BENEFITS OF CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE CLASSROOMS

A STUDENT PROFILE

MARIA: A RICH HERITAGE

Maria . . .• is 10 years old• is a fourth grader• speaks Spanish at

home• has lived in Mexico,

Texas, and Idaho• has two sisters, one

older and one younger• lives with Mom, Dad,

and grandparents

SOCIOECONOMIC PROFILEMaria’s family has immigrated from Mexico to Idaho in search of work and prosperity. Her father works in the agricultural industry while her mother stays at home. Although they are likely considered to be in poverty as to income level, it is due to immigration circumstances (situational poverty), not generational poverty (Payne, 2005). Her family does not display the characteristics of cultural poverty. Maria takes academic achievement seriously, turns work in on time, and comes to school clean and well-groomed.

ACADEMIC CHALLENGESMaria experiences challenges related to her status as an ELL student. She has a difficult time reading texts rich in academic vocabulary and varied sentence structure, and has been put in remedial pull-out classes for some content subjects. These classes include non-ELL learning disabled students, which leaves a large portion of the instruction inappropriate for Maria. In ELA class, she is behind the curve simply because she is learning English.

FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE: LINGUISTIC

Maria’s bilingual status affords the class many opportunities to work with English and Spanish morphology. Morphological concepts such as cognates, false cognates, bound and free morphemes, and others are beneficial areas for all students to develop (Hickey & Lewis, 2013).

FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE: CULTURAL/EXPERIENTIAL

Normally a quiet student, Maria perks up when issues relating personally to her are discussed in the classroom. She is a valuable information source on Mexican culture, and has much to share about her family’s journey to the U.S. During a unit of study on Idaho immigration history, she helped the class understand that immigration wasn’t confined to the history books.

FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE: MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Although Maria has challenges related to traditional academic areas of intelligence such as linguistic and mathematical, in other areas she is highly proficient. When other “advanced” students cannot figure out an arts and crafts project, Maria can finish her own and help others. She is a proficient spatial learner, and displays kinesthetic aptitude with her beautiful traditional dancing.

CCSS: STRENGTHSMaria’s limited English proficiency leaves her few strengths in achieving proficiency in the ELA Common Core State Standards. She will have to rely on her ability to think logically and reasonably to achieve well in performance tasks such as argumentative and narrative writing. Maria is adept at providing evidence to support opinions, especially relating to her culture, immigration, and discrimination issues. Acquiring the vocabulary and language vehicle to convey her ideas will be the challenge (Ferlazzo & Hull-Sypnieski, 2014).

CCSS: CHALLENGES

Maria’s challenges with English, including morphological knowledge, Cognitive

Academic Language Proficiency, and her developing grammar and usage will all prove difficult to overcome for her and

teachers alike. Since the ELA CCSS’s focus is on language proficiency, she will

continue to learn and develop in these areas.

CONCLUSIONS

Maria is just one culturally and linguistically diverse student in a class that is roughly half White American and half Latino American. It is easy to categorize students into ability levels and generalize ability across subjects and skill areas, but closer inspection of individual students reveals the assets they can be despite academic difficulties.

References

Ferlazzo, L., & Hull-Sypnieski, K. (2014). Teaching Argument Writing to ELLs. Educational Leadership, 71(7), 46-52.

Hickey, P. J., & Lewis, T. (2013). The Common Core, English Learners, and Morphology 101: Unpacking LS.4 for ELLs. Language And Literacy Spectrum, 2369-84.

Payne, R. K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty. Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc.