Bridging Two Languages
Engaging Activities for Bilingual Immersion Programs
Anne K. Soderman, Betty L. Wescott, and Shen Jie
It’s February when five-year-old Patrick first enters the Chinese immersion class. His father, who works for an automotive company, was transferred recently from Berlin to Beijing. Patrick’s Danish-speaking mother and German-speaking father give him a hug and tell him they will see him after school.
During large group meeting, the teacher introduces Patrick in Mandarin to the rest of the children and invites the children to tell him welcome in Mandarin. Patrick looks shyly at his new classmates. He cannot understand what they’re saying to him, and he doesn’t have any idea what he should say back to them. After lunch, he will have a similar experience, except then he will not understand the English he hears from the teachers and children who participate in this bilingual immersion program. For Patrick, it’s a long and confusing first day of school.
Increasing globalization and migration around the world have led to significant numbers of children having to learn a second or third language upon entering school. While many programs offer young children opportunities to become fluent in English, there is growing recognition that learning other languages in addition to English is also desirable.
At 3e International Kindergarten in Beijing, China, children from many different nations are immersed for half the day in Mandarin, the official language in the People’s Republic of China, and the other half in English. The school offers nursery, preschool, and kindergarten programs for children 18 months to six years, and according to the mission statement, children “explore, experiment, and express” in a bilingual, multicultural learning context as they build strong and enjoyable relationships with peers and adults from different cultures.
Like Patrick, many children enter 3e speaking neither Mandarin nor English. During the past year, our first full year of teaching young children in a bilingual immersion setting, we three authors learned quickly that in creating meaningful activities for them, we needed to keep in mind the following criteria:
- The activities should help children develop pride and cultural identity in the new languages being learned as well as in their home languages.
- Children are more focused when classroom activities are personally engaging, meaningful, and useful.
- Activities that elicit and encourage peer interactions are highly effective.
- Teacher collaboration in bridging and sharing activities across classrooms helps children make meaningful connections between languages.
- Teachers need to carefully sequence activities, step-by-step, to build on children’s previous knowledge and advance skills and concepts.
We saw these principles in action early in the school year in a child-initiated activity that captured the interest of the entire class (see “Children Initiate a Yearlong Writing Activity”).
Children Initiate a Yearlong Writing Activity
September: Lyuki gets a brainstorm!
Lyuki goes to the writing center and begins constructing a paper replica of a laptop computer. He carefully folds a piece of paper so that one half sticks straight up in the air while the other lays flat on the table. Children watch as Lyuki sections off the “keyboard,” filling in the letters of the English alphabet. Inspired and excited, several children begin to copy Lyuki’s invention.
October–December: We’re in the computer business
The children continue making their personal computers for months. As they add creative options, their computers grow more intricate and complex. For example, one child adds lowercase letters to the uppercase letters already on the keyboard. Another draws the flags of his friends’ countries on the bottom row of keys. He tells the teacher, “You press this flag, and then you get Japanese. You press this one, you get German.” This kindergartner has six keys representing six languages: Japanese, German, English, Korean, Finnish, and Mandarin. When other children see what he is doing, they too incorporate “language buttons” on their computer keyboards.
January–March: Improving the product
After returning to school in January, children ask for wire to connect paper mouses they’ve made to their paper computers. They write different Web addresses on their screens. Building on the children’s interest in developing their computers, the teachers encourage them to work on revisions for the keyboards. The children measure them and make cardboard boxes to put the keyboards in. They laminate the screens so they can write messages to one another on them with dry erase markers and then “delete” the messages.
The children rely more and more on print in both languages to develop their messages, and they add Mandarin characters to the letters on their keyboards. The English-speaking teacher and the children brainstorm different symbols to add to help them with their writing. They come up with numbers, a period, quotation marks, an exclamation point, a comma, a question mark, backspace and enter keys, a space bar, and arrows. The Chinese teacher has the children add some basic strokes to their keyboards for producing Mandarin characters.
Children help each other create accurate versions of their flags on the computer keys, and they type “secret messages” to each other that have to be deciphered. In March, they add the final touch—a flashlight installed through a hole in the back of each computer so children can turn their computers on and off.
Helping children make connections
As the children in the kindergarten class began to learn Mandarin and English, the Chinese and English teachers worked together to create curriculum-based activities to help the children make meaningful connections between the two languages. For example, in the English classroom, the teacher gave the children flip books of different word families in which the beginnings of the words could be changed by flipping the first letter to make a new word (fan, pan, man, can, ran) (Soderman, Gregory, & McCarty 2006). Children quickly caught on and began making their own lists and flip books, making rhymes from word endings the teacher introduced, like –ig (big, dig, jig, wig) and –in (tin, fin, win, bin).
In the Chinese classroom, the teacher transformed this familiar activity by creating a flip book to show the step-by-step writing of particular characters. She used clear laminate for the book’s pages and began with a simple character on the first page. As children turned each page, a new stroke was added to produce a different Mandarin character. Children used the flip books to practice reading the different characters and to practice writing complex Mandarin characters.
Sharing national symbols
One of the activities that served best to develop children’s pride and cultural identity was making their own countries’ flags. The English-language teacher downloaded color versions of all the children’s national flags from the Internet and printed them. In large group meeting, the teacher held up the flags one at a time, asking the children to raise their hands when their flag was shown.
Each of these five-year-olds knew his or her national flag and took great pride in the pair-share interactions that followed, discussing with a classmate how their two flags were alike or different. The children then drew their flags in their journals and identified themselves and their country (“I am Hirotake, and I am from Japan.”). In both the English- and Chinese-language classrooms, the teachers extended the activity by making two sets of laminated cards with the children’s national flags. Children used them to play a memory matching game.
Sharing languages
In the English-language class, children took a multicultural look at languages beyond English and Mandarin by learning a little about others’ home languages, including ways to say hello and goodbye. The teacher gave each child a page with his or her picture and the question, “What is your language? Please tell me now.” The teacher helped the children write the name of their language and hello in their language. For example, for Eira, a child from Finland, she wrote, “My language is Finnish. This is the way ‘hello’ sounds,” and Eira wrote, “Hei! Hei! Hei!” The children made the pages into a class book, and it became one of their favorite books to read to each other in the reading corner.
Using Mandarin and English purposefully
To give children practice writing their vocabulary for a real purpose, the teachers encouraged them to create menus in the dramatic play area, bringing in sample menus from local restaurants. Children suggested that one side of the menu could be in English and the other side in Mandarin. In Mandarin and English they wrote words like hamburger, fish, fruit, and salad on the appropriate sides of the menu and drew pictures of those foods. The teachers laminated the menus so the children could use them again and again as they ordered and took orders in the restaurant that developed. The teachers added other props, such as a chef’s hat, and the restaurant became a popular center at choice time.
For child-led family conferences, children decided which foods to serve to parents, and they drew up new menus in English and Mandarin. After seating their parents in the restaurant, the children presented the menus and served their parents their choices.
Children lead
As a result of these successes, the teachers looked constantly for more child-initiated activities they could expand into bilingual-skill-building and peer-scaffolding opportunities. For example, when some of the children built a town in the block area, the Chinese teacher asked them simple questions about the different structures. She suggested that the children make signs for all the buildings. The children helped each other label the buildings—post office, bookstore, restaurant, house—making signs in both Mandarin and English. The children frequently requested and enthusiastically sang songs they knew in both languages—“Eensy, Weensy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” Children participated in the familiar hand/body motions even if they couldn’t sing all the words.
Connecting Mandarin and English
Attribute charts, concept charts, and predictable charts were powerful strategies that helped children connect the two languages (Soderman & Farrell 2008). To create an attribute chart, the English and Chinese teachers together chose an engaging photo or picture in which the children could identify different physical characteristics. During a unit on fish, the teachers in each class posted a picture of a clownfish in the center of a sheet of color paper on the easel. Children took turns pointing out different attributes—fins, gills, eyes, scales—and the teacher drew lines to the attributes and wrote the words in Mandarin or English, depending on the class. If children had trouble coming up with a word in either Mandarin or English, they pointed to the part of the fish they wanted to name and their classmates said the word.
Similarly, at the beginning of thematic units, the children and teachers created concept charts or webs in each language to serve as classroom resources. Children could refer to these resources when searching for words while labeling a picture or writing in their journals. For example, during the transportation unit, the children named a variety of vehicles in both Mandarin and English, and the teachers modeled the writing of the words, drawing lines to the parts identified by the children.
Predictable charts were a favorite. Here, the teacher wrote highly predictable, patterned sentences on the easel, with a slight differentiation, depending on what each child said.
The children were invited to read the sentences aloud and could do so easily because of the repetition, predictability, meaningful content, and connection to classmates’ names they were beginning to recognize in print. Later, the teacher cut the predictable sentences into individual strips and gave the sentence strips to the children who had contributed them. The children illustrated their sentences and pasted them into a class book.
These young authors and illustrators created a great number of class books. The teachers laminated and bound the books and gave them to the children as keepsakes at the end of the school year. The children greatly prized these well-read books.
Including families
Teachers often involved families in activities. For example, children enjoyed working on a floor puzzle depicting a world map. The Chinese teacher pointed out each child’s country of birth on the map. The children traced their countries’ outlines on paper and then took the tracings home so they and their families could talk about the plants, animals, foods, and traditions native to their countries. Families were encouraged to find pictures representing these and paste them on the map.
In class the Chinese teacher and the children put the maps together on mural paper to construct a map of the world, with strings connecting the appropriate country to a child’s photograph. They also attached family photos to the mural.
Conclusion
What we have learned at 3e this past year has been invaluable. We are convinced that classrooms of children with multiple home languages contain more opportunities than challenges. They’re just more fun, particularly when teachers make use of the children’s home languages instead of working to replace them in the classroom.
We’re also convinced that unleashing teachers’ creativity is the key to building children’s literacy skills through engaging and meaningful activities in a quality early childhood program. In classrooms where multiple home languages are represented, teachers’ ingenuity and resourcefulness are critical in unlocking children’s motivation to learn. A prescribed curriculum and instructional approach to bilingual, multicultural, early childhood education simply does not work.
The gifts of bilingualism and multicultural identity in early childhood bring with them positive attitudes toward learning new languages, respect for different cultures, cognitive flexibility, increased self-esteem, and a feeling of greater competence in problem solving and meeting challenges (Siraj-Blatchford & Clarke 2001). If teachers do their jobs well, children in schools like 3e International Kindergarten will be able to move fluidly across cultures. They will grow into adults with fewer biases against others different from themselves, and they will be prepared to undertake the tasks ahead in an exciting new global era.
References
Siraj-Blatchford, I., & P. Clarke. 2001. Supporting identity, diversity, and language in the early years. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Soderman, A.K., & P. Farrell. 2008. Creating literacy rich preschools and kindergartens. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Soderman, A.K., K.S. Gregory, & L.T. McCarty. 2006. Scaffolding emergent literacy. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Anne K. Soderman, PhD, is professor emerita at Michigan State University. She serves nationally and internationally as a consultant on curriculum and assessment and conducts research on second language acquisition in Beijing, China. E-mail: soderman@msu.edu.
Betty L. Wescott, BA, graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in elementary education. She teaches kindergarten at 3e International Kindergarten in Beijing and is pursuing her master’s degree in literacy at Michigan State University. E-mail: betty@3eik.com.
Shen Jie, MA, is a graduate of Beijing Normal University. She is a kindergarten teacher in the Chinese classroom at 3e International Kindergarten, where she also serves as a translator and member of the curriculum development team. E-mail: js@3eik.com.
Copyright © 2007 by the National Association for the Education
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