From home Language to English Language

 Getting to a given language from one's home language is interesting as well as challenging. It's interesting in the sense it's a matter of having a clear reference to get to another language. It's challenging because new strategies should be developed to meet that learning demand. 

Students are more likely spending more time together at school, and even out of school in some situations. As far as teaching is concerned, there should have no barriers in the teaching process. We can understand certain things just by making a connection to an event or something else; we connect to a reference and the similarities will enable us to understand. Languages can share a lot of thing in common form the alphabet to some grammar rules. Student home language is the primary linguistic tool to get to another language as well as student experiences. 

As I said before, students spend most of the time together, and they know each other and are familiar to each other too. Scaffolding gets ride of any barriers and nurtures proper collaboration among students. If that collaboration is connected to their experience, the mere reference to the home language enables the understand of the material being taught: so collaboration and connection. 

Language represents a lot to its speaker even though this might be implicit. The benefit of using the learner's home language builds trust and fosters confidence in the learner because it's his reference, his identity somehow. Effective learning can take place in a classroom where there is respect which one will call in collaboration as far as scaffolding in concerned and in that case the home language becomes a ladder to get to English language. 

In a classroom, we can use group discussions and peer reading. Discussion on a specific content and reading which demands faithfulness as you read what is written and try to understand what is read. Academic vocabulary can be built that way as the learner is always in contact with vocabulary in an academic context and similarities from both languages emerge.  

References: 

  1. Colorin Colorado. (2016, June 15). Using the native language as a resource [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joHM964tTVs 
  2. Atc_Admin. (2023, May 24). Serving Language learners from an Asset-Based lens - peers and pedagogy. Peers and Pedagogy. https://achievethecore.org/peersandpedagogy/serving-language-learners-from-an-asset-based-lens/


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