Multilingual Moments at TIS

Teacher pushes her students to be united, not divided, by language By  Public Radio International, adapted by Newsela staff In Acacia WoodsChan's ethnic studies class at Castlemont High School in Oakland, California, students chat with each other in various languages.  They speak Spanish and Mam, which is a Mayan language from Guatemala, as well as Arabic, a language from the Middle East and North Africa.  The students have only been in the U.S. for a few weeks or months. Some are from Yemen, a country in the Middle East, and many are from countries in Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Last year, WoodsChan became concerned when she started hearing the Spanish-speaking students laugh when their classmates spoke Mam or Arabic, making fun of how those languages sounded. "You could literally look at the faces of the students who spoke those languages — Mam or Arabic — and just see the level of disappointment," she ...

Below we are sharing an article from the WIDA International Newsletter: March 2019  Multilingual Voices "The ECIS MLIE conference in London was a breath of fresh multilingual air, with its compelling theme “Multilingualism Through Unity: Growing Host, Home and Instructional Language.” WIDA was proud to sponsor this bi-annual event, which brought together scholars, practitioners and thought leaders. Together we inquired into how we can better serve multilingual learners in international schools, while conversations and presentations wove together insights from research and wisdom from the classroom. Student voices were one of the most powerful additions to this year’s conference. Fatima, a student from Tashkent International School, captivated three hundred educators with her rendition of Sujata Bhatt’s poem “Search for my tongue,” as she shared her TEDxYouth talk about identity and language. At MLIE, teachers shared ways to support students’ mother tongues and eng...

The Ployglots The Polyglots is an after school activity (ASA) at TIS which is aimed at celebrating multilingualism through interactive activities and reading online books. We play games such as 'HeadBanz' in English, Russian, and Uzbek to develop awareness of host country languages. The participants have been having fun trying the unusual sounds of Uzbek letters, as well as noticing cognates across languages. We have also been reading online books on BookBox website (www.bookbox.com) in the home languages of the participants. One of their favorite books is Zippy the Zebra, which is about symbiosis of animals. Sometimes we choose the main character (e.g turtle or zebra) and teach that word in our home languages to each other, as well as looking for cognates. Thank you dear participants for making the Polyglots ASA meaningful and fun! Rahmat! Спасибо! ありがとうございました! Merci! 谢谢 Link to the article Symbiosis - art of living together https://newsela.com/read/natgeo...