Lesson planning is a political act. As previously stated in the Language Magazine article “Content, Language, and Culture Targets” (Medina, 2023), schools in the US, at the core, are designed to promote a monocultural and monolingual perspective of teaching and learning. As educators, the lessons we design and facilitate either support or dismantle educational systems that have historically marginalized certain student communities (Medina and Izquierdo, 2021). Black, Indigenous, students of color (BISoCs), language learners, children with specific academic, behavioral and/or physical health needs, and students belonging to the LGBTQ2S+ community, among others, have been deprioritized in a schooling system that is centered on “Whiteness” and heteronormative ideologies and aligned with privilege resulting from English monolingualism. By leveraging students’ cultural and linguistic gifts via strategically planned lessons aligned to content, language, and culture learning targets, educators can move away from this ideology and ensure students actively engage with grade-level standards in an inclusive educational environment.
Since its release in 2018, the C6 Biliteracy Instructional Framework (C6BIF) has been embraced by schools and districts providing dual language, bilingual, world language, ESL/ENL/ELD/EAL, and English monolingual programming throughout the US and abroad. The framework embraces everything educators bring into the classroom in terms of pedagogical expertise, while also aligning the lesson-planning processes to the latest biliteracy instructional recommendations. Educators and administrators seeking to scale culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogical practices appreciate the clear yet flexible framework, which allows them to put research into action using a critical consciousness lens to dismantle oppressive educational systems. Supported by the ongoing E3: Equity, Evidence, and Efficacy research project, a six-year longitudinal study in partnership with Dr. Elena Izquierdo and Dr. Vanessa Espitia from the University of Texas at El Paso, the C6BIF ensures that these invaluable practices are replicable in every educational setting.
While the Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education: Third Edition (Howard et al., 2018), often referred to as the GP3, promotes culturally and linguistically sustaining biliteracy instructional practices that allow educators to serve diverse student communities better, it does not specifically identify how the research recommendations should be incorporated into an educator’s everyday lesson planning. The C6BIF is written to align with the recommendations in the GP3 and beyond, as well as to engage in the important work of critical consciousness and anti-bias/anti-racism in the pre-K–12 classroom. This article, organized into four sections, explores the strategic integration of current biliteracy recommendations, including translanguaging and cross-linguistic practices, that allow for this critical work to occur through the lesson-planning process:
- The Need for Critical Consciousness in Lesson Planning
- The C6BIF as a Vehicle for Action
- Connecting Learning Experiences to Students’ Lives and Linguistic Repertoires
- Activating and valuing students’ schemas
- Translanguaging
- Cross-linguistic connections
- Recommendations
The Need for Critical Consciousness in Lesson Planning
Schooling systems were conceptualized to promote a White, monolingual, heteronormative, patriarchal, and often xenophobic perspective of teaching and learning. Currently, state legislators in the US are working to deny educators the ability to facilitate accurate historical lessons. Targeted pre-K–12 topics include but are not limited to the origins of slavery, the Holocaust, the LGBTQ2S+ community, and American Indian/Alaska Native history, which relate to individuals in populations most marginalized in schools. This, coupled with the increasing number of books banned from school libraries for amplifying real events in history, makes it imperative that educators leverage the lesson-planning process to ensure anti-bias and anti-racism work is at the center of every lesson that is designed.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (2005) states that a pedagogy must be forged with, and not for, those oppressed. The oppressed, the students part of a schooling system that has historically “othered” them, must actively engage in the construction of their learning, and their liberation, which occurs through meaningful participation in the construction of their learning. This is critical consciousness. When lesson planning uses this lens, educators do not seek to be the voice for students. They instead seek to dismantle the systems that mute student voices. To support our evolution as educators, it is important to acknowledge our inherent participation in student oppression due to an alignment with antiquated and potentially biased educational practices. However, as educators, we can offer reparation for the trauma inflicted on our most diverse student communities through how we choose to engage in the lesson-planning process.
Figure 1. The C6BIF Descriptors and Identifiers
The C6BIF as a Vehicle for Action
In conceptualizing a lesson-planning framework specifically via a biliteracy instructional lens, identifying culturally and linguistically sustaining systems that would support critical-consciousness recommendations was imperative. Additionally, C6BIF alignment with the three goals of dual language programming—bilingualism/biliteracy, grade-level academic achievement in two program languages, and an overt focus on sociocultural competence and critical consciousness—was equally important (Arias and Medina, 2020). The intersection of these concepts resulted in the six components of the C6BIF, each designed to house biliteracy instructional systems that would be replicable in every educational setting and would empower students to be co-creators of the instruction and learning that takes place in every classroom.
The C6BIF is not a checklist or a to-do list. Rather, it is a way of thinking about the lessons we plan and identifying how they are or are not creating a pathway for all students to access grade-level standards through a critical-consciousness lens. Whatever professional learning educators have engaged in, it has a home within the C6BIF. Aligned with the content, language, and culture learning targets planned during CREATE, CONNECT is the next step in empowering students to own their full identities and deeper learning. As part of this component, students engage in learning experiences that connect to their lives and linguistic repertoires. Educators are challenged to wholly and authentically value the experiences, knowledge, cultures, and languages students come to school with every day. In this way, educators are simultaneously able to disarm educational systems designed to continue the oppression of BISoCs.
Connecting Learning Experiences to Students’ Lives and Linguistic Repertoires
If we acknowledge that schooling systems were conceptualized to promote a White, monolingual, and monocultural perspective of teaching and learning, then we too must be critically reflective about how we are or are not dismantling oppressive education systems. Our intentions must go beyond the performative. Only in this fashion can we begin the work toward linguistic liberation in every educational setting.
Activating and Valuing Students’ Schema
Often, educators will overtly state that they value all that a student brings into the classroom. However, quickly those conversations turn to the topic of building background. Even as we state that we embrace the cultural and linguistic prowess of the students we serve, we begin to chat about how to “fill the gaps” that students have so they can succeed in our educational system.
According to Marzano (2004), what students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information. But if teachers and administrators have not engaged in critical self-reflection about the oppressive nature of education and our part in that oppression, it becomes difficult to leverage the strategies that will fully empower students to use their entire cultural and linguistic skill sets.
The idea that all educators should value the schema of the BISoCs that they teach, and truly prioritize background knowledge that is not White, monolingual, heteronormative, patriarchal, and/or xenophobic, is a new concept for some. Valuing students’ lives and experiences regardless of race, language, religion, and so on is an essential building block for learning. But if building background is about filling gaps, and educational systems are grounded in Whiteness, then when we believe that a student lacks a certain understanding of content, what we are really worried about is that BISoCs are not White enough to be successful academically. As educators, we must reframe and reflect on our understanding of activating students’ schema and building background knowledge to ensure we don’t perpetuate systems in schools that further marginalize certain student communities.
Far too often in schools, BISoCs, including emergent multilingual students, are immediately labeled and pigeonholed into certain categories due to a perceived inability to understand a concept or express their learning in English. In fact, from the moment that we enter some teacher preparation or alternative certification programs, the pedagogy that is shared with us may be aligned with the flawed perspective that we must teach students, rather than learn alongside them and from them. We may be taught to see students as having gaps, identifying which children are “high” or “low,” and targeting student language that needs to be fixed, rather than embracing an asset-based perspective of student abilities. Across the country, students are color-coded (red/yellow/green or blue birds/red birds/green birds). This practice of identifying students as low, medium, and high is culturally and linguistically oppressive.
Let’s reframe how we think and speak about the students we serve. Rather than merely categorizing them as low, medium, and high, as educators we should assess student abilities from a culturally and linguistically sustaining perspective. Additionally, a multilingual student should be assessed not just from a content perspective but from a language lens as well.
Below is a tool to help educators dismantle present systems of oppression at work in schools, via the language we mobilize to engage in conversations about students and their learning.
Empathy, we are reminded, is needed as we empower students from communities that are frequently marginalized in schools, but what are we truly saying? Being good people, having empathy, and building background is not enough if we are not challenging the systems that continue to “other” students who are not White-adjacent. When we believe that some students simply do not have “what they need” to be successful in schools, what we are truly saying is that we align with antiquated ideologies that exclude non-White student communities from what happens in a US classroom.
Translanguaging
The topic of translanguaging research and how to, or not to, leverage the work in schools is feverishly being debated. What some educators fail to realize is that all of us translanguage. Whether fabulous and monolingual or fabulous and multilingual, we translanguage daily. Thanks to the research of Drs. Ofelia García, Susana Ibarra Johnson, and Kate Seltzer (2017), we have a deeper and more readily accessible definition of translanguaging and know the vital role it plays in our everyday lives. Translanguaging is the mobilization of specific language features, within one linguistic repertoire, based on the context and need for communication. That is, each of us has one linguistic repertoire. Based on with whom or how we are communicating, we mobilize the linguistic features needed at that moment. Translanguaging reminds us that communication is fluid and proves that one language never begins and others never end. It is only schools that attempt to separate languages. Moreover, translanguaging research clarifies that there is no hierarchy between what we in schools identify as academic and social language. All linguistic features are important and correct depending on the context in which they are used.
The reason translanguaging is important, in terms of serving BISoCs, is that we must continue to work toward linguistic liberation. From the time students who readily speak English enter a US school, they leverage 100% of their language repertoire because that is what we value in schools. That is not the case for culturally and linguistically diverse student communities. Depending on the implementation of translanguaging research in individual states, districts, schools, and/or classrooms, emergent multilinguals are asked to immediately ignore languages that are not English and only use less than 50% of their linguistic repertoires. Dual language programs also linguistically oppress students when they’re told “en español” or “English only,” once again forcing students to use less than 50% of their linguistic repertoires. A translanguaging stance allows educators to do away with that linguistic practice and to empower students to leverage their full linguistic prowess regardless of the educational setting.
If translanguaging requires individuals to move language from their one linguistic repertoire based on context, then the 4+1 language domains (Figure 2) become the vehicle through which such movement occurs. Every student, every human being, learns new content by interacting with information via listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, emergent multilinguals have an additional language domain that they leverage—metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness is the ability of multilinguals to make connections between the different nation languages represented within their one linguistic repertoire. Because in most schooling systems we have rarely empowered students to use their metalinguistic awareness, we have in fact been a part of their linguistic oppression.
Students must own and be encouraged to use listening, speaking, reading, writing, and metalinguistic awareness as part of their daily learning. They must understand that everyone has one linguistic repertoire. Some students have one language represented within their one language bubble, while others have more than one language they can use and call upon. But ultimately, every student will move toward linguistic liberation when they fully understand that their duty is to sustain and expand their one linguistic repertoire.
It is our job as educators to help students identify the context in which they are communicating and strategically choose which part of their linguistic repertoire to utilize, always honoring and elevating the languages of the students we serve. When we do not value or allow translanguaging in classrooms, we are in fact fighting against, and not in the name of, equity and social justice.
Figure 2. The 4+1 Language Domain Icons
Those of us who serve in educational settings must be clear on the difference between translanguaging, metalinguistic awareness, and cross-linguistic connections; as well, we must understand how they are interconnected and how we can best leverage them to serve emergent multilingual students best.
Translanguaging research is the umbrella that supports culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy. It reminds us that we all mobilize language from our one linguistic repertoire based on context. The 4+1 language domains, and specifically metalinguistic awareness, become the vehicles to move language from within our linguistic repertoire. Cross-linguistic connections are the tools teachers use to plan for and support metalinguistic awareness and thus translanguaging research in the classroom (Figure 2).
It is important to note that metalinguistic awareness is referred to as +1 because it is always leveraged in connection to one or more of the other language domains. Below are some examples of how this might be seen in the classroom:
- Listening + Metalinguistic Awareness:
- A Spanish-speaking student is in an all-English classroom, and they hear the teacher say the word chocolate. Immediately the student makes the connection between chocolate in Spanish and the word used by the teacher in English.
- Speaking + Metalinguistic Awareness:
- In a Spanish/English dual language classroom, a student might say in Spanish, José’s pelo es corto. The student is leveraging their full linguistic repertoire and embedding the possessive apostrophe-s into the Spanish statement.
- Reading + Metalinguistic Awareness:
- In a non-dual secondary mathematics course where all the instruction is offered in English, a newly arrived, non-English-speaking student will identify cognates between their home language and English as they read the information in the textbook.
- Writing + Metalinguistic Awareness:
- During a state assessment, an emergent bilingual student will write a sentence in English and change the syntax (word order) to align with their home language.
Figure 3. The Translanguaging Umbrella
What might translanguaging look like in a classroom? In addition to students owning and interacting with the 4+1 language icons (Figure 2), students should be able to explain both translanguaging and metalinguistic awareness. Approaching language in the classroom as fluid and without hierarchy empowers students to identify context; the continuum-of-language strategy is one way to be more linguistically sustaining in the classroom.
For example, an interactive chart could be displayed (see Figures 4 and 5) so that students can identify in which contexts words might be used. Chamba in Spanish might appear above the line to the left, and its academic equivalent trabajo would appear above the line to the right. Words like parquear or planching would appear on the line itself to represent combined words. A word like ’sup in English would appear to the left, and its academic equivalent How are you? would appear to the right, whereas Good day to you! might appear even further to the right. Black students are often linguistically oppressed in diverse educational settings. If a Black child shares, “I’m finna go to the store,” we can have them include it in context, while also asking them to mobilize, “I’m getting ready to.” Metalinguistic connections, as part of a lesson’s language-learning target, are one way that educators can lesson plan and leverage students’ full linguistic capabilities. The language continuum chart is an example of this work.
Figure 4. Language Continuum Chart
Figure 5. Language Continuum Chart with Examples
Translanguaging research and activities don’t only support language-learning targets; they also strengthen culture-learning targets. As educators, we can help students better understand how language impacts their learning and their existence in this world. Strategies like the one above empower students to fully own their linguistic prowess and thus their linguistic liberation.
Another activity for educators to consider is having students explain the content they’ve learned, either orally or in writing, to different types of audiences. For example, Explain the lunar cycle and phases of the moon might be the prompt, and teachers might assign different audiences to hear this information. How might you explain this content to your abuela who only speaks Spanish? How might you explain this to your bilingual younger cousin? How might you explain this to your principal who only speaks English? How might you explain this to a famous scientist? Comparing and contrasting the use of language as a class further deepens student understanding of translanguaging in their everyday lives.
All these pieces comprise the current body of research surrounding translanguaging. Our job as educators is to amplify and sustain our students’ languages. Embracing translanguaging research empowers us to continue to help students to expand their linguistic repertoires without destroying the languages of their homes and communities.
Cross-linguistic Connections
If as an educator, I must value all that students bring into the classroom, then I support translanguaging research by empowering students to use their 4+1 language domains. Specifically, I must also leverage the power of metalinguistic awareness via cross-linguistic work that will allow students to mobilize their content learning in more than one language. Strategic and authentic cross-linguistic work with students not only supports the academic goals of dual language classrooms, but it also promotes both sociocultural competence and critical-consciousness work. Planning for cross-linguistic connections is fundamental for educators seeking to dismantle educational systems of oppression that continue to impact certain student communities.
As translanguaging research continues to work its way into classrooms, many teachers are still not sure about how to separate languages while strategically making cross-linguistic connections. (See Figure 3, “The Translanguaging Umbrella.”) Educators want to be linguistically and culturally sustaining; they want to embrace translanguaging research, but many simply need the tools to plan for and implement in the classroom setting.
The following five cross-linguistic tools, sometimes referred to as biliteracy instructional tools, incorporate translanguaging research and provide practical application. Moreover, the tools ensure that the content learned by emergent bilingual students, specifically in dual language bilingual education programs, can be mobilized equally well in both program languages.
Tools for the End of a Unit
The recommended biliteracy tools teachers should use at the end of the unit are Bridge Level 1 and Bridge Level 2 anchor charts. These are artifacts created when educators implement the bridge. The bridge is the artifact that teachers use to make connections between the languages related to the current academic content being learned. The bridge happens at the end of a unit; students, with teacher support, create an artifact, usually an anchor chart, where cross-linguistic connections are made and documented.
It is important to note that Bridge Level 1 and Bridge Level 2 anchor charts are not about reteaching content. They are about documenting whether students can language the content they learned equally well in both program languages. There is also a general misunderstanding that Bridge Level 1 is about translation. It is not. Bridge Level 1 anchor charts are about language transfer.
Bridge Level 1 Anchor Charts
Bridge Level 1 anchor charts are side-by-side color-coded anchor charts that focus on the content and language of the unit. Teachers and students co-create this anchor chart at the end of the unit to ensure that students can language their deep content understanding in both program languages. Bridge Level 1 focuses on transfer.
To begin, students list the important concepts found in the unit in a designated program language in one column on the anchor chart. Teachers scribe in the appropriate color of the current language.
After creating and discussing this list, teachers guide students to switch to the other program language. During this step, students transfer the concepts that they brainstormed in the first step into the accompanying program language. Because the purpose of a Bridge Level 1 anchor chart is transfer, at this point students must also share three or four important facts that support the content concepts they are working to transfer and language in both program languages.
Depending on students’ linguistic repertoires in individual classes, students can guide teachers to add more columns for the additional languages represented in the classroom. Each language should be written in its designated color code.
Bridge Level 2 Anchor Charts
After completing the Bridge Level 1 anchor chart, students engage in a variety of contrastive analyses depending on what they observe. Teachers should strategically plan how to extend the language focus by leveraging the needs of students and helping guide students to create a Bridge Level 2 anchor chart. For educators, as well as teams/departments, Bridge Level 2 anchor charts provide opportunities for more strategic lesson planning and guide what units to select for Bridge Level 1 and 2 work. For example, if educators know that students need work on syntax, teams can identify which content area and unit best facilitate the bridging of this information. Bridge Level 2 anchor charts extend the work that took place in making the Bridge Level 1 anchor chart and focus on linguistic contrastive analysis.
After co-creating the Bridge Level 1 anchor chart, students make observations about the similarities and differences in phonology, morphology, syntax, grammar, or pragmatics that they see. Educators guide students to the chosen language focus.
A new anchor chart is created in this step. The concepts that have been identified as the language focus from the Bridge Level 1 anchor chart are transferred to this new chart to start the examples with the current content.
Then, just like with the Bridge Level 1 anchor chart, students begin to provide examples of the language focus in one program language while the teacher scribes in the appropriate color. Students are now encouraged to draw upon all their content knowledge and provide examples across disciplines.
After discussing and providing examples in the one program language, teachers guide students to the next column and begin filling in the information in the remaining program language. Students are encouraged to add any additional information to the column in this language as needed. Again, students might be invited to provide additional columns to represent and value the entire range of linguistic repertoires found in the classroom. The Bridge Level 2 anchor chart becomes a living, breathing chart where items are added throughout the school year. It continues to be displayed throughout the year as part of the environmental print support in the classroom. Some possibilities for Bridge Level 2 anchor charts include initial sounds, cognates, plural, singular, articles, syntax, punctuation, prefixes and suffixes, and regionalisms.
The bridge, which includes Bridge Level 1 and Bridge Level 2 anchor charts, is a tool that educators should utilize at the end of a unit. Four to six Bridge Level 1 and Bridge Level 2 anchor charts should establish cross-linguistic connections across content areas per semester. Bridge Level 2 anchor chart ideas drive which units are selected to bridge throughout the school year. In dual language programs with a two-teacher model, the dual language teachers that facilitate in English, whether monolingual or multilingual, must still engage students in cross-linguistic work. The classroom environment in both classrooms should reflect transfer work. The bridge is only one strategy to ensure that students can language their deep content understanding in both program languages.
Tools for Daily Use
Bridge Level 1 and Level 2 student co-constructed anchor charts document the content and language transfer that has already happened. Thus, as educators, we must leverage the three cross-linguistic tools to ensure that this transfer is happening daily. This is why the language allocation plan, whether 90–10, 80–20, or 50–50, must include grade-level instruction in both program languages in all content areas regularly. Creating linguistically inclusive spaces and strategically planning for cross-linguistic connections not only facilitates the transfer of academic content from one language into all others, it also is an example of how teachers can empower students to become linguistically liberated. Using the metalinguistic-awareness language domain icon (Figure 2) ensures that students own cross-linguistic work and thus embrace translanguaging research.
Bridge/Metalinguistic Moments
To help students value and understand translanguaging, cross-linguistic tools should be reserved for the end of units, but should be strategically planned and implemented daily. Asking students to make cross-linguistic connections is not merely asking them to translate. Engaging students in contrastive analyses of multiple languages across disciplines is so much more than that. When strategically planned and aligned to content targets, daily cross-linguistic tools are a powerful way to ensure transfer of both the content and language across students’ linguistic repertoires. Encouraging students to mobilize all parts of their linguistic repertoire is one way educators can begin dismantling the systems of linguistic oppression found in schools.
Understanding translanguaging research, embracing metalinguistic awareness, and making cross-linguistic connections require us to engage in these activities on a strategic and ongoing basis to be effective. Unless we address the linguistic bias inherently present in US schools, we are bound to continue the linguistic oppression of the emergent multilingual students we are charged
to serve.
Recommendations
Every single one of us, as educators in schooling systems that have marginalized BISoCs, must acknowledge that we have linguistically oppressed those we are charged to serve. Doing so enables us to offer reparation via the instruction we now facilitate. I often state that I am a linguistic oppressor in recuperation. It is my hope that others will join me as we strive to do better.
It is important for every educator to fully understand how translanguaging research, metalinguistic awareness, and cross-linguistic connections are integral for student linguistic liberation in the classroom. To deny students the opportunity to embrace their full linguistic repertoires is to further cause linguistic trauma.
In dual language programs, we must leverage translanguaging research as we establish times for target languages while also engaging students in cross-linguistic work. Moreover, we must cease the practice of running two monolingual programs side by side and calling it dual language. The only way that students can works toward bilingualism and biliteracy is via strategic cross-linguistic work.
Leadership at the school, district, state, and federal levels must make decisions grounded in translanguaging, metalinguistic awareness, and cross-linguistic connection recommendations.
References
Arias, B., and Medina, J. (2020). “Sociocultural Competence in Action.” Language Magazine. www.languagemagazine.com/2020/10/15/sociocultural-competence-in-action
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
García, O., Ibarra Johnson, S., and Seltzer, K. (2017). The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Caslon Publishing.
Howard, E. R., Lindholm-Leary, K. J., Rogers, D., Olague, N., Medina, J., Kennedy, B., Sugarman, J., and Christian, D. (2018). Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education (3rd ed.). Center for Applied Linguistics.
Marzano, R. J. (2004). Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools. ASCD.
Medina, J. (2023). “Content, Language, and Culture Learning Targets.” Language Magazine. www.languagemagazine.com/2023/03/22/content-language-and-culture-learning-targets
Medina, J., and Izquierdo, I. (2021). “Equity Commitment in Large-Scale Dual Language Bilingual Education.” Multilingual Educator, March 2021, 6–10.
Dr. José Medina is a researcher who provides dual language support to programs across the US and globally. As a former DL school principal and district leader, he has served at the elementary and secondary school levels. José co-authored the third edition of the Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education.
