CPF Magazine Winter 2020 Issue

Parents as
Multilingual
Experts
Leveraging families’ cultural and
linguistic assets in the classroom
BY DR. GAIL PRASAD
Reprinted with permission of Education Canada. First published in
December 2017, Vol. 57 (4) – https://www.edcan.ca
Linguistic diversity has become a defining feature of Canadian
classrooms today. Multilingual students, who speak different
languages at home and at school, have become the norm
rather than the exception, particularly in major urban centres.
Take the Toronto District School Board and the Vancouver School
Board: they both report over 120 languages spoken by their
students and their families. It’s not uncommon for teachers today
to have classes filled with students who speak many different
languages at home. At a time when people are constantly on
the go and technology makes it relatively easy to communicate
around the globe 24/7, researchers have observed that children
navigate their different language and literacy practices with
natural ease; they have grown up in a world that depends
on flexible language and literacy practices. Many teachers,
however, don’t share students’ diverse linguistic backgrounds or
experiences with growing up in a digitally mediated world. And
teacher preparation programs often offer little required work with
English learners and their families. Yet as classroom populations
continue to diversify, the need to develop inclusive multilingual
pedagogies also grows.
Are there ways to bridge this divide? How can teachers draw
on students’ diverse cultural assets and build on the linguistic
expertise that students bring into today’s classrooms, rather than
constraining it? Surely, all students should leave school with more
expansive linguistic repertoires rather than losing their home
languages in the process of acquiring the language of instruction.
Further, how can teachers engage parents in their children’s
language and literacy development if parents don’t speak the
language of instruction? Teachers, naturally, don’t speak all
of their students’ home languages!
Multilingual learning
Dr. Jim Cummins has advocated that teachers engage
multilingual students in the creation of what he calls “identity
texts”: students are encouraged to use their home languages
and cultural understanding alongside the language of instruction
to produce multimodal texts for academic purposes that reflect
students’ identities in positive ways. [1] Over the past decade,
researchers and teachers across the country have been putting
this idea into practice through the creation of a range of
continued . . .
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CPF MAGAZINE WINTER 2020 7