ML/EL E2: Nurturing multilingualism, with Jim Cummins, Ph.D.

Hi listeners, it's Susan. Okay, I know our comprehension season just ended, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop talking about comprehension. In fact, on April 15th, 2026, I'm leading an Ed webinar that goes even deeper into some of the ideas we've been discussing this podcast season and in my recent Plain Talk about Literacy and Learning presentation. If you'd like to continue the comprehension conversation and also earn CE credits, join me on April 15th. Find out more information and save your spot now at amplify.com/comprehensionedweb. You know, the more linguistic skills and the more literate skills we have, the more opportunities we have. It's as simple as that. This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading the podcast from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. This is episode two in our brand new mini-series exploring how the Science of Reading serves multilingual and English learners. Last time, we kicked things off by examining how the education system has historically let down this critical population. And we also explored a powerful collaboration between researchers and advocates for both the Science of Reading and Multilingual and English learners. The result of that collaboration was a joint statement which we started to unpack. This time, we're focusing on the Science of Language Acquisition and our guest is one of the many co-siners of that historic joint statement, Dr. Jim Cummins, Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. On this episode, Dr. Cummins distills the research on how humans learned languages, and he explains how that information can be applied in the classroom to support all students and especially multilingual and English learners. Let's hear from Dr. Jim Cummins. Dr. Jim Cummins, welcome to today's episode. We're so happy to have you on. Thanks, it's great to be here. So before we get started, we would really love if you could give a brief introduction of yourself to our listeners for those of those listeners that don't know you. And maybe briefly share your story of how you got interested in language development and acquisition as well as bilingual in education. Okay, currently I'm a retired professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which is essentially the Faculty of Education for the University of Toronto in Canada. And I've been here since 1979, so I've been here for quite some time. But even though I've worked in Canada for most of my adult life, my background is not Canadian. Like most of the people who currently live in Toronto, I was born somewhere else. I was born in Ireland. I grew up in Dublin. I went to school there, went to university there, and I went to Canada in the early 70s to do graduate work. I spent five frozen years of my life in Edmonton, which is the most northly of the big Canadian cities. And then went back to Ireland for two years and worked in education research there and then came back to Canada. So I've kind of got one foot on either side of the Atlantic. That makes sense of why you might be interested in bilingual education, for sure. What about the language piece of it? What's so interesting to you about that language piece? Well, when I was growing up, my parents sent me to what's called a gale skull in Ireland for just one year. It was in the equivalent of grade one. And as probably most people know, the predominant language spoken in Ireland is English, but there are two official languages, English and Irish or Gaelic. And since the founding of the Irish Free State in 1921, there's been a concerted effort to revive the Irish language. And schools were a major way of doing that, a conduit for that effort. So Irish is taught as a compulsory subject in all schools. And since the 1920s, there's also been a focus on bilingual education or Irish immersion, where Irish is used for about 80% of the time in elementary school. And those schools have kind of ebbed and flowed, depending on the different decades that we're talking about. But when I was growing up in the 1950s in Ireland, there were a number of gale skulls and Irish medium schools operating. And my older brother was going to a school near the centre of Dublin. And I couldn't get in there because it was full, I guess, in the initial year when I was in grade one, so my parents sent me to the school that was closest to it, which happened to be an Irish medium school. The rationale was we could go in on the bus together at the school. He would go right and I would go left. And so I spent one year in an Irish immersion programme. I had some instruction in Irish at the kindergarten or preschool level, but I certainly wasn't in any way fluent. But I can remember not understanding very much initially in the fall of that year. But by the time May came around, I can remember speaking with Irish and friends coming home in the bus. So it was an example of what a colleague of mine in Canada, Merrill Swain, is called "Balangilism Without Tears". The tears came later when I went up the road to the other school where Irish was just taught as a school subject for about 40 minutes, 40, 45 minutes a day. And it was taught as a subject without any real communicative context. So we learned vocabulary, we learned grammar, we learned little phrases that were apparently good to use. And I spent the next 10 or 11 years learning Irish in that context. And I did well on exams in my final grade 12 exam and I did very well. But I'd lost a lot of the fluency in the language. I was a lot more fluent at the age of eight than I was at the age of 18, despite 10 years of what some might call pain and suffering in between. And so that kind of stuck with me in terms of an experiential basis in looking at context in which different kinds of language can develop. And clearly my experience mirrors the fact that virtually all the research highlights the importance of being in a communicative, interactive context if you want to pick up the language. And study of the language is also important particularly when we're talking about literacy skills in the language. But you need both. You need active engagement with the language and the same is true for literacy. But you also need to become aware of how the language works. And so explicit instruction is usually an important element of that. When I went to Canada, my interest was not so much in bilingualism or bilingual education. I was interested in language and education generally. But the supervisor that I had from a graduate work was a professor called Metro Gulletson who was of Ukrainian background. He was third generation Ukrainian. He was an expert in Soviet and Eastern European studies. And at that stage in the early 70s, Canada had just adopted a national policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework where there were two official languages, English and French. But no culture was seen as superior to any other. And Metro, my supervisor was an astute academic politician as well as an astute academic in general. And he figured there's going to be a lot of interest in research on bilingualism given this new policy. So he started teaching courses on bilingualism at the graduate level and undergraduate level. And I was working for him as his research assistant or teaching assistant. So I had to sit in on his classes at the undergraduate level and learn a lot about this thing called bilingualism and bilingual education, which I knew very little about in any kind of academic sense. And I ended up doing my research for my PhD in French English dual language programs in Edmonton, where there were some students who were from French home backgrounds, some from English home backgrounds, and some who were coming from bilingual home backgrounds. When I finished my PhD in 1974, I went back to Ireland and continued that interest in bilingual education. And I carried out research in Irish English dual language programs, Irish immersion programs. So continued the themes of my doctoral research back in Ireland. Then I came back to Canada, went back out to Edmonton, spent another couple of frozen years out there. And this is at the stage in the late 70s, where bilingual education was becoming really controversial in the United States. Because after the Supreme Court law versus Nicholas decision in 1974, the Office of Civil Rights had interpreted the best remedy to help students acquire English as being transitional bilingual education, where initially the home school switch would be mediated by some instruction students' home languages. And when people realized what was going on, that suddenly Spanish and occasional some other languages were required to be used in the school system, there was strong, strong pushback. And so it became extremely controversial. And I got involved in those issues because some of the research I had done on the cognitive effects of bilingualism and transfer of skills across languages we're seeing as being relevant to those issues. So that's how I started off an immersion program and then kind of in a way went off the deep end and getting into the whole politics of a language education in the United States in the late 70s and 80s. And you've also worked across the world so we're not talking just Canada or Ireland or the United States but you've actually worked all over the whole world helping with bilingual education. Yeah, I've been involved in a number of contexts and that reflects the fact that when we look internationally multilinealism and bilingualism are the norms rather than monolingualism and there are multiple contexts where there are minority populations. Sometimes we're talking about minoritized populations for example in South Africa before the end of apartheid. You had the vast majority of people in South Africa who were minoritized and discriminated against and so bilingual education and ways of addressing the learning needs of students who are coming to school and learning a new language in the school context are universal issues virtually in almost all countries. And so in in a number of countries like for example the vast country in Spain during the 1970s and early 80s after Franco died in I think 1974-75 they had the the vast country got control over their own education system within the new Spanish constitution and one of their primary goals was to revive the vast language. So I became involved in in some of their language policy work in that context in the mid 1980s. I've also been involved in Ireland and some of the contexts also. That's interesting you know as you're as you're sharing some of that it reminds me of my experience learning German in high school because you know that's what you do in the United States as you take a a foreign language again as one of those you know blocks hour long block and then I was able to go on a with the German club a trip to Germany and actually go to school with a German student and sort of shadow her for about a week. And I distinctly remember the differences between what I experienced and what they seemed to experience in Germany of students because she was my age and fluent in English and I was lucky to sort of pass the test I got good grades but just pass the test in German but ask me to speak German I couldn't do it at all. And so that was my first realization that basically the entire world is bilingual or multilingual and here in the United States we are very focused on monolingual education. Yeah your your experience reminds me of a story that's attributed to Mark Twain where he said he spent several years in high school studying intermediate French but when he got to Paris if I nobody spoke that dialect. But it highlights the fact that you need a lot more probably than one week of interaction in an authentic context to really pick up fluency in the language and it highlights the fact that there are differences between the linguistic demands of schooling and the kind of language that we use in everyday conversational contexts outside of school. Yeah well we'll dive into that in just a minute but I'd really love it since this is your area of expertise. I would love if you could talk just a little bit about language acquisition you know in general but also what's particularly salient to those that are learning multiple languages. What do we as humans need to go through in terms of acquiring language? I think there's virtually universal acknowledgement among linguists and your linguists about the fact that our brains are wired for language acquisition. It's part of what we acquired in our evolutionary trajectory and Chomsky called it the language acquisition device and so in acquiring a first language what we need is interaction with the competent speakers of the language and in the first few years of life in virtually every culture and every child who's developing normally they will pick up fluency in their home language. They'll understand things that are spoken to them. They will within by the time they're two or three years old most kids are speaking fluently and they can understand whatever any reasonable adult is going to say to them and they can respond sometimes in ways that as parents know we wish they would just calm it down a little bit and not speak quite as much. It's hard to shut them up sometimes but that's that's obviously a universal pattern for children who are developing normally with language and obviously when we come to school we continue our language development but in a different way we're talking about language that's typically associated with literacy. We expand our vocabulary knowledge from what we've picked up in the first four or five years of life into a much broader range of vocabulary that reflects the vocabulary of academic subjects. It reflects the vocabulary of more analytic forms of thinking and so we're expected to be able to make hypotheses. We're expected to make predictions. We're expected to understand complex dense informational text and that's all language but it's also literacy and so when we look at what's involved I would argue in both language and literacy development there's two broad aspects of this and there are two sides of the same coin ideally. First of all you need active engagement with the language. The same way to acquire strong reading comprehension skills we need active engagement in actual reading and engagement with a wide range of texts which you also need explicit awareness of how language works. You need to be in a situation where ideally a more competent adult is pointing things out to the child directing them to for example how the letters on the page look how they might sound and highlighting helping students pronounce words that they may not be able to pronounce initially and so all of that feedback that we're getting and it's typically explicit feedback is a critical aspect of becoming a competent language user. So what we're talking about here are two aspects one is explicit instruction explicit feedback focused on developing skills in language focusing on developing awareness of how language works and secondly we need active engagement with the language in an interactive context or we're talking about oral language and in an interaction with text when we're talking about literacy and so those two aspects are core and they apply whether we're talking about acquiring a first language or acquiring a second language. Yeah and it seems to me that if we're talking about just let's use me as an example with one language my first language that transition from normal everyday language use into more the language of schooling can be quite complicated. I think I heard somebody say once nobody is a native speaker of academic language or academic English right we actually have to help our students understand how that works in the context of schooling but if we're adding on to that then someone who is developing their home language while simultaneously learning a new language that feels like it's a lot more complex. Yeah for sure and in terms of the distinction that I've made and other people have made also between conversational language the language of interaction in a face-to-face situation and the kind of language that is that we're required to develop within the school context and there's a distinction there it's not a dichotomy there's lots of overlap in terms of this but we can think of it in terms of a continuum where in different contexts different kinds of language is required and is used and we pick up those forms of language from being in those contexts so when we're talking about children requiring first language and developing academic skills in that language one of the reasons we send children to school for 12 years is that it takes that long for them to acquire the more formal language skills, literacy skills, the reading skills, the writing skills as well as the subject matter knowledge that we feel is required for the work environment but at the same time the vast majority of children coming into school in their first language are fluent speakers of that language they have acquired what Trump's called competence and when we talk about competence we're talking about a set of skills that are largely acquired by age five or six so by the time children come to school all native speakers of the language are not all but but virtually all have acquired this competence in language but that doesn't mean that language stops developing a certain kind of language stops developing but we still need to expand the linguistic repertoire that we bring to school into a much broader range of contexts and acquire much broader range of skills so if we are looking at the kind of skills required to write a letter of application for a job okay there's some explicit knowledge that we need in terms of the registers of the formats that are required the politeness set registers that might be required if we want to kind of get in for an interview. So there's a lot of things involved in that that five-year-old children obviously don't have. And so the distinction between conversational skills versus more literate forms of language is one that I think is intuitive and largely agreed upon. Now when we talk about children who are experiencing a home school language which where the language of the home is different from the language of the school obviously the challenge is increased because they're acquiring oral skills fluency in that language at the same time as they're learned to read and the cognitive load is greater in for obvious reasons than for a native speaker. And what the research shows I think very clearly is that under normal conditions where students are getting support in school after learning the language within about a year or two a large proportion of children coming from a multilingual background will acquire fluency in English in everyday context. And one of the reasons for this is that language development is supported by a variety of contexts to the features. So when we're talking to when the child is talking to another child or where I'm talking to you or you're talking to me there are all kinds of non-linguistic or what are sometimes called parallel linguistic clues that contribute to the meaning. There's eye contact, there's facial expressions, there's tone of voice, intonation, there's the immediate context I can point to something and children pick up the language that's associated with with those kinds of contexts. That's how all of us acquired our first language and it's a crucial aspect of acquiring a second language in the school context. And obviously additional support will be very helpful for children acquiring a new language in the school context but we also need that engaged interaction for students to really pick up that language. And typically that'll happen for most children within a year or two. But that just means that they've caught up in all aspects of language that are required in school. There's two reasons why the catch-up trajectory takes a lot longer and typically we're talking about at least five years sometimes longer and sometimes students never catch up. The first reason is as students who are learning the school language as a new language are trying to catch up to a moving target because native speakers of say English who come to school speaking that language are not standing still. Every year they're broadening the vocabulary knowledge, they're increasing their knowledge of how language works, they're developing reading skills, they're developing writing skills. And so second language learners have to run faster to bridge that gap. And then the second reason is that there are obvious complexities in literate language and the language of schooling like which you referred to where you said that many people have made the point that acquiring literacy is like acquiring a second language. So there are additional aspects of language that need to be acquired during that process. And so that's why students need support. But if we look at the support that they need it's not just support that could be provided in half an hour a day. By a specialized English as a second language teacher. It needs support throughout the five hours of the school day. So all teachers need to have some knowledge of how language works, they need to be aware of the trajectories of catching up academically. And the fact that a student who's been in the United States or Canada for two years or maybe three years who's speaking English fluently apparently may not have caught up in all aspects of language development. And so what the teacher might interpret as say slowness and picking up reading skills or writing skills that are problematic. And the teacher may wonder if this child has some kind of special education need. That's probably or in many cases going to be the just a normal process of catching up academically. And so these trajectories are important and they highlight the fact that you know there are important differences between conversational language and academic language that we need to be aware of as educators. Yeah, that makes sense and it makes me think of the modes of language. So speaking and listening which we talked about is sort of that conversational language usage were wired to do that. We've been evolved to do that to be communicators and when you're in the context of that you're able to leverage that to be able to pick up a new language. But when we're talking about academic language, we're talking about that mode of reading and writing which some of that needs to be explicitly taught both to first language learners, but especially for second language learners. And that sort of layer of we'll just call it academic language are for right now, but that language you said can be really cognitively demanding for multi-lingual learners. I wonder if you could talk about the cognitive demanding part because I'm not sure everybody understands what that actually means. Yeah, that's an excellent point and when we think about what happens in school and what textbooks they're trying to teach in mathematics, in history, in social studies, whatever the subject might be, we're talking about concepts, we're talking about ideas, we're talking about the ability to analyze issues in a logical or rational way. So we're talking about cognitive skills and there are various kinds of cognitive functions that students are expected to learn how to do within the school context. They may have many of these functions already developed to some extent before they come to school, but we require much more competence and precision in terms of doing this. For example, being able to analyze the logic of an argument, being able to pick out inconsistencies in an argument, these things are fundamental to a democracy, being able to identify disinformation, being able to check claims against empirical data. All of these things are fundamental to science, they're fundamental to participation in democracy or effective participation in democracy. And so these are things that we expect schools to do. And so when you look at these cognitive functions that we expect students to be able to engage in, and look at the language that's associated with that, the language complexity goes along with the increase in cognitive challenge and cognitive complexity. And so if we're looking at being able to identify holes in somebody's argument or holes in claims made by a politician, for example, we need to be able to engage in fairly complex cognitive processes that also involve linguistic awareness, the awareness of how language can be used for all kinds of purposes. Languages obviously use to illuminate, to inform, to express various kinds of emotions. All of these things are potentially positive, but languages also use to deceive, to disinform, to disempower. And so language awareness, developing language awareness, has got to be a fundamental aspect of what it means to educate our students. And so this is all part of what we get as we engage with literacy in the school context. And it's not just a case of an individual child sitting down and reading books, like that's great if the child wants to do that. But all of these processes are amplified when there's a community of peers or people that we can discuss these ideas with, we can get feedback, we can explore ideas collectively. And again, this is the power of literacy in the school context and literacy engagement. It's going to be much more active if we have somebody to talk to about the ideas that we've come across in a book. If we're looking at historical realities and looking at different interpretations of historical events or phenomena, again talking through these with people is a really important way of reality checking our own initial ideas, but also moving our ideas onto another realm. And this is all part of what we need to do in schooling. And this is why when we talk about reading and writing literacy, we've got to focus on not only just teaching the skills, it's not like as if you can teach a literate skill. When we talk about comprehension of text, we're talking about something that goes on ideally throughout our lifetimes. And that is all going to be amplified when we have critical and constructive discussions with others about the issues that we're engaged with. Let's go back to take a step back to the way we've sort of looked at language development in the school environment, which is traditionally and probably still some places. We've thought about language education or literacy as an education as sort of this individual acquisition process. So I'm going to learn English and then I'm going to go to another class to learn German or to learn Spanish or to learn French. What's the history of that concept and what do we know now about whether that works or doesn't work? When we look at the factors that impact language development, literacy development, education achievement generally, there are obviously individual cognitive factors. Some children are brighter than others in terms of having special talents, for example, in mathematics or other areas. But there are also the multitude of social factors that impact learning. If we look at some of the neurological evidence or neuropsychological evidence from the first five years of life. We know, for example, that 90% of brain development happens between birth and age five. And there have been a number of studies in recent years of the last 15 or 20 years that have highlighted the brain areas that kind of light up when particular activities are engaged in. And so, for example, studies have shown that reading to children, even before their first year of life, when they're still crawling around and not even walking yet, that has impact on children's vocabulary development at age three. It also has impact in terms of neurological development. We can identify brain regions that have been stimulated, that have developed in the early years as a result of that kind of linguistic and literate engagement and exposure. So, those are social conditions. Poverty is not good for the brain. It's not good for physical development. It's not good for any number of reasons, both because of direct nutritional issues, but also issues like lead in the water that kids from low income backgrounds are frequently exposed to, and many, many other issues over crowding in home, et cetera. But one of the things that's really important here, I think, is that when we look at the social impact of, in terms of social factors that affect literacy, and what schools can do about it, there's not much that individual teachers in their classrooms can do about income levels of families. There's not that much they can do about the fact that many of the kids in schools serving low income backgrounds are living in very overcrowded conditions. There's not much they can do about families that have single parents and the economic realities that often go along with that. But there's one thing, one social reality that we can do a lot about. And that's the fact that children growing up in poverty from low income backgrounds frequently have far less exposure to print in their early years than children from more affluent backgrounds. And what about for kids that are simultaneously learning a new language, right? So I know, you know, it used to be that when we would bring kids into the classroom, it would be like, we're only speaking English here and tell the parents at home, we're only speaking English, we're going to, you know, teach them using books and explicit instruction all about English, but we don't want you to use your home language. That is no longer a research-based approach, correct? Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. It's virtually totally disputed in terms of any of the research that's out there. It's easy to see how that assumption came about because obviously exposure to a language is important in learning language. You can't learn a language without being exposed to it. And for many, many years up until the 1960s, it was assumed that bilingualism and being exposed to two or more languages had negative effects on children's development. Orally because children, let's say, children from Spanish are speaking background in the United States living in very low-income conditions, come to school without speaking in English, the school provided no support for children in those contexts, and lo and behold, three years later, they're not doing very well in reading skills, writing skills. So this obviously has got to be due to the fact that they're bilingual. You know, this is the very problematic mindset that developed as a result of this. And this lack of rational inquiry into these issues reinforced socio-political assumptions that, well, all immigrants should assimilate into the United States. We're a melting pot. And in order to help children learn English, we have to get rid of their home language. And we know that that's nonsense at this point. The research is very clear that development of bilingual and multilingual skills has positive rather than negative cognitive consequences. When both languages continue to develop, we know that children who are coming from non-English speaking backgrounds in say, North American context can acquire English relatively quickly if they're coming in at a young age in a supportive environment. And we know, for example, also that children who are formally classified as English learners when they acquire so-called full English proficiency, they're often better than children from monolingual backgrounds in terms of literacy development. So we know that there are all kinds of benefits to acquiring additional languages. When you were talking about your German experiences, you put a lot of effort into learning German. You went to an issue. For dead. You're motivated. You were doing that for some obvious reasons, because you knew that acquiring German was something that was going to be useful to you, culturally, linguistically, cognitively, from a social point of view in terms of life opportunities. All of those positive associations of bilingualism are very much there. But yet, when it comes to children from minority backgrounds, the mindset has been, no, bilingualism is bad for the poor. It may be good for the rich, but bad for the poor. And again, I think happily over the last 20, 30 years, we've got beyond that, or most people have got beyond that. And the reality from bilingual programs in the United States is that they show very positive results, which is why they've been expanding quite rapidly. Yeah. And to be clear that in the classroom environment, teachers, probably with their best interest of the student, were thinking, oh, this is going to be too confusing for them to use their home language while they're trying to learn English. And this confusing aspect of it is going to keep them from developing English, which they really need to have, because that's the context which they're in right now. So the thought was that it was a little bit confusing and we can't use those languages together. Where now, what we better understand is that we can draw from our home language to help us develop and then acquire a second or even third language. And I think we throw this word out and around now called translanguaging. And I think there's a lot of misconception about what that is. Did I use translanguaging in the right sort of high level context? And can you give us a little bit of more information about what this means for those learning a second or third or fourth language? Yeah. Translanguaging has become almost a household word in terms of language education debates over the last 15 years or so. And it's largely due to the work of Professor Filiugar Seah from City University of New York who picked up a concept that had been developed in the Welsh context and the context of Welsh English bilingual programs where content might be presented in one language. So instruction might be through Welsh. But the textbooks that children were using might have been in English because there weren't appropriate textbooks in Welsh. And they might come back to know I'd study it, talk about it in English, and then come back and then talk about it in Welsh. So it referred to in the Welsh context alternation of input and output in the two languages. And Professor Garcia picked up on that notion and broadened it considerably and rather than going into kind of the details of academic debate on this, the basic meaning of translanguaging is that or pedagogical translanguaging is that we're providing opportunities for children to use their entire bilingual or multilingual repertoire in carrying out academic tasks and activities. So we're basically opening up the classroom so that children can use the cognitive tools they have and their home language is cognitive tool. And so if we cut them off from using that tool, we're in a way cutting them off from using the cognitive skills that they have. And so it's a negative rather than a positive thing. And so what translanguaging has come to evolve into is what some people, colleagues of mine in the Toronto context have been very much involved in this, the language-friendly school where this was a concept or an idea that was coined or term that was coined in a way by my colleague, Emmanuel Lupichon. And a colleague of hers in the Netherlands when they were both working there. And basically the philosophy and practice behind this is that rather than trying to exclude other languages from the school context, we welcome them in as a way of promoting children's language awareness, as a way of enabling them to use their full cognitive repertoire and as a way of broadening their knowledge of how language works both as a skill that we can use as individuals, but also language in the social context, how languages used in different situations. So essentially translanguaging, pedagogical translanguaging, in the way I interpret, can be seen as a way of implementing language-friendly, pedagogy or language-friendly schools. - And we will link our listeners in the show notes to the website language-friendly schools because I know they have, when you pointed me to that website, they have a really nice sort of two page document. about what this looks like and specifically in the context of schools and what it might mean to become a language-friendly school. Essentially what we're saying is we accept you into our school with all of who you are including your language and so that just feels like a really welcoming message and something as humans we should be doing anyway. But I think and you correct me if I'm wrong because you're the language researcher here in the expert. But if we stop development in a home language to only focus on a new language, we actually are stunting an individual's growth in language overall. Would you say that's true? Yeah, I think we need to qualify a little bit because there's obviously lots of kids who come to school speaking another language, community kindergarten and speaking Punjabi or speaking Spanish or whatever the language might be. They're in a school context that's not very supportive of developing children's bilingualism but they pick up English relatively quickly and then their cognitive skills develop in that language. So they transfer what they brought to school to that language and and often sadly within a couple of years they're not speaking their home language anymore. They're embarrassed if they go to the supermarket with their mom or dad and they say something in the home language. Don't speak that language here. It's embarrassing. And you know, I live in Toronto. It's incredibly multilingual multicultural city. Close to 50% of children in elementary schools in Toronto come from non-imus speaking backgrounds. So it's a vibrant multicultural place. But it's also a linguistic graveyard because the rate of language loss among families in the city and it's not just Toronto. It's virtually every large city is phenomenal because children pick up the message even though teachers may be positive towards other languages. They may be positive towards children's own language but they quickly pick up the message that English is the language of power, the language of status within the school context and they sometimes will assume that it's not permitted to speak their own language in the school context. And so in a couple of years they've lost a lot of their fluency in that language and English becomes their preferred language which you know sometimes they'll do fine academically but sometimes they may not. And the social aspects of this are really sad because you see so many anecdotes of children who've been in that situation who've lost their abilities in the language and then when grandparents come to visit or when they go back to the home country to connect with grandparents they don't have a language in common anymore. And so there's a loss there that's real. It's not quantifiable but it certainly is painful for a lot of individuals who realize that their wish their parents had been able to provide stronger support and support in the school also for maintaining those languages. And I don't know a lot of times I and maybe this is just distinguishing too much but I like to distinguish between being bilingual and multilingual versus being by literate and multiliterate. So there's this language that we could speak conversationally but being able to read and write so listen, speak, read and write in multiple languages definitely brings benefits. Yeah absolutely it's the more linguistic skills and the more literate skills we have the more opportunities we have it's as simple as that. They may be employment opportunities. There's been a number of studies in the United States showing that people who are bilingual and by literate and Spanish and English make more money than people from the same backgrounds who have either lost their Spanish and only speak English or people who haven't required English that well. So their economic benefits to knowledge of other languages but it's it requires support to do that unless one is unless a child is growing up in a very privileged environment. It requires support from parents and a lot of parents don't have access to the research on this. They may assume that okay we're immigrants. The only language that matters for my child is English. I want my child to do well. That's one of the reasons we immigrated. So I'm going to stop speaking the home language to the child and not necessarily the worst thing somebody could do but it's certainly not helping the child academically at all and it's cutting the child off from a wonderful resource and there's a lot of research out there showing that children's what's what's language is called metal linguistic awareness. They're awareness of how language works. That increased significantly as a result of continuing to develop bilingual and multilingual skills. So schools that embrace children's languages enable children to write dual language books, communicate it to children that their language was something prestigious in this classroom environment and in the school environment. Communicated positive messages to parents about what they can do to help their children like reading to children in their home language, continuing to speak to children in that language, communicating positive affect attitudes towards the language. All of that is going to make a difference in terms of whether children pursue learning the language and see it as something that's part of their identity or whether they just want to run away from it as fast as possible. And you know we have probably many of our listeners are in monolingual settings, educational settings and they are monolingual themselves and so what kind of advice or hope do you have that they for for those folks in those monolingual monolingual environments, what kind of advice do you have for them in terms of working with multilingual or English language learners? In a lot of the case studies that I'm talking about, the teachers have been monolingual and even if they might have known another language, it's not necessarily the language that's represented in their classroom, but they have found ways to communicate to children that their languages are welcome in the in the classroom. They will arrange time for children from the same language background can be discussed in probably who are learning English can discuss a project in their home languages if that's a stronger project. We use both languages, trans language in the group and then come back and report back to the rest of the class in English. There's there's all kinds of ways in which monolingual teachers as well as bilingual teachers can communicate a an interest in language positive attitude towards language as a cognitively and personally beneficial aspect of children's development and you know we talk about particularly at the preschool level the importance of play and preschool environments. Not being too rigorous in terms of developing academic skills, but a long term to play and develop in that way. Well enabling children to play with language is something that we can do right throughout K-12 as well as in the preschool years and when you read some of these accounts of inspirational multilingual pedagogies or language friendly pedagogies this is exactly what's happening. Kids are playing with language, they're enjoying finding out about other children's languages and like just one example of that one of the most inspirational schools that I've read about is a school in Ireland where the principal is a person called Durdro Kierwin, the school's called Skull Breedon and it was in a low income area in Dublin had a large number up to 80% of the kids coming from immigrant backgrounds. One of the things that the teachers noted there is that when a new child comes into the school and the children in the classroom that the child is in are really welcoming because they want to know what language this child speaks and they want to find out about that language. Wow language curiosity. I will exactly and that's what we need to be looking at in terms of those two aspects that I talked about in terms of what's involved in developing language and literacy skills. We need the big picture is that we need two things. We need active engagement, active interaction if we're talking with oral language and conversation language skills but active engagement with the language and when we're talking about academic language books are the way and major sources in which we get access to that language but also we need a focus right throughout K-12 on developing children's curiosity about language. Their awareness about how language works and their interest in exploring further how language works and those two components of strong language and literacy education apply whether we're talking about monolegal context or bilingual or multilegal context. We have extra tools in a bilingual and multilegal context because we have a variety of languages there that we can work with. Yeah that makes sense. Well I want to ask you about one more thing and that's this recent joint statement that came out called the Science of Reading and Implementation for English learners and emergent bilinguals. You recently signed that joint statement along with many many many others. Can you tell me a little bit about why it was important to you that you'd be one of the signers and what impact you hope that that joint statement has? Yeah, obviously reading instruction has been controversial for many, many years, for decades. But it seems like every 15 or so years there's a new episode of the Reading Wars or what have been called the Reading Wars. And which is really unfortunate because when you look at the research and you look at the views of researchers, there's an enormous amount of common ground there. There are, will be disputes about some of the details, about some of the relative emphasis in the classroom. But the common ground is very much there. And the common ground essentially is, let's say what I've talked about before, we need to teach foundational skills. We need to ensure that all children develop an awareness of how the sounds of the language related to printed language that typically will require formal instruction and explicit instruction. Some of that may be in a whole class format, some of it may be in small groups, some of it may be in a whole class format but contextualized where a teacher may be reading a story or reading a text to children and then stop and focus in on a phrase or focus in on a word in terms of and talk about how that word is pronounced and what some of the patterns in that word might be. So that is all important. That's developing children's awareness of how language works, which is one of the pillars. But the other pillar is active engagement with language and active engagement with literacy. Print access is incredibly important and all of the research out there suggests a strong, strong relation to between reading comprehension development and literacy engagement. So when we talk about that joint statement, everybody agrees that children need to develop a strong phonics skills and so that they can begin to decode the language and they need support as they go through that. But in order to develop strong reading comprehension skills, they've got to be reading extensively and it's a very simple reality. There's a, what some people have called a statistical reality here. The more encounters children have with text, with words, the more likely they are to be able to understand those words and know how they're pronounced. And so we need both of those aspects in our reading programs. And the sad thing is that the pendulum in the so-called reading wars has thrown back and forth between focusing exclusively on phonics as the main emphasis or neglecting phonics and focusing only on providing access to books. And you need to be doing both and you need to be doing both well. And I think the vast majority of reading researchers agree with that. Yeah, that makes sense. And do you believe this joint statement is going to have an impact or what is your hope for this joint statement? The, my hope for it is that it will become a starting point for discussion of policies and that any policy that is developed or adopted by a particular state should be consistent with what's in that statement. And the concern of many people is that the way things get implemented in practice is very different from what the research is actually saying. And typically what gets left out in stuff like this is the emphasis on active reading engagement. And there's minimal focus on developing children's active engagement with print. And this involves things that go beyond just instruction. It means, for example, that there's strong school libraries. All parents should be encouraged to have a, have library cards in the public library. But also, as some schools have done, parents should have library cards for the school library. So that they can come in and read books with the children in that library, check out books for the children. There's all kinds of things that are part of the context of providing a rich literacy environment for children that get totally left out of their discussion. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Well, we certainly appreciate your time and your expertise in terms of language development. Thank you for the work that you're doing, for the work that you've done, and then that you continue to do. We will link our listeners in the show notes to many of the resources that you mentioned. And we appreciate your time. Great. It's pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation, sir. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Jim Cummins. Dr. Amaritas at the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education of the University of Toronto. Check out the show notes for links to learn more about language-friendly schools, as well as translanguaging. We have much more planned for this series exploring how the science of reading serves multilingual and English learners. Next time, we're going deep into the topic of dyslexia. dyslexia is something beyond language. It's something that our students bring with themselves, and we need to give them all the tools and resources in order to help them overcome those symptoms. That's coming up next time right here in the normal podcast feed. Please join the conversation about this episode and this mini-series in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading the Community. Please also consider rating us and leaving us a review on the podcast platform of your choice. Science of Reading the Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the science of reading, go to Amplify.com/ckla. Thank you so much for listening. Hey literacy educators, I want to tell you about a new professional learning resource featuring bite-sized, actionable tips you can implement in your classroom right away. Check out Amplify's brand new YouTube channel, Advice for the Literacy Classroom. I'm going to share three tips you can use to make your read-alouds interactive and engaged. I wanted to take you on a quick tour of my classroom and show you how I lay things out. Give you a second too. Start learning now at Amplify.com/literacy classroom advice.