All languages belong here
By Alexa Bennett Fox, teacher, Burnaby
Last year, my Grade 4 students taught their home languages to one another and to me. This is their story. This project was built with and by students and reshaped my classroom in a profound and beautiful way.
How it started
When my Grade 4 class started learning French in term one, a student asked, “Why do we even learn French?” This is a question that I always look for at the start of our French learning — it’s an important one. When my students asked this, I invited them to consider why this might be. They weren’t sure at first, so we looked at the map, and we found France. I asked them to think about how French got all the way across the Atlantic.
Students, who had already done a lot of learning on this topic, suggested that the answer was colonization. I asked them if they could tell me more about how colonization would be responsible for changing the languages used in a place. One student then put it all together: Europeans didn’t just come to visit, they wanted to take the land and take away Indigenous languages and cultures. Soon my students had connected their initial question to important history, explaining why both of our official languages are one of the many legacies of colonization, and why we don’t get to learn hən’q’əmin’əm’ or Skwx̱wú7mesh sníchim at school in Burnaby.
Some students also talked about how it was “a bit weird” and “unfair” to only learn in English and French at school, especially when so many members of our class spoke more than one language. I told them it felt extra weird to me, as the only person in the room who spoke French, to insist that French was the one additional language that should be taught. We talked about how it would be interesting to learn each other’s languages, but nobody jumped at the opportunity, so we continued our discussion.
A few months later, we were talking about growth mindset and how we use growth mindset for all kinds of things — learning to bake, improving at basketball — not just school subjects. We’d started by thinking about what we were learning on our own and then moved on to thinking about what things we might want to learn together. One of my students asked “Ms. Alexa, can we train our brains to learn each other’s languages?” This time the class was immediately excited, so we started to brainstorm what this would look like.
We started by making a list of languages that students were keen to share: Farsi, Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, Ukrainian, Spanish, Punjabi, Arabic, Ilocano… the list was long. We decided on a basic ground rule: teaching was voluntary; we would accept if any-one decided not to teach, but we would encourage anyone who did. Then, it was decided that we would add this language learning to our daily check-in.
What we did
Every day after recess, we do a check-in. This is a student-led activity, where the general goal is to practise being a community that listens to, understands, and cares for one other. A student leads the check-in, with the following script:
I’m going to start the class check-in. The rules are:
One person talks at a time.
We listen to the person talking.
Everyone has the right to pass.
Today the question(s) is/are: How are you? And ... ?
Sometimes we just ask, “How are you?” But often we dream up another question together. It could be something connected to what we’re learning (e.g., What biome are you the most interested in?) or to student interests (e.g., What is your favourite imaginary animal?) The goal is always to offer an authentic way for students to share, to learn about each other, and build connections.
Once we decided to work on learning one another’s languages, our check-in became multilingual. Students quickly discovered that if you are teaching, it is important to be kind but also a bit bossy. Kind, because it can feel like a risk to try to say something in a new language and you want your class-mates to feel good about trying; bossy, because each person’s language is precious and deserves to be said with as much attention to correct pronunciation and accent as possible.
For students who decided to share their language, some felt ready to independently make a bilingual teaching guide written in their language and in English. Others wanted some support with writing and worked with the teacher, a parent (or in one case, with a big brother, and in another, with grandparents!) to make sure that we had a clear guide to help them successfully lead.
Over the course of the rest of the year, students taught Farsi, Mandarin, Korean, Hindi, Taiwanese, Punjabi, and Tagalog. And on the very last day of school, one student decided to wrap our project up in the perfect way by offering to teach Vietnamese for the last check-in.
What we learned
I wasn’t sure how long we would work on this project or how many students would want to participate. But as soon as William and Ryan started us off teaching Farsi, the whole class got into it. Soon, students could ask Chetori? (How are you?) and respond with how they felt using Farsi. These Grade 4 language teachers were proud, and those who were learning — like me — were excited to learn.
This multilingual learning time became a daily highlight. It stopped feeling hard to try out words in a new language and instead became part of the class routine. Students asked their friends about other words they wanted to learn and would sometimes spend time in class working on their check-in page to guide their teaching.
The check-in also created space for thinking about how we say things in different ways, depending on the language. We learned that languages often have different sounds than the ones we make in English, and we practised using our voices in new ways. Students made connections between languages and also noticed differences. We grew our understanding of English as just one of many written systems, and English pronunciation rules as one of many ways the letters in our alphabet can be used. We observed that languages don’t always have words in the same order, that punctuation and reading direction change from language to language, and that in some languages the tone really matters. We grew our confidence in trying new things and celebrated when we were brave together. And it was fun!
Weaving this student-led learning into our daily routine pushed back against the supremacy of English and French in the classroom, affirming that all languages are doors to new places, ways to connect to the world, and something to be celebrated and cherished, both in and out of school.
