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Newcomer Students

Newcomer students are youngsters who arrive in school without knowing English. When they are placed in classrooms where the language of instruction is English, it is a challenge for both newcomer students, their classmates, and their teachers. Teachers want newcomer students to develop English and to take advantage of available supports, but they also want them to learn. They are frustrated when they see that newcomer students cannot follow instructions or explanations, and they worry that they will inevitably fall behind.

Enlisting the Help of Classmates

In an effort to involve and include newcomers, teachers often enlist the help of other students who speak the newcomer’s language. These children are proud of their bilingual skills and eager to help. Unfortunately, without guidance, these eager young translators can sometimes create unexpected dependencies in the newcomer children they are eager to help.

Establishing a Language Buddies Program

A Language Buddies Program is designed to guide bilingual students in supporting their newcomer peers. It can take a number of forms but essentially it includes the following features:

1. Students apply to serve as language buddies.
2. Selected language buddies receive guidance in ways in which they can provide their newcomer classmates with just-in-time information while at the same time emphasizing the importance of their listening closely and making consistent efforts to understand.
3. Selected language buddies are publicly acknowledged for supporting the newcomer in gaining confidence in her ability to understand, begin to produce English, and participate in different types of classroom interactions.

Key Ideas about Language Development to Guide Language Buddies

There are a few key ideas about language development that language buddies need to understand.

Ideas about Receptive Capacities

In order to learn, the most important capacity newcomers need to develop is comprehension. They must first understand the teacher. They need to keep listening even when they get tired. At first it will be hard, but the more they keep listening and trying to understand, the more they will develop their receptive abilities.

Language buddies will not help this process if they translate everything for the newcomer.

Instead, what language buddies need to do is to:

• Provide “advance organizers” for newcomers to help them anticipate what the teacher will say. For example: the teacher is going to give instructions on what to do today, listen carefully.
• Set up a process for checking in to see what the newcomer understood. For example: Tell me three things you understood.
• Fill in key pieces of information for the newcomer.
• Check in with the teacher to give her a sense of the newcomer’s progress.

Ideas about Productive Capacities

Newcomers will develop productive capacities by being included in interactions.

Inclusion is key, that is, talking to newcomers with the expectation that if they keep engaged and listen, they will be able to imitate the language that they hear.

Language buddies can help productive abilities grow if:

• They work to encourage other students to speak to and include the newcomer and model the kind of English that the newcomer can imitate, for example:

Preformulated utterances: Yes that’s it. I don’t know. Cool! Bummer!

Phrases to keep communication going: Could you say that again?

• They phrase questions to the newcomer that support participation:

Choice questions: Do you think this is hard or soft?

Yes-no questions: Are you finished with the ruler?

Questions grounded in concrete objects they’re investigating: Do you want to test it with the magnet (pointing to magnet)?

Providing models of appropriate responses with explanation in the home language as needed: If you agree (si estás de acuerdo) say: “Yes that’s right. I agree.”

• They provide additional preformulated utterances for the newcomer to use and support the newcomer in using them (here’s how you say that in English) rather than simply translating what the newcomer wants to say.

Language Buddies in the Science Classroom

In the context of NGSS science classrooms, language buddies can support students’s work in triads. An ideal triad for a newcomer would include: the newcomer, a language buddy, and a talkative, competent speaker of English. In the science classroom, the process of language learning is seen as developing the ability to use the target language to participate meaningfully and purposefully in particular activities and contexts (Cook, 2002), such as using science practices to participate in inquiry and sense-making. The SISL approach understands language development from a participation metaphor, in which success means becoming a member of a community of practice (Larsen-Freeman, 2002)—in this case, a classroom community engaging together in investigating and understanding scientific phenomena. In order to support their participation, learners make use of affordances in their environment. Van Lier (2004) defines an affordance as “a relationship between an organism (a learner, in our case) and the environment, that signals an opportunity for on inhibition of action” (p. 4). Learners assert agency in perceiving and taking up affordances as they act and participate in their environment.

In the case of newcomers, the role of language buddies in science classrooms (guided by the teacher’s understanding of how opportunities for language development can be used) is to serve as “good buddies,” that is, friends to support learners in taking up these affordances: listening (past fatigue), observing, imitating, engaging, and using less than perfect language to express ideas. In doing so, it is important that language buddies do not “help” in ways that undermine newcomer students’ agency or show a lack of respect or appreciation for their intellectual capacity. Often, well-intentioned peers “help” in ways that are ultimately undermining, such as telling newcomers to copy their work to make sure it is “correct” or giving newcomers specific tasks in a group activity without having engaged them in the intellectual work of the task (e.g., telling them to draw a part of the model without engaging them in making sense of the phenomenon they’re modeling).

As teachers, there are important moves we can make to interrupt these types of unproductive “helping” behaviors:

• Focusing on the ideas students communicate, rather than the language used to express them.
• Focusing on the process of joint inquiry and learning, rather than correct products.
• Giving groups sufficient time to complete collaborative tasks, so that they don’t resort to copying in order to complete work quickly.
• Publicly affirming and valuing the ideas newcomers express, whether they are communicating in English, their home language, or through visuals or gestures, so that their peers see and appreciate their intellectual contributions to the community.
• Circulating to model how language buddies can engage newcomers in the group’s scientific work.
• Carefully observing their interactions in their triad and with their language buddies.
• Intervening as needed to make sure newcomers are engaged in their groups and provide feedback and support to language buddies.

References

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2002). Language acquisition and language use from a chaos/complexity theory perspective. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization (pp. 33-46). Continuum.

Cook, V. (2002). Portraits of the L2 user. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Kluwer Academic Publishers.