by Catherine Compton-Lilly
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Oct. 23, 2014

I am constantly impressed when an 8-year-old-child easily shifts between languages, translating her mother’s words into English to compensate for my lack of Spanish. In recent years, a growing body of research has highlighted the significance of bilingualism and the long term effects being bilingual, or being multilingual, has not only on people’s understandings of language, but also on their general cognitive abilities. Perhaps this is why I am intrigued by a recent publication by esteemed scholar, Luis Moll. I highlight Moll’s work partly because I found it in a book on Vygotsky and feared it might not be discovered by many of us who focus on literacy.

In this chapter, Moll and his colleagues observed two groups of children as they moved between reading instruction in Spanish and English. The children spent half of their days in each classroom. The teacher who taught them to read in English did not speak Spanish. Moll and his research team were intrigued when they noticed that some children who were capable readers in Spanish, were identified as struggling in their English reading classroom. When their Spanish-speaking teacher viewed her students participating in the English reading classroom, she noted, “Those can’t be my kids. Why are they doing such low-level work?”

Moll and his colleagues initiated a series of teaching-learning experiments in which they asked children to read texts in English and then discuss what they had read in Spanish. The results were compelling. Children who appeared to have minimal comprehension of English texts when they were required to discuss these texts in English, revealed rich comprehension when they were allowed to talk about the texts using their native Spanish. Moll and his colleagues worked toward creating a “bilingual zone” in which children were invited to draw on their Spanish language resources to comprehend and discuss texts they had read in English. Specifically, Moll and his colleagues were careful to provide scaffolds when children discussed texts using English. They built on students’ comments and provided missing elements of stories enabling groups of students to collectively express what they understood and to share their ideas with each other. When students gave short one-word responses, the research team situated these comments within the story and invited other members of the group to build on these comments.

Finally, the research team invited children to use Spanish to access key terms and convey ideas the children could not yet express in English. Throughout this process, the research team actively resisted allowing the children to resort to literal and basic comprehension of texts. Instead, they asked high-level inferential questions and expected the children to respond to complex ideas while employing language scaffolding and allowing the children’s selective use of Spanish. As Moll reports, “we knew that the students could perform at more advanced levels,” and that “it was well within their zone of proximal development.”

Significantly, the idea we can invite bilingual speakers to draw on their full language repertoire— in two languages— is a concept quickly gaining traction with our colleagues who focus on ESL and bilingual education, as noted in several of the studies listed at the end of this post. Teachers can ask children to use their native languages to talk or write about books read in English or explore different ways of conveying ideas using multiple languages or language variations. In addition, it is important for teachers to recognize the bi-literate abilities many children bring to classrooms, including being able to write words and sentences in more than one language. Even teachers who do not speak the native languages of all her students can invite students to draw on their bi-literate abilities, consulting with bilingual colleagues as needed. Recent work on “translanguaging” opens the door for reading scholars to think deeply about intersections between reading and language. Moll’s work invites all of us to consider the competencies our bilingual students bring to text and possibilities for our teaching.

Catherine Compton-Lilly is an associate professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Compton-Lilly teaches courses in literacy studies and works with professional development schools in Madison.

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