# @edutopia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CLF8oi4Lbuu
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/20303944-edutopia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/af13629d5a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-02-10T01:16:53.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Edutopia (@edutopia) — https://gondola.cc/edutopia

## Caption

When teachers intentionally celebrate and nurture multilingual students’ language skills, they “send a powerful message that children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds contribute to the vibrancy of our early childhood programs,” write Michele Coulombe and Kate Lafferty Márquez, who both work at the nonprofit Children’s Literacy Initiative. ⁣
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They suggest five strategies for recognizing and building students’ linguistic expertise.⁣
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1. Incorporate home languages: Try to give multilingual students opportunities to think and express themselves in their home language. During partner work, for example, consider sometimes pairing kids who speak the same language, allowing them to solidify learning by thinking and sharing in their home language. And when teaching new vocabulary words, invite multilingual kids to share the words in their home language. ⁣
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2. Teach anchor words: To build confidence and reduce anxiety and self-doubt, offer a preview of foundational concepts you’ll be teaching. For students who are very new to English, consider preteaching a list of “relevant thematic words,” the authors suggest.⁣
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3. Provide sentence stems: Teach multilingual students a few helpful sentence stems, or sentence starters—”I like…” or “I learned…” for example—as a framework for answering questions. Such stems “provide scaffolding for children to focus on what they want to say rather than thinking about how to formulate their response,” the authors note.⁣
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4. Include visuals: Visuals can help support comprehension when English learners “find themselves in a sea of language that can be tough to navigate.” Try using concrete objects or pictures, and consider acting out or modeling vocabulary words and concepts. ⁣
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5. Use layered questioning: To build understanding and participation among students at different stages of language development, try varying the types of questions you ask based on language proficiency. Questions can range from ones that require simple gestures as responses, or a yes or no, to more demanding, open-ended questions that require students to share their thinking. ⁣
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Link in bio.⁣

#Multilingual #MultilingualStudents #TeacherTips

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## Tags

teachertips, multilingual, multilingualstudents

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