Setting a Supportive Classroom Environment for DLL Children

Setting a Supportive Classroom Environment for DLL Children

Lillian: So when setting up your classroom environment for dual language learners, you need to consider language interaction. So we already think about that in early childhood, but take it a step further when you're thinking about dual language learners. You want to create many opportunities for them to practice language, both with their peers and adults, and self-talk on their own. There are a lot of internal practice strategies, rehearsal strategies that happen with dual language learners while they're acquiring English, and any of us go through that while we're acquiring a second language.

So, here are three suggestions that come to mind. Number one is set up opportunities for peer interaction. Oftentimes, if you've read "One Child, Two Languages" by Patton Tabors, some of her descriptions of classrooms in which DLLs are situated along with monolingual English speakers, they sense isolation from the rest of the peers in the group, right?

Because they're not — they don't share a language, they can't just go up and engage in play and interact verbally, so it's important to set up these contexts in which they have to share materials, an adult is there to facilitate that initial conversation, there can be some non-verbal communication that goes on through play, gesturing that young kids seem to find and develop their own language, even if they don't share a verbal language, but some of that takes environmental engineering, right?

Having maybe one less paint brush than you need to or having materials where you need to share in order to create the project, doing murals together. So thinking more about some of those engaging activities where children are working together and will need to interact. Second, I think about how to engineer time where teachers can spend more individual in small group time with those students.

Those students will often get lost in the shuffle; they might be the quiet ones if they're going through that somewhat of a silent period, right? Maybe they're not causing a fuss; they're quiet, and everything else going around a teacher who has a lot on her plate may just miss those opportunities to really foster communication relationship building with that child.

So, it's important to schedule those times into your schedule where you either have them in a small group or individually to foster those conversations and their initial emerging English. And then the third thing that I would consider in terms of environmental arrangement is having culturally familiar objects and some routines around the classroom.

So when they come into the classroom and they see their home reflected in some ways in that classroom. I'm going to bring up two examples. In Minneapolis, the lead agency for Head Start started Somali-English bilingual classrooms, and so not only is it that they speak Somali in those classrooms, but you walk in and there are beautiful baskets from Somalia, there's woven tapestries.

You go into the kitchen areas and there's items that their moms are using, they donated, that they cook with, the particular foods that they make. And so when you walk in you really feel like you've potentially walked into one of their living rooms, right? The pillows are on the floor, and they've created this very welcoming environment that — that children associate with using the Somali language.

So again, language does not happen in isolation from the cultural context in which we learn it, and particularly in early childhood because they're not out there experiencing the world around them, they're always experiencing the world within the context of the adults around them.

So, as much as we can incorporate those cultural artifacts, norms, some of those routines in our classroom, will help the child transition into a school program more easily and then potentially foster more conversation, more communication because the environment's welcoming and then fosters those relationships.