Sunday Stories
Being bilingual, biliterate and bicultural is part of both my personal and professional journey. Growing up, my home language was Spanish and my school language was English. Many years ago, when tennis already existed (a wondering by my then elementary age daughter) bilingual programs didn’t exist in my suburban Connecticut town. My father, who is from Mallorca, Spain, land of Rafael Nadal (yes, we are big fans) and my mother, who is from Ponce, Puerto Rico, met by sheer chance in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Although my father spoke Mallorquin, Spanish and English and my mother speaks Spanish and English, the language they shared was Spanish; hence our home language. When I entered Kindergarten, Spanish was my dominant language. I had some receptive language in English that I likely learned from my sister who was entering 3rd grade. As often happens with the oldest siblings, they bring English from school into the home.
I have very few memories of elementary school. I attribute this to the fact that I was probably more consumed with trying to understand what was going on in my classroom than forming any long-term memories. My strongest memory is that I was not a good student. In sixth grade, the culmination of elementary at my school, the teacher told my mother that I had difficulty putting vocabulary words from our weekly list into full sentences. In 7th grade, my social studies teacher decided that my lack of academic progress in her class was due to my first language. She announced to the class that perhaps the reason I wasn’t doing well on tests was because it must be very difficult for me to constantly translate from one language to the other. I was confused by her statement because I thought I wasn’t doing well on those tests was because the class was boring and I didn’t study. Nevertheless, my friends became obsessed every time we took a test.
“What language were you thinking in?” became a common question every time we turned in a test.
The truth is I had never thought about it. I had no metalinguistic awareness. Just as my friends became obsessed with my two languages, I began to wonder, is speaking Spanish a bad thing? Eventually, I came to realize that when I speak English, I think in English and when I speak Spanish, I think in Spanish and if I’m speaking to a Spanish/English bilingual person, I will inevitably codeswitch between my two languages because these are the two languages in my linguistic repertoire. Speaking both allowed me to communicate effectively when immersed in American culture and when engaging with my family. Later when my daughters were born, I was committed to their bilingual/biliterate development.
In later years, when I became a teacher and I learned about second language acquisition --the Common Underlying Principle from James Cummins and the Affective Filter Hypothesis from Stephen Krashen-- all of my prior educational experiences flashed before my eyes. It all started to make sense. During my teacher preparation program, I also learned that it took English learners/Multilingual learners 5-7 years to gain academic language proficiency and realized that my elementary experiences supported the research findings. I went from a struggling elementary student to excelling academically from 7th grade on. I was stunned when my counselor recommended a 9th grade advanced science class at the end of 8th grade. Me? An advanced class? No, those classes were for the other kids, not me. The visual in my mind jumped to my fourth-grade class during reading, when a group of students would line up at the door to go to the “smart” reading group. I struggled with reading comprehension and writing in English and never stood in that line. Once in junior high school, it was like la bombilla se me prendió, and I began to fly.
When I became a bilingual third grade teacher, all of my school experiences came with me when I stepped into my first classroom without realizing it. As I met my students, and muddled my way through my first year, as we all do that first year, I clearly understood what was missing from my elementary experience. There was no ELD class, or ELD instructional time, no bilingual education, no consideration that my brain was processing information through two languages. And so allí sequí yo, a panzasos, until it all came together in junior high school. This quote from Maya Angelou resonates so much with me:
“When you know better, you do better”
My teachers didn’t know what to do with this little Spanish speaking girl with pierced ears who struggled to comprehend but I knew better. I knew there was a better way to serve students who bring a language other than English into our classrooms. From the beginning of my career, I was committed to honoring my students home language, teaching in both to the best of my ability, and celebrating our bilingual/bicultural experiences.
It is my hope, as we step into the classroom for the 23-24 school year, that we celebrate bilingualism/biliteracy/biculturalism every day in our DLI classrooms because the work we do is very special and very important for our students, for our community and for us.
