Teaching English Learners: Making Connections with Students' Home Languages

But I really want to get at the connections that you can make. And what I like to say is that you do not have to know the student's home language in order to make those cross-linguistic connections. What you do need to know is ... what are those cross-linguistic connections? And I like to look up on the internet, mylanguages.org, and I find out ... what is the home language of the student and are there any connections to be made regarding the sounds of their home language and English?

Spanish is the most prominent language of our English learners today. So there are so many sounds. I actually counted 19 sounds that are exactly the same between Spanish and English. In Spanish, for example, we say, well, they have 22 sounds in their language. Some people will say 24. In English, we say there's 44 sounds in the English language. Some folks will say 46. Either way that you look at it, English has doubled the number of sounds than the language of Spanish. English has more sounds than many, many languages. But what about those connections? Some vowel sounds that are similar between English and Spanish will be a sound like /ĕ/, right? Or a sound like /ō/. Those are very related. A sound like /ā/ is ... actually, we have that in Spanish. We just represent it in a different way than it is represented in the English language.

The same thing with /ī/. And a lot of folks don't even know that even native Spanish speakers don't know about those connections when we think about literacy. And so these sounds exist, so sounds like /k/ and /g/, right? Sounds like /l/ and /n/ and /m/ ... those all exist across the languages. Same thing in languages such as Arabic. Arabic has some sounds like /b/ and sounds like /l/ ... those exist across the languages. Knowing those connections is so important and knowing how we can capitalize upon that, highlight it with our students. Now, what's going to be problematic in the English language? Oh my goodness. What's going to be problematic are those short vowel sounds: /ă/, /ĭ/, /ŏ/, /ŭ/, right? That schwa sound's going to be problematic. Also, our sounds like those digraphs, those two sounds like /sh/ and /zh/ and /ng/. But we can make connections with, okay, are there any approximations that we can make from their home language to English?

Is there anything that's almost the same? And I like to talk a lot about, for example, in the English language, and I even think about my dad having trouble with sounds like /ch/ and /sh/. And so those were challenging sounds, but I don't understand why /ch/ is a hard sound of English. In Spanish we have the sound /ch/, right? But when you have the sound in English such as /j/, that's a very challenging sound that we use the letter 'j' for that sound. We can use 'g' before 'e' or 'i' or 'y', right? Or '-dge' at the end of a word. But here's a little hint for you. I want you to get your hand and I want you to put your hand on your throat right now, right here. And I want you to say the sound for the 'c-h' sound ... /ch/, /ch/, /ch/. Do you feel any vibration?

Your vocal chords are not vibrating, but the challenging sound for our English learners is the sound /j/. So what I want you to do is I want you to say /ch/, /ch/, /ch/ three times. Now I want you to add voicing. Make your vocal chords vibrate. Say /ch/, but add voicing: /j/, /j/, /j/. Turn off your voice box: /ch/, /ch/, /ch/. Turn it on: /j/, /j/, /j/. That's a connection we can make. And when we do that, the students are like, I got it. I got this new sound that was so challenging. Sometimes when I work with teachers that they themselves speak English as their second language, they said, oh, that sound always bothered me, but you just gave me a connection that will help me so very much, right? Another connection that we can make is that oftentimes in the Spanish language, we pronounce all the vowel sounds, right? And so it's very difficult for us to not pronounce some of the vowel sounds. So that's challenging. The 'r' in English isn't trilled. We like to go /rr/, and we like to trill it. So we have to learn how to soften that 'r', right? How to soften that sound. But there's also connections because we have what we call the soft 'r' in Spanish, and it's when it's between two vowels. So here's my face, and the word for face, for example, in the Spanish language is cada. Cada. The word for hour, like what hour is it? Hora. Hora. Cada. Cada.

And what you're going to notice there is, I didn't trill that 'r'. We call it the soft 'r' ... cada. Hora. And it actually represents the medial sound. We call it a flap sound. The medial 't', like in the word Katie. My niece is Katie, right? Or in a word like letter or ladder ... that medial 't' and 'd'. When a student writes 'l-e-r-e-r' for letter, I say, good for you. Why? Because you've got the sound. You're just using your letter from your home language. The new letter is going to either be 't' or 'd' in that medial position between two vowels. And a lot of instructors don't understand ... why do they put an 'r' in place of a 't' or a 'd'? That makes no sense. I thought they trilled every 'r'. No, there's a soft 'r' that is the English medial 't' and 'd' sound. So that's so important. Another sound that's so challenging is the sound for 'th', like in the words father and mother. And you know what's going to happen? Everyone look at your finger. I want you to say 'd-e-d-o'. Dedo. Say it like me. Look at my mouth. Dedo.

'D-e-d-o.' But that second 'd' ... I pronounced it differently from that first 'd', right? The second 'd' was pronounced like English /TH/. So when the children write father 'f-a-d-e-r', you're going to say, good for you. You got the sound. in Spanish, you use 'd'. In English, we use 'th'. And there's two sounds for 'th'. This one is going to be with the voice box on: /TH/. There's another one with the voice box off: /th/, like in thimble or thistle. So those are connections to be made, and it helps us to understand those connections. Let's look at their reading samples and their writing samples. And from there we can figure out why are those error patterns? Errors inform instruction. Listen carefully. Errors inform instruction. So I look at that error, and that error tells me what I need to do. Why do they have that error? What can I do about that error? And so that's going to help me very much to inform instruction. It's an opportunity for learning. It's an opportunity for you and your teaching.