Language Innovations

Language Innovations in a Multi-lingual Classrooms

Multilingualism is noticed all around the world. Connotatively, multi as several or many, and lingual as language, combined, basically meaning the use of multiple languages. It does not simply dictate the language they use but also the place where they have been influenced and had grown, thus, even reaching out to multiculturalism, meaning multiple experiences, influences, cultures, ideals, and more. It is clear furthermore that the above linguistic differences also reflect far-reaching and systematic cultural differences. (John, 1970). Multilingualism in education is a conceptual as well as a pedagogical challenge of the 21st century. (Gudrun 2011). Such countries of multilingualism include Canada, Singapore, Belgium and other more, but this paper focuses on to our locality, the Philippines having more than 170 languages. Language is defined as to the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication. A system which makes it possible from a limited set of rules to construct an unlimited number of sentences is not found in any other species, and Chomsky believes that it is an investigation of this uniqueness that is important and not the likeness between human language and other communication systems (Wardhaugh 1993:18-26,60-65). Basically, the purpose of communication is the preservation, growth, and development of the species (Smith and Miller 1968:265). Modern linguistics also defines as, “Language is a structured system of arbitrary vocal sounds and sequences of sounds which are used in interpersonal communication and which rather exhaustively catalogs the things, events, and processes, of human experience.” The Philippines’ national language is called Filipino. However, there are over a hundred languages all around the country plus a lot more in dialects (language variations). There are over a hundred native languages in the Philippines. Except for Chavacano, all of them belong to the

Cited: by Mosley & Zoch, (2012) in their research, there is a struggle among teacher educators worldwide when it comes to preparing teachers for “cross-cultural inclusive teaching in an increasingly standardized context”. To answer this problem, Mosley & Zoch, (2012) proved that diversity can be helpful to pre-service teachers to understand learners through their “ tools that come from within” and “funds of knowledge” in order to attain an “educated and diverse citizenry”. The effectiveness of using “tools that come from within” and “funds of knowledge” proven true to pre-service teachers but not yet to professional educators. Donald Schon’s two forms of knowledge in professional practice are “knowing-in-action” and “reflection-in-action”. Knowing-in-action refers to making “spontaneous decisions in class which may not have necessarily stemmed from an explicit plan or goal”. Reflection-in-action on the other hand is a way to address ambiguity that professionals encounter in their practice. Reflection-in-action has three developmental sequence namely recognizing facts and rules of the situation, recognizing reasons of the problem and learning to develop and trial action in practices. (Hartfitt,2012) New Zealand had their new national Curriculum in 2009 that is geared toward learner centeredness, competency based skills and development of higher order thinking skills which is so much like our K-12 curriculum today. There had been a problem in implementing the values of the curriculum into the actual classrooms because of diversity. In response to this, a research was conducted and that found out the efficiency of Class meetings as pedagogy to create a classroom community where there is increased voluntary participation from the students because of increased confidence. Class meetings are conducted in a separate time in with different setting form the regular classroom only to discuss and update on the progress of the learning in the regular class meetings. It is a time where teachers, administration and the students are at the same level and talk and reflect together. Then from the class meetings, the atmosphere was carried to the regular classroom and helped in learning concepts, skills, and literacy and language acquisition. Drewery (2012) Relationships were found to be very important in teaching-learning process. (Mosley& Zoch2012) In multi-cultural classroom, there are issues of in-group and out group members, conformity learning styles and language barriers. In group is the group with the same culture and language while the out-group members are the ones with different culture and language from them. Such division is a barrier in an inclusive leaning process among students which a language teacher has to address. “ when there are big differences among learning peers the instructors or educators should no only familiarize themselves with, but also become more understanding of these differences in order to deliver learning opportunities. (Liang & McQueen, 2013) Philippines have various spoken languages especially in schools that have 2 or more languages being used as their means of communication to the people who has the same language with theirs. However, with the diverse language that we havein our country, teaching language in a multilingual classroom is somewhat distressing to the part of the teacher considering that there are different languages used by the students as their mother tongue language. Another thing is that, a particular language cannot be used without the majority’s agreement to that language. Language is very important to be taught especially that this is used as a bridge to communicate with other people especially teacher-student communication in the field of education. The problem in teaching language in a multilingual classroom is the question “ What is the language to be taught as a medium of instruction and how to teach this language?” . The case of having a multilingual language in our country, in the field of education is a burden among the schools of choosing wisely on what should be the language to be used. In our researches, the strategies in teaching the language are missing. The “How” question is not yet answered with the fact that these researches are mostly done not in the Philippine country. Philippines just implemented the multilingual language used in the year 2012 which then affected the curriculum of the schools to change the way of teaching the subjects using a certain dialect. This questions us on how do the teachers teach. Then came up with a follow up question of, What are the strategies they use and the effectiveness of it in teaching?Are the strategies used before in teaching language can also be used in multilingual teaching strategy? Or, Is there any new way of teaching a language in a multilingual classroom? In order to have a more productive answer to our research, these problems serve as our guide in finding out the answers that will satisfy our needs in conducting this research. It is then hypothesized that language innovations are to be made in multilingual classrooms to arrive at a more effective learning environment