Multi-lingual Education
Learn-Choose-Use
A teacher’s knowledge of methodologies that promote effective Multilingual Education (MLE) is vital for quality learning in a linguistically diverse classroom. By using and intentionally incorporating students’ mother-tongue language for learning, students grow more confident when learning new concepts in additional languages. Mother Tongue-Based (MTB) education fosters a classroom culture that values not only students' languages, but also their cultural backgrounds, heritages and traditions. The Multilingual Education Learn-Choose-Use Teacher Toolkit provides over 80 MLE teaching methodologies all aligned to our Teacher Competency Standards Framework. Teachers can select the methods that will work best for them and their students in their multilingual classrooms.
Multi-lingual Education
Teacher Competency
Standards Framework
TeacherFOCUS's Multilingual Education Teacher Competency Standards Framework seeks to identify and validate the approaches and best practices for multilingual teaching and learning used and cited from around the globe. The 3 domains and 20 teacher competencies aim to assess a complex combination of knowledge, skills, understanding, values, and attitudes which lead to effective language learning, cultural promotion and critical thinking.
The MLE framework consolidates the essential multilingual competencies that would enable a teacher to effectively promote authentic learning in a multilingual environment. The framework provides a core set of competency standards to be used as the point of reference or benchmark for quality multilingual teaching.
Multilingual Education
Classroom Observation Tools
The MLE Teacher Competency Standards Framework has been used to develop a classroom observation tool to be able to give teachers working in multilingual classroom specific feedback on their teaching methodology. These can also be used to measure teachers' growth and development as they are routinely observed. Download the observation tool in English, Thai, Burmese and S'Gaw Karen Languages.
Best Practices
See-Saw
As students become more comfortable and confident using a second or third language, its important to challenge them to use the less familiar language more and more. You can think of this as a language seesaw: As reliance on L1 decreases, difficulty of the L2 task increases. In this video you will watch teacher Lah Wah progressively increase the difficulty of tasks in Myanmar language (the L2 of the class) as the students learn a complex poem.
Scaffolding
Just like scaffolding supports the structure of a new building, language scaffolding is used to build a strong foundation in children’s L1 and use it to teach L2. In this video teacher, Ei Mhway allows the students to use S’Gaw Karen, the students’ mother tongue language, to express their opinions to higher-level questions they are not fully confident to express in Burmese, the L2 of the class.