ML/EL E2: Nurturing multilingualism, with Jim Cummins, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus Jim Cummins, Ph.D., joins Susan Lambert from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education for an engaging conversation that explores the dynamics of language development and bilingual education, as well as the importance of a supportive learning environment for multilingual/English learners. Cummins shares stories from his extensive experience and research in the field, highlighting the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, the importance of literacy engagement, and the role of translanguaging in educational settings. He also illuminates the challenges and opportunities in fostering multilingual capabilities and underscores the value of embracing students' linguistic diversity in schools.

Show notes:

• Listen to episode 1, Language is always an asset, with Kajal Patel Below
• Read: Translanguaging in Bilingual Education by Ofelia García and Angel M.Y. Lin
• Website: Language Friendly School

Quotes:

“Virtually all the research highlights the importance of being in a communicative, interactive context if you want to pick up a language." —Jim Cummins, Ph.D.

“There are differences between the linguistic demands of schooling and the kind of language that we use in everyday conversational context outside of school." —Jim Cummins, Ph.D.

“All of these processes are amplified when there's a community of peers or people that we can discuss these ideas with, we can get feedback, we can explore ideas collectively." —Jim Cummins, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Jim Cummins
03:00 Personal Language Journey
10:00 Global Perspectives on Language Education
18:00 Conversion to academic language spectrum
20:00 The process of learning a second language
25:00 Language awareness
37:00 Translanguaging and Language Policy
43:00 Benefits of being multilingual and fostering a supportive environment
49:00 Joint statement
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Transcript

Jim Cummins: 0:00

The more linguistic skills and the more literate skills we have, the more opportunities we have. It's as simple as that.

Susan Lambert: 0:10

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. This is Episode 2 in our brand new miniseries exploring how the Science of Reading serves multilingual and English learners. Last time, we kicked things off by examining how the education system has historically let down this critical population. And we also explored a powerful collaboration between researchers and advocates for both the Science of Reading and multilingual and English learners. The result of that collaboration was a joint statement, which we started to unpack. This time, we're focusing on the science of language acquisition, and our guest is one of the many co-signers of that historic joint statement, Dr. Jim Cummins, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. On this episode, Dr. Cummins distills the research on how humans learned languages, and he explains how that information can be applied in the classroom to support all students, and especially multilingual and English learners. Let's hear from Dr. Jim Cummins. Dr. Jim Cummins, welcome to today's episode. We're so happy to have you on.

Jim Cummins: 1:38

Thanks. It's great to be here.

Susan Lambert: 1:40

So, before we get started, we would really love if you could give a brief introduction of yourself to our listeners for those of those listeners that don't know you , and maybe briefly share your story of how you got interested in language development and acquisition, as well as bilingual and education.

Jim Cummins: 1:57

Okay. Currently, I'm a retired professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education, which is essentially the faculty of education for the University of Toronto in Canada. And I've been here since 1979, so I've been here for quite some time. But even though I've worked in Canada for most of my adult life , my background is not Canadian. Like most of the people who currently live in Toronto, I was born somewhere else. I was born in Ireland. I grew up in Dublin. I went to school there, went to university there. And , I went to Canada in the early seventies to do graduate work. I spent five frozen years of my life in Edmonton, which is the most northerly of the big Canadian cities, and then went back to Ireland for two years and worked in educational research there, and then came back to Canada. So I've kind of got one foot on either side of the Atlantic.

Susan Lambert: 2:49

Well, that , that makes sense of why you might be interested in bilingual education, for sure. What about the language piece of it? What's so interesting to you about that language piece?

Jim Cummins: 2:58

Well, when I was growing up, my parents sent me to what's called a "gaelscoil" in Ireland for just one year. It was in the equivalent of grade one. And as probably most people know , the predominant language spoken in Ireland is English, but there are two official languages , English and Irish, or Gaelic. And , since the founding of the Irish Free State in 1921, there's been a concerted effort to revive the Irish language, and schools were a major way of doing that, a conduit for that effort. So Irish is taught as a compulsory subject in all schools. And since the 1920s, there's, there's also been a focus on bilingual education or Irish immersion, where Irish is used for about 80% of the time in elementary school. And those schools have kind of ebbed and flowed depending on the different decades that we're talking about. But when I was growing up in the 1950s , in Ireland, there were a number of "gaelscoileanna," Irish medium schools, operating. And my older brother was going to a school near the center of Dublin. And I couldn't get in there because it was full, I guess , in the initial year when I was in grade one. So my parents sent me to the school that was closest to it , which happened to be an Irish Medium school. The rationale was we could go in on the bus together to school and he would go, right, and I would go left. And so I spent one year in an Irish immersion program. I had some instruction in Irish at the kind of kindergarten or preschool level, but I certainly wasn't in any way fluent. But I can remember not understanding very much initially , in the fall of that year. But by the time May came around, I can remember speaking with Irish friends coming home on the bus. So, it was an example of what a colleague of mine in Canada, Merrill Swain , called "bilingualism without tears." The tears came later when I went up the road to the other school where Irish was just taught as a school subject for about 40 minutes...40, 45 minutes a day. And it was taught as a subject without any real communicative context. So we learned vocabulary, we learned grammar, we learned little phrases that were good to use. And I spent the next 10 or 11 years learning Irish in that context. And I did well on exams. In my final grade 12 exam, I did very well. But I'd lost a lot of the fluency in the language. I was a lot more fluent at the age of eight than I was at the age of 18, despite 10 years of what some might call pain and suffering in between.

Susan Lambert: 5:44

Mh-hmm.

Jim Cummins: 5:44

And so that kind of stuck with me , in terms of an experiential basis in looking at context in which different kinds of language can develop. And clearly, my experience mirrors the fact that virtually all the research highlights the importance of being in a communicative, interactive context. If you want to pick up the language. And study of the language is also important, particularly when we're talking about literacy skills in the language. But, you need both. You need active engagement with the language, and the same is true for literacy. But you also need to become aware of how the language works. And , so explicit instruction is usually an important element of that. When I went to Canada, my interest was not so much in bilingualism or bilingual education, I was interested in language and education generally. But the supervisor that I had for my graduate work was a professor called Metro Gulutsan, who was of Ukrainian background. He was third generation Ukrainian. He was an expert in Soviet and East European studies. And at that stage in the early seventies, Canada had just adopted a national policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework, where there were two official languages, English and French. But no culture was seen as superior to any other. And Metro, my supervisor, was an astute academic politician as well as an astute academic in general. And he figured there's going to be a lot of interest in research on bilingualism given this new policy. So he started teaching courses on bilingualism at the graduate level and undergraduate level. And I was working for him as his research assistant or teaching assistant. So I had to sit in on his classes at the undergraduate level and learn a lot about this thing called "bilingualism" and "bilingual education," which I knew very little about in any kind of academic sense. And I ended up doing my research for my Ph.D. In French-English dual language programs in Edmonton, where there were some students who were from French home backgrounds, some from English home backgrounds, and some who were coming from bilingual home backgrounds. When I finished my Ph.D. In 1974, I went back to Ireland and continued that interest in bilingual education, and I carried out research in Irish-English dual language programs, Irish immersion programs. So continued the themes of my doctoral research back in Ireland. Then I came back to Canada, went back out to Edmonton, spent another couple of frozen years out there. And this is at the stage in the late seventies where bilingual education was becoming really controversial in the United States. Because after the Supreme Court Lau vs. Nichols decision in 1974, the Office of Civil Rights had interpreted the best remedy to help students acquire English as being transitional bilingual education, where initially the homeschool switch would be mediated by some instruction in students' home languages. And when people realized what was going on, that suddenly Spanish and occasionally some other languages were required to be used in the school system, there was strong, strong pushback. And so it became extremely controversial. And I got involved in those issues , because some of the research I had done on the cognitive effects of bilingualism and transfer of skills across languages were seen as being relevant to those issues. So that's how I started off in immersion program, and then kind of in a way went off the deep end in getting into the whole politics of bilingual education in the United States in the late seventies and eighties.

Susan Lambert: 9:30

And you've also worked across the world, so we're not talking just Canada, or Ireland, or the United States, but you've actually worked all over the whole world helping with bilingual education. Is that right?

Jim Cummins: 9:43

Yeah, I've been involved in a number of contexts, and that reflects the fact that when we look internationally, multilingualism and bilingualism are the norms rather than monolingualism. And, there are multiple contexts where there are minority populations. Sometimes we're talking about minoritized populations. For example, in South Africa, before the end of apartheid, you had the vast majority of people in South Africa who were minoritized and discriminated against. And so bilingual education and ways of addressing the learning needs of students who are coming to school and learning a new language in the school context are universal issues virtually , in almost all countries. And so , in a number of countries, like for example, the Basque Country in Spain during the 1970s and early '80s, after Franco died in, I think 1974 or '75, they had the Basque Country got control over their own education system within the new Spanish constitution. And one of their primary goals was to revive the Basque language. So I became involved in some of their language policy work in that context, in the mid-1980s. I've also been involved in Ireland and some other contexts also.

Susan Lambert: 11:04

That's interesting. You know, as you're sharing some of that, it reminds me of my experience learning German in high school. Because, you know, that's what you do in the United States, is you take a foreign language, again, as one of those, you know, hour-long blocks. And then I was able to go on—with t he German club—a trip to Germany and actually go to school with a German student and sort of shadow her for about a week. And I distinctly remember the differences between what I experienced and what they s eemed to experience in Germany a s students, because she was my age and fluent in English. And I was lucky to sort of "pass" the test. I got good grades, but just p assed the test in German. But ask me to speak German, I couldn't do it at all. And so, that was my first realization that basically the entire world is bilingual or multilingual. And here in the United States, we are very focused on monolingual education.

Jim Cummins: 12:09

Yeah. Your experience reminds me of a story that's attributed to Mark Twain, where he said he spent several years in high school studying intermediate French, but when he got to Paris, he found nobody spoke that dialect. And it highlights the fact that you need a lot more probably than one week of interaction in an authentic context to really pick up fluency in the language. And it highlights the fact that there are differences between the linguistic demands of schooling and the kind of language that we use in everyday conversational contexts outside of school.

Susan Lambert: 12:46

Yup. Well, we'll dive into that in just a minute, but, I'd really love it, since this is your area of expertise, I would love if you could talk just a little bit about language acquisition, you know, in general, but also what's particularly salient to those that are learning multiple languages. What do we as humans need to go through in terms of acquiring language?

Jim Cummins: 13:09

I think there's virtually universal acknowledgement among linguists and neurolinguists about the fact that our brains are wired for language acquisition. It's part of what we acquired in our evolutionary trajectory. And Chomsky called it the Language Acquisition Device. And so , in acquiring a first language, what we need is interaction with competent speakers of the language. And in the first few years of life, in virtually every culture and every child who's developing normally, they will pick up fluency in their home language. They'll understand things that are spoken to them. They will...by the time they're two or three years old, most kids are speaking fluently, and they can understand whatever any reasonable adult is going to say to them. And they can respond sometimes in ways that , as parents know , we wish they would just calm it down a little bit and not speak quite as much. It's hard to shut them up sometimes. But that's almost a universal pattern for children who are developing normally with language. And obviously , when we come to school, we continue our language development, but in a different way. We're talking about language that's typically associated with literacy. We expand our vocabulary knowledge from what we've picked up in the first four or five years of life into a much broader range of vocabulary that reflects the vocabulary of academic subjects. It reflects the vocabulary of more analytic forms of thinking. And so we're expected to be able to make hypotheses. We're expected to make predictions. We're expected to understand complex, dense, informational text, and that's all language, but it's also literacy. And so when we look at what's involved, I would argue both language and literacy development, there's two broad aspects of this, and there are two sides of the same coin, ideally. First of all , you need active engagement with the language. The same way to acquire strong reading comprehension skills, we need active engagement in actual reading, and engagement with a wide range of texts. But you also need explicit awareness of how language works. You need to be in a situation where, ideally, a more competent adult is pointing things out to the child, directing them to, for example, how the letters on the page look , how they might sound , and highlighting, helping students pronounce words that they may not be able to pronounce initially. And so all of that feedback that we're getting, and it's typically explicit feedback, is a critical aspect of becoming a competent language user. So what we're talking about here are two aspects. One is explicit instruction, explicit feedback focused on developing skills in language, focusing on developing awareness of how language works. And secondly, we need active engagement with the language in an interactive context where we're talking about oral language. And in an interaction with text when we're talking about literacy. And , so those two aspects are core, and they apply whether we're talking about acquiring a first language or acquiring a second language.

Susan Lambert: 16:33

Yeah. And it seems to me that if we're talking about, let's use me as an example with one language, my first language, that transition from normal everyday language use into more the language of schooling, can be quite complicated. I think I heard somebody say once, "Nobody is a native speaker of academic language or academic English." Right? We actually have to help our students understand how that works in the context of schooling. But, if we're adding onto that, then someone who is developing their home language while simultaneously learning a new language, that feels like it's a lot more complex.

Jim Cummins: 17:16

Yeah, for sure. And in terms of the distinction that I've made, and other people have made also, between conversational language, the language of interaction in a face-to-face situation, and the kind of language that, we're required to develop within the school context. And there's a distinction there. It's not a dichotomy. There's lots of overlap in terms of this. But we can think of it in terms of a continuum, where in different contexts, different kinds of language is required and is used. And we pick up those forms of language from being in those contexts. So when we're talking about children acquiring a first language and developing academic skills in that language , one of the reasons we send children to school for 12 years is that it takes that long for them to acquire the more formal language skills: literacy skills, the reading skills, the writing skills, as well as the subject matter knowledge that we feel is required for the work environment. But at the same time, the vast majority of children coming into school in their first language, are fluent speakers of that language. They've acquired what Chomsky called "competence." And when we talk about competence, we're talking about a set of skills that are largely acquired by age five or six. So by the time children come to school , all native speakers of the language, not all, but virtually all, have acquired this competence in language. But that doesn't mean that language stops developing. A certain kind of language stops developing. But we still need to expand the linguistic repertoire that we bring to school into a much broader range of context and acquire a much broader range of skills. So that if we are looking at the kind of skills required to write a letter of application for a job, okay, there's some explicit knowledge that we need in terms of the registers or the formats that are required, the politeness registers that might be required if we want to kind of get in for an interview. So there's a lot of things involved in that, that five-year-old children obviously don't have. And so, the distinction between conversational skills versus more literate forms of language is one that I think is intuitive and largely agreed upon. Now, when we talk about children who are experiencing a homeschool language switch, where the language of the home is different from the language of the school, obviously the challenge is increased because they're acquiring oral skills—fluency in that language—at the same time as they're learning to read. And the cognitive load is greater for obvious reasons than for a native speaker. And what the research shows, I think, very clearly, is that under normal conditions where students are getting support in school for learning the language , within about a year or two, a large proportion of children coming from a multilingual background will acquire fluency in English in everyday context. And one of the reasons for this is that language development is supported by a variety of contextual features. So when we're talking to, when a child is talking to another child, or I'm talking to you, or you're talking to me, there are all kinds of non-linguistic or what are sometimes called "paralinguistic clues" that contribute to the meaning. There's eye contact, there are facial expressions, there's tone of voice , intonation. There's the immediate context. I can point to something and children pick up the language that's associated with those kinds of contexts. That's how all of us acquired a first language. And it's a crucial aspect of acquiring a second language in the school context. And obviously, additional support will be very helpful for children acquiring a new language in the school context. But, we also need that engaged interaction for students to really pick up that language. And typically that'll happen for most children within a year or two. But that doesn't mean that they've caught up in all aspects of language that are required in school.

Susan Lambert: 21:20

Yeah.

Jim Cummins: 21:20

There's two reasons why the catch-up trajectory takes a lot longer, and typically, we're talking about at least five years, sometimes longer. And sometimes students never catch up. The first reason is that students who are learning the school language as a new language are trying to catch up to a moving target. Because native speakers of, say English, who come to school speaking that language , are not standing still. Every year, they're broadening their vocabulary knowledge. They're increasing their knowledge of how language works. They're developing reading skills, they're developing writing skills. And so, second language learners have to run faster to bridge that gap. And then the second reason is that there are obvious complexities in literate language in the language of schooling, like what you referred to where you said that many people have made the point that acquiring literacy is like acquiring a second language. So there are additional aspects of language that need to be acquired during that process. And so, that's why students need support. But if we look at the support that they need, it's not just support that can be provided in half an hour a day by a specialized English-as-a-second-language teacher. It needs support throughout the five hours of the school day. So all teachers need to have some knowledge of how language works. They need to be aware of the trajectories of catching up academically. And the fact that a student who's been in the United States or Canada for two years, maybe three years, who's speaking English fluently, apparently may not have caught up in all aspects of language development. And so , what the teacher might interpret as, say, slowness in picking up reading skills or writing skills that are problematic, and the teacher may wonder if this child has some kind of special education need, that's probably, or in many cases, going to be just a normal process of catching up academically. And so these trajectories are important, and they highlight the fact that, you know, there are important differences between conversational language and academic language that we need to be aware of as educators.

Susan Lambert: 23:28

Yeah, that makes sense. And it makes me think of the modes of language, right? So, speaking and listening, which we talked about, is sort of that conversational language usage. We're wired to do that. We've been evolved to do that, to be communicators. And when you're in the context of that, you're able to leverage that to be able to pick up a new language. But when we're talking about academic language, we're talking about that mode of reading and writing, which, some of that needs to be explicitly taught both to first language learners, but especially for second-language learners. And that sort of layer of, we'll just call it academic language for right now, but that language, you said, can be really cognitively demanding for multilingual learners. I wonder if you could talk about the "cognitive demanding" part, because I'm not sure everybody understands what that actually means.

Jim Cummins: 24:25

Yeah, that's an excellent point. And when we think about what happens in school and what textbooks are trying to teach in mathematics, in history, in social studies, whatever the subject might be , we're talking about concepts. We're talking about ideas. We're talking about the ability to analyze issues in a logical or rational way. So we're talking about cognitive skills, and there are various kinds of cognitive functions that students are expected to learn how to do within the school context. They may have many of these functions already developed to some extent before they come to school, but we require much more competence and precision in terms of doing this. For example, being able to analyze the logic of an argument, being able to pick out inconsistencies in an argument.

Susan Lambert: 25:18

Mm - hmm.

Jim Cummins: 25:18

These things are fundamental to a democracy. Being able to identify disinformation, being able to check claims against empirical data. All of these things are fundamental to science. They're fundamental to participation in democracy, or effective participation in a democracy. And so these are things that we expect schools to do. And so, when you look at these cognitive functions that we expect students to be able to engage in, and look at the language that's associated with that, the language complexity goes along with the increase in cognitive challenge and cognitive complexity. And so, if we're looking at being able to identify holes in somebody's argument, or holes in claims made by a politician, for example, we need to be able to engage in fairly complex cognitive processes that also involve linguistic awareness, the awareness of how language can be used for all kinds of purposes. Language is obviously used to illuminate, to inform, to express various kinds of emotions. All of these things are potentially positive. But language is also used to deceive, to disinform, to disempower. And so, language awareness, developing language awareness ,has got to be a fundamental aspect of what it means to educate our students. And so this is all part of what we get as we engage with literacy in the school context. And it's not just a case of an individual child sitting down and reading books. Like, that's great if the child wants to do that. But all of these processes are amplified when there's a community of peers or people that we can discuss these ideas with. We can get feedback. We can explore ideas collectively. And again, this is the power of literacy in the school context and literacy engagement. It's going to be much more active if we have somebody to talk to about the ideas that we've come across in a book, if we're looking at historical realities and looking at different interpretations of historical events or phenomena. Again, talking through these with people is a really important way of reality-checking our own initial ideas, but also moving our ideas onto another realm. And this is all part of what we need to do in schooling. And this is why when we talk about reading and writing , literacy, we've got to focus on not only just teaching the skills, it's not like as if you can teach a literate skill, when we talk about comprehension of text, and we're talking about something that goes on ideally throughout our lifetimes. And that is all going to be amplified when we have critical and constructive discussions with others about the issues that we're engaged with.

Susan Lambert: 28:15

Let's go back to, take a step back to the way we've sort of looked at language development in the school environment, which is traditionally, and probably still some places, we've thought about language education, or literacy education, as sort of this individual acquisition process. So I'm going to learn English. And then I'm going to go to another class to learn German, or to learn Spanish, or to learn French. What's the history of that concept? And what do we know now about whether that works or doesn't work?

Jim Cummins: 28:48

Well, when we look at the factors that impact language development, literacy development, educational achievement generally, there are obviously individual cognitive factors. Some children are brighter than others in terms of having special talents, for example, in mathematics or other areas. But there are also a multitude of social factors that impact learning. If we look at some of the neurological evidence, or neuropsychological evidence, from the first five years of life, we know, for example, that 90% of brain development happens between birth and age five. And there have been a number of studies in recent years, over the last 15 or 20 years, that have highlighted the brain areas that kind of light up when particular activities are engaged in. And so, for example, studies have shown that reading to children even before their first year of life, when they're still crawling around and not even walking yet, that has impact on children's vocabulary development at age three. It also has impact in terms of neurological development. We can identify brain regions that have been stimulated, that have developed in the early years as a result of that kind of linguistic and literate engagement and exposure. So, those are social conditions. Poverty is not good for the brain. It's not good for physical development. It's not good for any number of reasons , both because of direct nutritional issues, but also issues like lead in the water that kids from low-income backgrounds are frequently exposed to, and many, many other issues, overcrowding in home, et cetera. But one of the things that's really important here, I think, is that when we look at the social impact in terms of social factors that affect literacy and what schools can do about it, there's not much that individual teachers in their classrooms can do about income levels of families. There's not that much they can do about the fact that many of the kids in school serving low-income backgrounds are living in very overcrowded conditions. There's not much they can do about maybe families that have single parents and the economic realities that often go along with that. But there's one thing, one social reality, that we can do a lot about, and that's the fact that children growing up in poverty from low-income backgrounds frequently have far less exposure to print in their early years than children from more affluent backgrounds.

Susan Lambert: 31:27

And what about for kids that are simultaneously learning a new language, right? So, I know, you know, it used to be that when we would bring kids into the classroom, it would be like, "We're only speaking English here." And tell the parents at home, "We're only speaking English. We're going to, you know, teach them using books and explicit instruction all about English. But we don't want you to use your home language." That is no longer a research-based approach, correct?

Jim Cummins: 31:57

Yeah, that's , uh, a nice way of putting it. It's virtually totally disputed in terms of any of the research that's out there. It's easy to see how that assumption came about. Because obviously exposure to a language is important in learning a language.

Susan Lambert: 32:15

Yup.

Jim Cummins: 32:15

You can't learn a language without being exposed to it. And for many, many years, up until the 1960s, it was assumed that bilingualism and being exposed to two or more languages had negative effects on children's development. Partly because children, let's say children from Spanish-speaking background in the United States, living in very low-income conditions, come to school without speaking any English. The school provided no support for children in those contexts. And lo and behold, three years later , they're not doing very well in reading skills, writing skills. So this obviously has got to be due to the fact that they're bilingual. This was the very problematic mindset that developed as a result of this. And this lack of rational inquiry into these issues reinforced sociopolitical assumptions that, "Well, all immigrants should assimilate into the United States. We're a melting pot. And, in order to help children learn English, we have to get rid of their home language." And, you know, we know that that's nonsense at this point. The research is very clear that development of bilingual and multilingual skills has positive rather than negative cognitive consequences when both languages continue to develop. We know that children who are coming from non-English speaking backgrounds in , say, a North American context, can acquire English relatively quickly if they're coming in at a young age in a supportive environment. And, we know, for example, also that children who were formally classified as English learners , when they acquire so-called "full" English proficiency , they're often doing better than children from monolingual backgrounds in terms of literacy development. So we know that there are all kinds of benefits to acquiring additional languages. When you were talking about your German experiences, you put a lot of effort into learning German. You went on a trip.

Susan Lambert: 34:20

Sure did!

Jim Cummins: 34:20

You were motivated , you were doing that for some obvious reasons. Because you knew that acquiring German was something that was going to be useful to you culturally , linguistically, cognitively, from a social point of view in terms of life opportunities. All of those positive associations of bilingualism are very much there. But yet, when it comes to children from minority backgrounds, the mindset has been, "No, bilingualism is bad for the poor. It may be good for the rich, but bad for the poor." And again, I think, happily, over the last 20, 30 years, we've got beyond that, or most people have got beyond that. And the reality from bilingual programs in the United States is that they show very positive results. Which is why they've been expanding quite rapidly.

Susan Lambert: 35:06

Yeah. And, to be clear, that in the classroom environment, teachers, probably with their best interest of the student, were thinking, "Oh, this is going to be too confusing for them to use their home language while they're trying to learn English. And this confusing aspect of it is going to keep them from developing English, which they really need to have, because that's the context which they're in right now." So, the thought was that it was a little bit confusing, and we can't use those languages together. Where now, what we better understand, is that we can draw from our home language to help us develop and then acquire a second or even third language. And I think we throw this word out and around now called "translanguaging." And I think there's a lot of misconception about what that is. Is this, did I use "translanguaging" in the right sort of high-level context? And can you give us a little bit more information about what this means for those learning a second, or third, or fourth language?

Jim Cummins: 36:09

Yeah. "Translanguaging" has become almost a household word in terms of language education debates, over the last 15 years or so. And it's largely due to the work of professor Ofelia Garcia from City University of New York, who picked up a concept that had been developed in the Welsh context, in the context of Welsh-English bilingual programs, where content might be presented in one language. So instruction might be through Welsh. But the textbook that children were using might have been in English because there weren't appropriate textbooks in Welsh. And they might come back, so they might study it, talk about it in English, and then come back and talk about it in Welsh. So, it referred to, in the Welsh context, alternation of input and output in the two languages. And professor Garcia picked up on that notion and broadened it considerably. And, rather than going into kind of the details of academic debate on this, the basic meaning of translanguaging, or pedagogical translanguaging, is that we're providing opportunities for children to use their entire bilingual or multilingual repertoire in carrying out academic tasks and activities. So we're basically opening up the classroom so that children can use the cognitive tools they have. And their home language is a cognitive tool. And so if we cut them off from using that tool , we're, in a way, cutting them off from using the cognitive skills that they have. And so it's a negative rather than a positive thing. And so what translanguaging has come to evolve into is what some people, colleagues of mine in the Toronto context have been very much involved in this, the language-friendly school where, this was a concept or an idea that was coined, or a term that was coined in a way, by my colleague Emmanuelle Le Pichon, and a colleague of hers in the Netherlands when they were both working there. And basically, the philosophy and practice behind this is that rather than trying to exclude other languages from the school context, we welcome them in, as a way of promoting children's language awareness, as a way of enabling them to use their full cognitive repertoire, and as a way of broadening their knowledge of how language works, both as a skill that we can use as individuals, but also language in the social context, how language is used in different situations. So essentially, translanguaging, ,pedagogical translanguaging in the way I interpret, can be seen as a way of implementing language-friendly pedagogy or language-friendly schools.

Susan Lambert: 39:04

Hmm . And we will link our listeners in the show notes to the website "language-friendly schools," because I know they have, when you pointed me to that website, they have a really nice sort of two-page document about what this looks like, in specifically in the context of schools, what it might mean to become a language-friendly school. Essentially what we're saying is, "We accept you into our school with all of who you are, including your language." And so that just feels like a really welcoming message and something as humans we should be doing anyway. But I think, and you correct me if I'm wrong, because you're the language researcher here and the expert, but if we stop development in a home language to only focus on a new language, we actually are stunting an individual's growth in language overall. Would you say that's true?

Jim Cummins: 40:00

Yeah. I think we need to qualify it a little bit.

Susan Lambert: 40:02

Okay.

Jim Cummins: 40:02

Because there are obviously lots of kids who come to school speaking another language. Come into kindergarten speaking Punjabi or speaking Spanish, or whatever the language might be. During the school context, it's not very supportive of developing children's bilingualism. But they pick up English relatively quickly, and then their cognitive skills develop in that language. So they transfer what they brought to school to that language. And, often, sadly , within a couple of years, they're not speaking their home language anymore. They're embarrassed if they go to the supermarket with their mom or dad, and they say something in the home language. "Don't speak that language here. It's embarrassing." And, you know, I live in Toronto. It's an incredibly multilingual, multicultural city. Close to 50% of children in elementary schools in Toronto come from non-English speaking backgrounds. So it's a vibrant, multicultural place. But it's also a linguistic graveyard. Because the rate of language loss among families in the city, and it's not just Toronto, it's virtually every large city, is phenomenal, because children pick up the message, even though teachers may be positive towards other languages , they may be positive towards children's own language. But they quickly pick up the message that English is the language of power, the language of status within the school context. And they sometimes will assume that it's not permitted to speak their own language in the school context. And so, within a couple of years, they've lost a lot of their fluency in that language, and English becomes their preferred language. Which, you know, sometimes they'll do fine academically, but sometimes , they may not. And the social aspects of this are really sad because you see so many anecdotes of children who've been in that situation who've lost their abilities in the language. And then when grandparents come to visit, or when they go back to the home country to connect with grandparents, they don't have a language in common anymore. And so, there's a loss there that's real. It's not quantifiable, but it certainly is painful for a lot of individuals who realize that they wish their parents had been able to provide stronger support, and support in the school also, for maintaining those languages.

Susan Lambert: 42:28

Mm-hmm. And, I don't know, a lot of times I, and maybe this is just distinguishing too much, but I like to distinguish between being bilingual and multilingual, versus being biliterate and multiliterate. So there's this language that we could speak conversationally, but being able to read and write—so listen, speak, read, and write in multiple languages—definitely brings benefits.

Jim Cummins: 42:57

Yeah, absolutely. It's , you know, the more linguistic skills and the more literate skills we have , the more opportunities we have. It's as simple as that. There may be employment opportunities. There's been a number of studies in the United States showing that people who are bilingual and biliterate in Spanish and English make more money than people from the same backgrounds who have either lost their Spanish and only speak English, or people who haven't acquired English that well. So, there are economic benefits to knowledge of other languages. But it requires support to do that, unless a child is growing up in a very privileged environment. It requires support from parents. And a lot of parents don't have access to the research on this. They may assume that, "OK, we're immigrants. The only language that matters for my child is English. I want my child to do well, That's one of the reasons we immigrated. So I'm going to stop speaking the home language to the child." And , not necessarily the worst thing somebody could do, but it's certainly not helping the child academically at all. And it's cutting the child off from a wonderful resource. And there's a lot of research out there showing that children's, what linguists call "metalinguistic awareness," their awareness of how language works, that increased significantly as a result of continuing to develop bilingual and multilingual skills. So it's schools that embrace children's languages; enable children to write dual language books; communicate to children that their language was something prestigious in this classroom environment and in the school environment; communicate positive messages to parents about what they can do to help their children. Like reading to children in their home language, continuing to speak to children in that language, communicating positive affect, attitudes, towards the language. All of that is going to make a difference in terms of whether children pursue learning the language and see it as something that's part of their identity, or whether they just want to run away from it as fast as possible.

Susan Lambert: 45:04

And you know, we have, probably, many of our listeners are in monolingual settings, educational settings, and they are monolingual themselves. And so what, what kind of advice or hope do you have for those folks in those monolingual environments? What kind of advice do you have for them in terms of working with multilingual or English language learners?

Jim Cummins: 45:30

In a lot of the case studies that I'm talking about, the teachers have been monolingual. And , even if they might have known another language, it's not necessarily the languages or the language that's represented in their classroom. But they've found ways to communicate to children that their languages are welcome in the classroom. They will arrange time for children from the same language background, or who are learning English, can discuss a project in their home languages, if that's their stronger project, or use both languages, translanguage in the group, and then come back and report back to the rest of the class in English. There's all kinds of ways in which monolingual teachers, as well as bilingual teachers, can communicate an interest in language, a positive attitude towards language as a cognitively and personally beneficial aspect of children's development. And, you know, we talk about, particularly at the preschool level, the importance of play and preschool environments not being too rigorous in terms of developing academic skills, but allowing children to play and develop in that way. Well , enabling children to play with language is something that we can do right throughout K to 12, as well as in the preschool years. And when you read some of these accounts of inspirational multilingual pedagogies or language-friendly pedagogies, this is exactly what's happening. Kids are playing with language, they're enjoying finding out about other children's languages. And, like just one example of that, one of the most inspirational schools that I've read about is a school in Ireland, where the principal was a person called Déirdre Kirwan, the school is called Scoil Bhríde. And it was in a low-income area in Dublin, had a large number, up to 80% of the kids coming from immigrant backgrounds. One of the things that the teachers noted there is that when a new child comes into the school , the children in the classroom that the child is in are really welcoming. Because they want to know what language this child speaks, and they want to find out about that language.

Susan Lambert: 47:36

Wow. Language curiosity!

Jim Cummins: 47:38

Well, exactly. And that's what we need to be looking at in terms of those two aspects that I talked about. In terms of what's involved in developing language and literacy skills. We need the big picture , is that we need two things. We need active engagement, active interaction. If we're talking with oral language and conversation language skills, but active engagement with the language. And when we're talking about academic language, books are the way, a major source, in which we get access to that language. But also, we need a focus right throughout K to 12 on developing children's curiosity about language, their awareness about how language works , and their interest in exploring further how language works. And those two components of strong language and literacy education apply, whether we're talking about monolingual context or bilingual or multilingual context. We have extra tools in a bilingual and multilingual context because we have a variety of languages there that we can work with.

Susan Lambert: 48:47

Yeah, that makes sense. Well , I want to ask you about one more thing, and that's this recent joint statement that came out called "The Science of Reading and Implementation for English Learners and Emergent Bilinguals." You recently signed that joint statement , along with many, many, many others. Can you tell me a little bit about why it was important to you that you be one of the signers, and what impact you hope that that joint statement has?

Jim Cummins: 49:16

Yeah. Obviously , reading instruction has been controversial for many, many years, for decades. But it seems like every 15 or so years, there's a new episode of the "reading wars" or what have been called the "reading wars." Which is really unfortunate because, when you look at the research and you look at the views of researchers, there's an enormous amount of common ground there. There are, will be, disputes about some of the details, about some of the relative emphasis in the classroom, but the common ground is very much there. And the common ground essentially is saying what I talked about before. We need to teach foundational skills. We need to ensure that all children develop an awareness of how the sounds of the language relate to the printed language. That typically will require formal instruction, and explicit instruction. Some of that may be in whole-class format. Some of it may be in small groups. Some of it may be in a whole-class format , but contextualized where a teacher may be reading a story or reading a text to children, and then stop and focus in on a phrase, or focus in on a word in terms of, and talk about how that word is pronounced and what some of the patterns in that word might be. So that is all important. That's developing children's awareness of how language works, which is one of the pillars. But the other pillar, is active engagement with language, and active engagement with literacy. Print access is incredibly important. And all of the research out there suggests a strong, strong relationship between reading comprehension development and literacy engagement. So when we talk about that joint statement, everybody agrees that children need to develop strong phonics skills. And so that they can begin to decode the language, and they need support as they go through that. But in order to develop strong reading comprehension skills, they've got to be reading extensively. And it's a very simple reality. There's what some people have called a "statistical reality" here. The more encounters children have with text, with words, the more likely they are to be able to understand those words, and know how they're pronounced. And so, we need both of those aspects in our reading programs. And the sad thing is that the pendulum in the so-called "reading wars" has swung back and forth between focusing almost exclusively on phonics as the main emphasis , or neglecting phonics and focusing only on providing access to books. And you need to be doing both, and you need to be doing both well. And I think the vast majority of reading researchers agree with that.

Susan Lambert: 52:09

Yeah. That makes sense. So and do you believe this joint statement is going to have an impact? Or what is your hope for this joint statement?

Jim Cummins: 52:17

My hope for it is that it will become a starting point for discussion of policies. And that any policy that is developed or adopted by a particular state should be consistent with what's in that statement. And the concern of many people is that the way things get implemented in practice is very different from what the research is actually saying. And typically what gets left out , in stuff like this, is the emphasis on active reading engagement. And there's minimal focus on developing children's active engagement with print. And this involves things that go beyond just instruction. It means, for example, that there should be strong school libraries. All parents should be encouraged to have library cards in the public library, but also, as some schools have done, parents should have library cards for the school library. So that they can come in , and read books with their children in that library, check out books for their children. There's all kinds of things that are part of the context of providing a rich literacy environment for children that get totally left out of the discussion.

Susan Lambert: 53:28

Yeah. That's a really good point. Well, we certainly appreciate your time and your expertise in terms of language development. Thank you for the work that you're doing, for the work that you've done, and then that you continue to do. We will link our listeners in the show notes to many of the resources that you mentioned, and we appreciate your time.

Jim Cummins: 53:48

Great. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Susan.

Susan Lambert: 53:51

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Jim Cummins, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Check out the show notes for links to learn more about language-friendly schools, as well as translanguaging. We have much more planned for this series exploring how the Science of Reading serves multilingual and English learners. Next time, we're going deep into the topic of dyslexia.

Francisco Usero-Gonzalez: 54:21

Dyslexia is something beyond a language. It is something that our students bring with themselves. And we need to give them all the tools and resources in order to help them overcome those symptoms.

Susan Lambert: 54:37

That's coming up next time, right here in the normal podcast feed. Please join the conversation about this episode and this miniseries in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Please also consider rating us and leaving us a review on the podcast platform of your choice. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. Thank you so much for listening.