Three Steps for Nurturing Productive Struggle Among Multilingual Learners

By Natalia Benjamin

Language learning is a highly demanding cognitive task. Language learners focus on both language mechanics and meaning-making. Oftentimes, beginning language learners are relegated to learning basic language skills, rather than scaffolding for productive struggle.??

As a Spanish-speaking immigrant who has now lived in the United States for almost 30 years, I still have to check language conventions, but this doesn’t mean I am not capable of engaging in complex topics. This was also true thirty years ago when I came to the United States as an English language learner. So, how do we support multilingual learners to be successful in the classroom through productive struggle? Language of Identity, Language of Access (LILA) provides practical examples.?

First: Get to Know Your Students?

• Where are your students in their language development? Explore WIDA Can Do Descriptors and ELD Standards Framework?

• Build language profiles to unveil students’ full linguistic repertoire, as discussed in Translanguaging in the Classroom.?

• Get to know your student’s families and communities to connect the curriculum to their lives, families, and communities.?

Second: Develop and Sustain the Language of Identity and Criticality?

• Implement Culturally and Linguistically Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Pedagogies (Ladson-Billings (1995, 2022), Gay (2018), Paris & Alim (2017), Garcia (2017).?

• Select texts that speak to student’s lived experiences, communities histories, and linguistic needs?

• Teach critical frameworks, such as language orientations (Ruiz, 1984; Hult & Hornberger, 2016) and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005; Cuauhtin et al., 2019). Available resources: language orientations, visual notes and community cultural wealth, student-friendly graphic organizer (chapters 2-5 of LILA)?

Third: Support and Develop the Language of Access?

• Develop the language of access (chapters 6-9 of LILA).?

• Understand language functions and determine language objectives.?

• Use research-based strategies like Genre-Based Pedagogy and Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning protocols (Hollie, 2012).?