Casting for Meaning: Teaching Multilingual Students in the Content Areas

I learned this year that so much of teaching multilingual students in the core subjects is about finding the right word.

It's like fly fishing for connection. You know they can learn it. You know they want to learn it, but your Google translated explanations, your pictures, and your pantomimes aren't catching.

This year, I taught two young women from Afghanistan with wicked sharp minds. They were both old enough to remember the before. The time before the Taliban took back the country and banned them from school.

They could speak and read two languages and were learning English quickly, but they were in high school with almost no formal background in math.

They were determined to learn math. I called on my misty memories of high school math to help them in our school skills for newcomers class.

Over and over I saw them blocked because the assignments depended on the understanding that not all math equations are instructions--many are puzzles. They needed algebra.

It felt important to help my students reclaim their right to understand algebra--a language with roots in their homeland. A powerful language to negotiate an unbalanced, world. It belonged to them, and it had been kept from them.

But my explanations of variables weren't catching.

One morning, the older sister and I sat together with whiteboards and markers while the rest of my newcomers worked on their Chromebooks. I could feel the imbalance I was creating by giving so much extra attention to one student, but I could feel how close she was if we could just make this connection.

We translated back and forth, but the translation wasn't quite clear. I modeled an equation with torn bits of scratch paper, but my student could not understand why that letter was sitting there in her math problem.

She wanted it to mean something. She wanted to know what it was telling her to do, and I was trying to explain, "it's not like the other symbols. It's not a verb. It's a mystery."

I tried English words to explain the variables. I tried "substitute" "placeholder" "unknown." Then a sentence finally caught.

"It's missing," I said.

"Oh!" she said. "Missing!"

And the connection between our minds finally held.

There's been a lot written and taught about comprehensible input and academic vocabulary, but that morning, what my student needed was for us to search together for the words where our languages overlapped.

As an English teacher, it's hard for me not to appreciate the irony that a gap left in her education by war and prejudice could begin to be filled by the word "missing."

I've received hundreds of hours of instruction about supporting multilingual students in the content areas. I've seen great presentations and strange ones. But I don't remember any of them teaching this honest truth.

That teaching across languages often comes down to quietly, persistently casting words back and forth until you find the ones that catch.