono-cultural instructional methodologies, ignorance,
social distance, biased research, and racism. We must work to destroy those blinders so
that it is possible to really see, to really know the students we must teach.

Gay and Howard (2000) explained that 86% of all elementary and secondary teachers
are European Americans. The number of African American teachers has declined from a high
of 12% in 1970 to 7% in 1998. The number of Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander American
teachers is increasing slightly, but the percentages are still very small (approximately 5% and
1% respectively). Native Americans comprise less than 1% of the national teaching force.

 H.RICHARD MILNER
 ...the preservice teachers who seemed the most prepared and efficacious about
teaching in urban schools and highly diverse settings had the most salient interactions and
connections with the following:

(a) cultural and racial awareness and insight,

(b) critical reflection, and

(c) the bridging of theory and practice.

...critical reflection is a necessary interaction for preservice teachers... preservice

teachers needed to focus on themselves, their own experiences, life worlds, privileges,
struggles, and positions in relation to others (their students, their students’ parents, their
students’ communities, and their students’ ways of knowing, for example). Critical reflection
was needed to guide the preservice teachers through the posing of and answering of tough
questions beyond our course and into their classrooms.

In a study of 125 preservice teachers, Hadaway et al. (1993) found that most
education students reported few personal experiences in culturally diverse settings.
Frequently, gender, ethnicity, and class influence the tendency to hold parochial attitudes,
especially when these are linked to limited travel and the inability to communicate in a non-
English language (Zimpher, 1989).

...to be effective and equitable teachers, education students must understand and
appreciate human diversity. Appreciation and understanding evolve from direct
interpersonal contact and from knowledge of the history and culture of diverse groups,
including their values, stories, myths, inventions, music, and art.

 So, what works?

Monica Nilsson and Ulla Sundemo (2001, pp. 161-163), in their multicultural
classroom with children aged between 7 and 9, focused largely on working with characters
from children's books to promote learning.

A trunk containing new letters from the characters, problems, or new equipment
became part of the teaching strategy. They wrote letters to the characters and they got
letters back, often with different problems to solve.

Children came up with a large variety of solutions:

"He has to pick up 3." (boy, age 7)

"He needs to take 5 from the white and 5 from the blue." (girl, age 9)
"It's dark in Billy's room, so Billy must take 3 socks. And try them on." (boy, age 9)
"You can take 2 if you're lucky, or 3, then you will be sure to make a pair." (girl, age 8)
And, finally, Bej's very obvious solution: "Turn on the light!"

If we try to take the perspective of the child, the world is not divided between play
and learning—the world is just something you have to make sense of. If children begin to
distinguish between play and learning, it is because we as adults make that distinction.
Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson

 L1 and L2: separate or together?

...students’ first language is not the enemy in promoting high levels of second
language proficiency; rather, when students’ first language is invoked as a cognitive and
linguistic resource through bilingual instructional strategies, it can function as a stepping
stone to scaffold more accomplished performance in the second language.

 Exposure to Words

In terms of learning new words in the course of reading, research shows that it does
occur, but in small increments. Studies estimate that of 100 unfamiliar words met in reading,
between 5 to 15 will actually be learned.

Bringing Words to Life: Isabel L. Beck,

Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan

 Dictionary work works, right?

Asking students to look up words in the dictionary is what students find most
uninteresting… often in schools pupils look up a word and write it in a sentence. However,
dictionary definitions can be obscure. 63% of student sentences written were judged to be
odd.

Bringing Words to Life: Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan

 Teaching Comprehension

 Reciprocal Teaching

 Palincsar and Brown (1985)

 Teachers worked with small reading groups averaging five in number. The students
were identified to be fairly adequate decoders but very poor comprehenders,
typically performing at least two years below grade level on standardised measures
of comprehension.

 Strategies

 Predicting

 Clarifying

 Summarising

 Asking questions

 Added visualising

 Resources
  Text matched to pupils’ abilities and interests

 A dictionary

 An atlas

 Reciprocal Teaching cards as prompts in the initial lessons until pupils have mastered
the strategies and no longer need them

 To conclude…

With the nation's student population becoming increasingly more diverse, teachers
must both be willing and prepared to work with students from backgrounds different from
their own. For indeed, if All students don't succeed, we fail to meet their nation's democratic
ideals and the very purpose of schooling itself.

Pohan (1995)