Creating Linguistic Portraits With Diverse English Learners

• In Event: 34.059 - Teacher Education Policies and Linguistic Diversity: An Investigation of Teacher Education for Supporting English Learners

Abstract

Objectives
The broader study behind this paper examines Ontario’s new teacher-education policy mandating that all teacher candidates learn to support English Learners (ELs). However, this category of “English Learner” is defined broadly and includes vastly diverse experiences and identities. Of the 2 million K-12 students in Ontario, about one quarter are identified as ELs with 63% of elementary schools and 58% of secondary schools reporting ELs in the student body (People for Education, 2017). This continuum of ELs includes Metis, Inuit and First Nations students living in remote locations and experiencing chronic marginalization, Franco-Ontarians who attend French-language schools, refugees with significant gaps in their education, immigrant students who have begun to learn English at school in their country of origin, as well as secondary students in Canada on a study visa. We have undertaken to develop linguistic portraits with this very diverse group of ELs to determine whether Ontario’s teacher education policy is consistent with the diversity, strengths, and needs of ELs.

Theoretical Framework
Freire’s (1970) Humanizing Pedagogy is a frame for Cummins’ (2009) Transformative Multiliteracies Pedagogy (TMP) and the Literacy Expertise Framework (LEF) which inform our development of linguistic portraits with diverse ELs. Humanizing Pedagogy emphasizes the need for transformative educational experiences in which students’ identities and experiences are central. TMP and LEF emphasize ELs’ prior knowledge and the need to involve them in cognitively engaging activities leading to knowledge construction and dialogue via art and technology, as well as how teachers/mentors can accomplish this by focusing on meaning, language and use (Cummins, 2009; Cummins et al., 2015).

Methods & Participants
Using participatory action research (PAR) and Flipgrid, a video discussion app, we collaborated with over 20 ELs aged 10-20 years to create multimedia profiles of their full linguistic repertoires, their beliefs and attitudes about the languages they speak, and what needs they have at home, in the community, and at school to maintain their languages. PAR helped us to rethink researcher positionality with respect to youth who are marginalized. We followed McCarty, Wyman and Nicholas (2014) in viewing EL youth not merely as objects of policy, but also as policy-makers themselves. We have used maximum variation sampling (Merriam, 1998) to reflect the vast diversity among English learners in Ontario.

Findings
A content analysis of the linguistic portraits reveals the uniqueness of each EL in terms of how they use the various languages in their repertoire across the multiple worlds in which they live. In fact, these portraits have become a rich resource for teacher educators and classroom teachers, in that they provide evidence of the complexity of the students who are categorized as ELs.

Significance
Our study is significant as it reveals the disconnect that can exist between policy and reality. In this case, the linguistic profiles of diverse ELs are very different from the taxonomy of ELs on which the policy is based.

Authors

• Antoinette Gagné, University of Toronto

• Katie Brubacher, OISE/University of Toronto

• Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, University of Toronto

• Shakina Rajendram, University of Toronto

• Wales Wong, University of Toronto