pedagogies and practices

Pedagogies and Practices inMultilingual Classrooms: Singularitiesin PluralitiesOFELIA GARCIACity University of New YorkGraduate CenterUrban Education and Hispanic andLuso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages365 Fifth AvenueNew York, NY 10016Email: [email protected]

CLAIRE E. SYLVANInternationals Network50 BroadwayNew York, NY 10004Email: [email protected]

Bilingual classrooms most often have strict language arrangements about when and who shouldspeak what language to whom. This practice responds to diglossic arrangements and models ofbilingualism developed in the 20th century. However, in the 21st century, heteroglossic bilingualconceptualizations are needed in which the complex discursive practices of multilingual stu-dents, their translanguagings, are used in sense-making and in tending to the singularities in thepluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today. Examining the case of a network of U.S.secondary schools for newcomer immigrants, the International High Schools, this article looksat how students’ plurilingual abilities are built through seven principles that support dynamicplurilingual practices in instruction—heterogeneity, collaboration, learner-centeredness, lan-guage and content integration, language use from students up, experiential learning, andlocal autonomy and responsibility. As a result, students become not only more knowledge-able and academically successful but also more confident users of academic English, betterat translanguaging, and more plurilingual-proficient. The article presents translanguaging ineducation as the constant adaptation of linguistic resources in the service of meaning-makingand in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classroomstoday.

THE LITERATURE ON BILINGUALISM INeducation—whether the education of languagemajorities or language minorities—has most of-ten treated language groups as if they were static,homogeneous, and monolithic. Thus, models andpedagogies of second-language education andbilingual education developed in the 20th cen-tury generally treat groups as if they were mono-lingual and acquiring an additional language ina stepwise fashion. These programs group stu-

The Modern Language Journal, 95, iii, (2011)DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01208.x0026-7902/11/385–400 $1.50/0C©2011 The Modern Language Journal

dents homogeneously by language level, using es-tablished pedagogies and instructional materialsthat are leveled and that use one language at atime.

However, in the 21st century, a monolithic viewof ethnolinguistic groups has been increasinglyquestioned, with scholars pointing to differencescreated by class, gender, and power (see, e.g.,Brubacker, 2009). Furthermore, with globaliza-tion and technological innovation, ethnolinguis-tic communities that had been previously isolatedhave started to come into contact with differentpeople. Thus, the idea that an additional languagecould be taught to a monolithic group that startsout as monolingual is no longer viable (see, e.g,Garcıa, 2009a).

386 The Modern Language Journal 95 (2011)

We argue in this article that the multi-lingual/multicultural classrooms of today arecharacterized by an increased plurality of prac-tices. Rather than constructing educational mod-els for a particular type of student who uses onelanguage or the other, we must learn to focuson teaching individuals within multilingual class-rooms in which the plurality is created by pay-ing attention to the singularity of the individ-ual student. We speak of teaching for singulari-ties in pluralities, extending arguments proposedby Makoni, Makoni, Abdelhay, and Mashiri (inpress) in studying language policies in Africa.To the pluralization of singularity that has ac-companied the “invention” of many African “lan-guages” as different and singular units (Makoni& Pennycook, 2007), Makoni et al. offer theconcept of singularization of plurality—that is, afocus on the individual differences in the dis-cursive regimes that we call “languages.” Theresult, then, is the facilitation of communica-tion to improve the lives of speakers of lan-guage, instead of promoting a specific language orlanguages.

In the same way, teaching in today’s multilin-gual/multicultural classrooms should focus oncommunicating with all students and negotiatingchallenging academic content with all of themby building on their different language practices,rather than simply promoting and teaching oneor more standard languages. In this article, weuse singularities in pluralities to refer to the in-creased plurality of practices—linguistic, educa-tional, cultural—that characterize students in themultilingual/multicultural classrooms of today.Additionally, we use the concept of singularitiesin pluralities to discuss how teachers’ pedago-gies and practices that facilitate learning in thesecomplex contexts must build on students’ singu-lar language practices as part of the classrooms’pluralities.

This article starts out by reviewing program-matic and theoretical constructs that have beenused in the past, as well as those that support ourposition. It then focuses on one type of educationfor students who are linguistically diverse—the In-ternationals Network for Public Schools (INPS)—a group of schools that serve newcomer adoles-cent immigrants in the United States. We specifi-cally look at the dynamic structures, pedagogies,and language practices in these schools as exam-ples of how to invert schooling structures andsubvert traditional language education so as to payattention to the singularities of students withinmultilingual classrooms.

FROM MONOLINGUALISM TO LINEARBILINGUALISM TO DYNAMICBILINGUALISM IN SCHOOLS

A First Turn: From Monolingualism to LinearBilingualism

During the second half of the 20th century,schools started to pay more attention to devel-oping the bilingual proficiency of monolingualchildren, both language majorities and languageminorities. This first turn from strictly mono-lingual schools to more bilingualism in schoolscoincided with the ethnic revival that took placearound the world in the 1960s (Fishman, 1985).

In Canada, Wallace Lambert and his associatesshowed that bilingualism resulted in positive cog-nitive advantages (Peal & Lambert, 1962). At therequest of Anglophone parents in Quebec whowanted their children to become bilingual in or-der to participate in a Francophone Quebec thatwas gaining political power, Lambert and his as-sociates developed an early immersion bilingualeducation program in St. Lambert, a suburb ofMontreal, in 1965 (Lambert & Tucker, 1972).

In the United States, the era of Civil Rightsturned the attention of educators to the failurein school of language minorities—in particular,of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and NativeAmericans. As a result, bilingual education pro-grams were established, some funded throughCongress’s authorization of the Bilingual Ed-ucation Act (Title VII of the Elementary andSecondary Education Act). In the beginning,some of these programs had a philosophy ofmaintaining the home language of the childrenwhile developing English (maintenance bilingualeducation programs), but very soon, in the 1974reauthorization of the Bilingual Education Act,programs were defined as transitional, withhome languages used only until the childrenwere proficient in English (transitional bilingualeducation programs).

This ethnic revival movement of the second halfof the 20th century was also fueled by the inde-pendence of many African and Asian countries.As new countries were forged, decisions had to bemade about how to teach a multilingual popula-tion that was to be schooled in a language thatwas often “foreign” to them. In many cases, andwith the urging and support of the United Na-tions Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Orga-nization (UNESCO), a transitional bilingual edu-cation model was often adopted.

These bilingual education programs—animprovement over the monolingual programs of

Ofelia Garcıa and Claire E. Sylvan 387

FIGURE 1Additive Versus Subtractive Bilingualism

the past and which continue today—are shapedby the two models of bilingualism that Lambert(1974) developed—additive bilingualism andsubtractive bilingualism. Additive bilingualismrefers to the type of bilingualism Lambert hopedto develop as a result of immersion bilingual edu-cation programs in Quebec. A child enters schoolwith a first language (L1), a second language(L2) is added, and, as a result, the child becomesa speaker of both languages. The thinking is thatthe child’s bilingualism needs to move toward“ultimate attainment,” an endpoint in which theprocess is complete. Subtractive bilingualism,however, is often what language-minority studentsget. Students enter school with an L1, and whilethe L2 is added, the first language is subtracted.The child’s bilingualism is moving away from the“ultimate attainment” of bilingualism. Instead,it is moving backward toward the “ultimateattainment” of monolingualism. Both models canbe rendered as in Figure 1.

In these conceptualizations of bilingualism,the two languages are seen as having a linear re-lationship, with the L2 moving forward (additive)or the L1 moving backward (subtractive). In ad-dition, there is a conception of two autonomouslanguages—an L1 and an L2—and of bilingualsas two monolinguals within one individual.

At the same time, other theories of bilingual-ism were being developed. No other scholar hascontributed more to advancing theoretical frame-works surrounding the changing shape of bilin-gualism in education than Jim Cummins. Early in1979, Cummins developed his theory of linguis-tic interdependence , positing that both languagesbolster each other in the students’ acquisitionof language and knowledge. At the same time,Cummins proposed his theory of the common un-derlying proficiency, positing that knowledge andabilities acquired in one language are potentiallyavailable for the development of another.

A Second Turn: From Linear Bilingualismto Dynamic Bilingualism

Toward the end of the 20th century, the greatermovement of people, goods, and informationbrought about by globalization, innovations intechnology, and changes connected to corporateglobalization further impacted our understand-

ings and enactments of bilingualism in educa-tion. In some countries of Europe, maintenancebilingual education had been used to educateautochthonous minorities. However, the collapseof totalitarian regimes meant that more nationalminorities started to claim greater autonomy.Bilingual education became a way of educat-ing children who, after suffering political repres-sion and monolingual schooling, had a broadrange of linguistic competence in their own homelanguages. Thus, bilingual education programsstarted to change, capturing this greater linguis-tic heterogeneity. Developmental bilingual educa-tion programs, more aware of this greater rangeof language abilities, started to come into being,not only in Europe but also in the United Statesand other places.

The Deaf, who had been exposed to oralism asa schooling practice throughout the world, withsignacy not recognized as valid, started experi-menting with developmental bilingual educationprograms. Deaf educators were mindful of thebroad oracy ability ranges in the Deaf commu-nity, with some being profoundly deaf and oth-ers hard of hearing, and with cochlear implantsincreasing the diversity of oracy abilities. Theywere also aware of the broad signing ability inthe Deaf community, with most children bornto hearing parents and thus arriving at schoolwith little signacy, but others arriving with devel-opmentally appropriate signacy. The signacy andoracy heterogeneity also produced diverse literacypractices. Thus, for the Deaf community, the di-versity of signacy, literacy, and oracy meant thatonly a developmental bilingual education pro-gram in which students’ different abilities wereaddressed was adequate (Baker, 2010; Marschark,2009).

In places in which Indigenous peoples con-tinued to be mostly disempowered (e.g., LatinAmerica), the only way of including the students’home languages was through transitional bilin-gual education (Lopez, 2006, 2008). However, incountries where Indigenous peoples had gainedsome measure of political power, while having lostmuch of their home language proficiency, suchas in the case of the Maoris in Aotearoa/NewZealand, immersion revitalization bilingual educa-tion programs were developed (Berryman, Glynn,Woller, & Reweti, 2010; May, 2004, 2010). In theseprograms, there was also a great range of linguisticdiversity, with Maori bilingual ability being highlyheterogeneous. Thus, there was recognition thatthe students could not be treated as monolingualEnglish speakers, for they could all reach back tobits and pieces of their ancestral language prac-tices in order to develop them further. There was


also recognition that Maori children were not twomonolinguals in one—a prevalent view of bilin-gualism in the past that has been challenged bymany (see, e.g., Grosjean, 1982, 2010).

Meanwhile, in many countries where bilingual-ism was becoming the norm, parents startedclamoring for bilingual education programs thatwould make all children bilingual to whicheverextent they needed to be competent in differentlanguage practices. In the United States, two-waybilingual education programs—sometimes called“dual language” programs for political expedi-ency because of the silencing of bilingualism inthe United States (see Garcıa, 2009a; Garcıa &Kleifgen, 2010)—started to be implemented. Two-way bilingual education programs educate to-gether language-majority and language-minoritychildren in two languages, separating languagesby teacher, subject, or part of the day or week.These programs grew out of the political desir-ability of educating language minorities togetherwith language majorities, as well as of keepingbilingualism as a possibility to educate languageminorities at a time of increased attacks againsttransitional bilingual education programs. In Eu-rope and other places, content and language in-tegrated learning (CLIL) bilingual education pro-grams came into being around the same time.CLIL programs teach at least one subject to allstudents through the medium of an additionallanguage. (For an excellent treatment of CLIL,see Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010.)

The differences between conceptualizations ofbilingualism in these programs of what we arecalling the second turn and those that we con-sidered in the previous section of what we arecalling the first turn are telling. The programsof the first turn claim an L1 and an L2 for thegroup of children and have a linear additive or

FIGURE 2Types of Bilingualism

Note. This figure is adapted from Garcıa and Kleifgen (2010). We gratefully acknowledge permissionfrom Teachers College Press to reproduce this figure.

subtractive bilingualism with monolingual normsas the goal. The programs of the second turn,however, conceptualize bilingualism as dynamic(Garcıa, 2009a). This dynamic conceptualizationof bilingualism goes beyond the notion of two au-tonomous languages, of an L1 and an L2, andof additive or subtractive bilingualism. Instead,dynamic bilingualism suggests that the languagepractices of all bilinguals are complex and inter-related; they do not emerge in a linear way. AsGarcıa (2009a) has said, they do not result in ei-ther the balanced two wheels of a bicycle (as inadditive bilingualism) or in a unicycle (as in sub-tractive bilingualism), but instead bilingualism islike an all-terrain vehicle with individuals using itto adapt to both the ridges and craters of commu-nication in uneven terrains (see Figure 2; see alsoGarcıa & Kleifgen, 2010). Dynamic bilingualismsees the complex bilingual language practices asboth the center of how language practices occurand the goal for communication in an increas-ingly multilingual world.

Garcıa (2009a) proposed two types of dynamicbilingualism for the 21st century—recursive dy-namic and dynamic. Recursive dynamic bilingual-ism characterizes the bilingual development ofthose individuals who have undergone a high de-gree of language loss and thus need to recoverbits and pieces of their ancestral language prac-tices as they reach back to move forward. Dynamicbilingualism refers to the development of differentlanguage practices to varying degrees in order tointeract with increasingly multilingual communi-ties in a global world.

This second turn in which bilingualism startedto be recognized as more dynamic was then char-acterized by moving away from conceptualizationsof language as a monolithic construct made upof discrete sets of skills to a conceptualization of


language as a series of social practices that are em-bedded in a web of social relations that maintainasymmetries of power (Pennycook, 2010; Street,1984). Pennycook (2010) explained:

A focus on language practices moves the focus fromlanguage as an autonomous system that preexistsits use, and competence as an internal capacitythat accounts for language production, towards anunderstanding of language as a product of the em-bodied social practices that bring it about. (p. 9, ouremphasis)

In speaking about language as an activity, somescholars refer to languaging (Becker, 1995;Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Maturana & Varela,1987; Shohamy, 2006). Languaging is differentfrom language conceived simply as a system ofrules or structures; languaging is a product of so-cial action and refers to discursive practices ofpeople. Languaging, as Becker (1995) explained,“is shaping old texts into new contexts. It is doneat the level of particularity” (p. 9).

Within a dynamic conceptualization of bilin-gualism, bilinguals are valued for their differ-ing multicompetence (Cook, 2002) because theirlives, minds, and actions are different fromthose of monolinguals. As Herdina and Jessner(2002) have pointed out, the interactions of bilin-guals’ interdependent language systems createnew structures that are not found in monolin-gual systems. Learning is then not just the “tak-ing in” of linguistic forms by learners, but asLarsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) have said,“the constant adaptation of their linguistic re-sources in the service of meaning-making in re-sponse to the affordances that emerge in thecommunicative situation, which is, in turn, af-fected by learners’ adaptability” (p. 135). Thisview is based on van Lier’s (2000, 2004) con-cept of “affordance,” which he defined as a rela-tionship between a learner and the environment“that signals an opportunity for or inhibition ofaction” (2004, p. 4).

Cummins himself moved away from discussingan L1/L2 dichotomy, characterizing the way inwhich languages had been conceptualized inbilingual classrooms as “two solitudes” (Cummins,2007) and calling for bilingual instructional strate-gies in the classroom as a way of promoting “iden-tities of competence among language learnersfrom socially marginalized groups, thereby en-abling them to engage more confidently with liter-acy and other academic work in both languages”(p. 238).

Garcıa (2009a), extending Williams (cited inBaker, 2006), talks about translanguaging as theprocess by which bilingual students and teachers

engage in complex discursive practices in orderto “make sense” of, and communicate in, multi-lingual classrooms. According to Garcıa (2009a),translanguaging refers to multiple discursivepractices as seen from the perspective of speak-ers themselves. It is the communicative norm ofmultilingual communities.

Translanguaging builds on the concept of lan-guaging as social practices explained earlier. How-ever, translanguaging also relates to the con-cept of transculturacion introduced by the Cubananthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1940/1995). ForOrtiz, transculturation refers to the complex andmultidirectional process in cultural transforma-tion, as well as to the questioning of the epistemo-logical purity of disciplines and of the knowingsubject. The concept of transculturation thus in-volves what Mignolo (2000) called “border think-ing.” Mignolo saw border thinking as “knowledgeconceived from the exterior borders of the mod-ern/colonial world system”—that is, “subalternknowledge” (p. 11). In blending transculturationand languaging, the term translanguaging re-sponds to the complex and multidirectional pro-cesses in the language practices of people andchallenges the view of languages as autonomousand pure, as constructed in Western thought.Translanguaging, then, is a product of borderthinking, of knowledge that is autochthonousand conceived from a bilingual, not monolingual,position.

Translanguaging includes codeswitching—defined as the shift between two languages incontext—and it also includes translation, but itdiffers from both of these simple practices in thatit refers to the process in which bilingual studentsmake sense and perform bilingually in the myr-iad ways of classrooms—reading, writing, takingnotes, discussing, signing, and so on. However,translanguaging is not only a way to scaffold in-struction and to make sense of learning and lan-guage; it is part of the discursive regimes thatstudents in the 21st century must perform, partof a broad linguistic repertoire that includes, attimes, the ability to function in the standardizedacademic languages required in schools. It is thusimportant to view translanguaging as complex dis-cursive practices that enable bilingual students toalso develop and enact standard academic ways oflanguaging.

SINGULAR PLURALITIES AND DYNAMICPLURILINGUAL EDUCATION

Education for bilingualism (i.e., to teachan additional language) includes types of pro-grams that are bilingual but also some that are


monolingual. For example, in the United States,transitional bilingual education programs use twolanguages to develop English, whereas English-as-a-second-language programs are monolingualprograms in which instruction is supposed tobe in English. Both, however, are conceived aseducation for bilingualism because their objectiveis to teach an additional language. Whether edu-cational programs are monolingual or bilingualand whether they view bilingualism linearly or dy-namically, they are often structured as if groupsof students need the same language “treatment,”as if language and life (or the content they needto learn) were separate. Thus, schools often havelanguage policies and practices that are organizedas top–down and are applied to the group orgroups as if everyone needed the same. However,all educators need to pay attention to the indi-vidual experience of students in their classrooms.John Dewey (1938), the American educational re-former, has said:

Every experience is a moving force. Its value can bejudged only on the ground of what it moves towardand into . . . It is then the business of the educatorto see in what direction an experience is heading . . .

Failure to take the moving force into account so as tojudge and direct it on the ground of what it is movinginto means disloyalty to the principle of experienceitself. (p. 38)

Recently, one of us (Garcıa) was in a fifth-gradetwo-way bilingual classroom that, although atten-tive to dynamic bilingualism, demonstrated howorganizing classrooms for homogeneous groupsof students is often not enough in our complexworld. The teacher described the class as beinghalf Latino, half Anglo. However, of course, theindividual experiences of the children were farmore complex than simply those of two ethnic orlinguistic groups. Among the so-called “Latinos,”there were monolingual Spanish speakers, mono-lingual English speakers, and bilingual and trilin-gual speakers. Not all of the Latinos who werelearning English were speakers of Spanish, for inthe group there was a recently arrived Mexicanindigenous child who spoke Mixteco at home aswell as a Paraguayan child who was bilingual inSpanish/Guaranı. Those Latinos who were bornin the United States were not necessarily the oneswho were English speakers, for some had beenborn in the United States and had then movedback to Latin America or had moved back andforth over the course of their lifetime. Some whowere born in Latin America had been in theUnited States for a long time and were fluentEnglish speakers, but there were also those who

had recently arrived. Latino immigrants to theUnited States often follow a migration patternreferred to as step migration, in which one fam-ily member initiates the migration, with children,spouses, and siblings left behind, until the lengthyprocess of obtaining permanent visas is resolved(Grasmuck & Pessar, 1991). For this reason, thechild’s language characteristics often have littleto do with the language of the home. In thisfifth-grade two-way bilingual classroom, often themother had been in the United States for a longtime and spoke English. She sometimes had anew husband and young children whose linguis-tic repertoires did not coincide with that of thechild. There had been divorces, marriages, and re-composition of families, each bringing with thema new set of language practices. There had alsobeen moves to different communities, also accen-tuating different language practices.

Among the “Latinos” there were class differ-ences, national differences, and racial differences.Among the so-called “Anglos,” there were stu-dents who spoke English at home, but there werealso speakers of Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Urdu,Gujarati, and Romanian. Although the teacherhad been educated as a bilingual teacher and waswell versed in theoretical frameworks and peda-gogy, she was ignorant of the linguistic complex-ity of her classroom. In fact, on the first day, whenGarcıa walked in, the children told her that theRomanian girl was a “Roman.” When Garcıa in-quired further, it became obvious that neither theteacher nor the children had any idea of eitherthe country of Romania nor the Romanian lan-guage (nor, incidentally, of whether the child wasa Roma from Romania). The teacher had alsonever heard of Guaranı and had no idea that oneof her students was a Guaranı speaker. For her,the job simply was to teach the children in twolanguages—English and Spanish. Clearly, the in-dividual linguistic, cultural, and schooling expe-riences of the children were being ignored. Thisschool only structures a language group experi-ence, denying the many individual variations thatexist.

Schools that are truly organized to respectthe singular pluralities in multilingual classroomshave to let go, then, of some principles that evenbilingual education has long held dear. No longeris it possible to isolate languages or to limit instruc-tion to two or even three languages; it is importantto create a context in which educators pay closeattention to how a student and his or her languagepractices are in motion—that is, to focus on howthe students are engaged in meaningful activities.It is only then that, as Carini (2000) said, “it is


possible for the teacher to gain the insightsneeded to adjust her or his own approaches tothe child accordingly” (p. 9, our emphasis).

Bilingual education programs often have lan-guage allocation policies that dictate when, how,and for how long each language should be used;that is, language allocation policies most oftenfocus on the macroalternation of languages. Rarelydo these policies include thinking about the mi-croalternation of languages, the translanguagingthat allows educators to adjust language practicesand content to the child. Educators must negoti-ate sense-making instructional decisions, momentby moment (for educators as language policy mak-ers, see Menken & Garcıa, 2010). Bilingualism ineducation must emerge from the meaningful in-teraction of students with different linguistic back-grounds and their educators, instead of solelybeing handed down to educators as languagepolicy.

This pedagogical philosophy of singular plu-ralities rooted in progressive education, along-side understandings of dynamic bilingualism andits complexities, is what schools must own today.However, at the same time, and especially in theeducation of language minorities, attention hasto be paid to social justice . Goldfarb and Grinberg(2002) defined social justice as:

the exercise of altering these arrangements [differ-ence in terms of power, economic distributions, ac-cess to knowledge, and generation of knowledge] byactively engaging in reclaiming, appropriating, sus-taining and advancing inherent human rights of eq-uity, equality, and fairness in social, economic, educa-tional, and personal dimensions, among other formsof relationships. (p. 162)

Teacher–student relationships and interactionshave to be simultaneously rooted in the singu-larity of the child’s experience and the pluralityof experiences and languages that make up thebilingual or multilingual classroom. Recognizingthe different language practices of students andfocusing on the singularity of the individual expe-rience and the oppression of groups of minoritypeople would enable language minority studentsto become engaged in their own struggle for lib-eration and education (Freire, 1970), as well asto invest in the development of their additionallanguage (Norton, 2000).

How schools organize themselves to deliver thisinstruction depends on the local communitiesand the characteristics of the students. For exam-ple, in the United States, there are schools in res-identially segregated neighborhoods where moretraditional bilingual education structures are still

very much relevant. (See Bartlett & Garcıa, 2011and Garcıa & Bartlett, 2007 for an example of onesuch program for Dominican immigrants in theUnited States.) But there is also space for moreflexible bilingualism in education, emerging notfrom top–down policies, but from educators’ andstudents’ negotiation of bilingual practices (seeGarcıa, Flores, & Chu, 2011). Garcıa and Kleifgen(2010) have called this type of program dynamicplurilingual education.

We follow the use of the Council of Europein reserving the term “plurilingual” for the com-plex language practices of individuals, whereas us-ing “multilingual” to signal the language practicesof classrooms, geographic or political areas, orgroups. In the Council of Europe’s (2001) view,plurilingualism is:

The ability to use languages for the purposes of com-munication and to take part in intercultural inter-action, where a person, viewed as a social agent, hasproficiency of varying degrees, in several languages,and experience of several cultures. This is not seenas the superposition or juxtaposition of distinct com-petences, but rather as the existence of a complex oreven composite competence on which the user maydraw. (p. 168, our emphasis)

In schools with a dynamic plurilingual approach,the locus of control for language is the stu-dents’ own active use—their language/contentunderstandings in motion and in dynamic inter-relationship. Regardless of whether classroomsare monolingual (with students of one languagegroup), or bilingual (with students of two lan-guage groups), or multilingual (with students ofmany language groups), instruction is plurilin-gual, in the sense that each students’ languagingis recognized and the pedagogy is dynamicallycentered on the singularity of the individual expe-riences that make up a plurality. As such, this ped-agogy enables students, as Freire (1970) has said,to learn from each other as well as from teachers,at the same time that teachers learn from thestudents. In addition, this pedagogy is centeredin the dialogical action that promotes under-standing. Said another way, in these dynamicplurilingual programs, the direction betweenthe educator and the educated goes both ways.Both are learners and teachers. The pedagogicalpractices negotiate the dynamic bilingualism ofstudents’ individual experiences while activelyworking against existing forms of dominationand exploitation of groups of people. It is then toan example of such schools and how they enactthis dynamic plurilingual education that we nowturn.


TABLE 1Internationals Network’s Schools in New York Cityand California and Founding Year

1. The International High School atLaGuardia Community College

1985

2. The Manhattan International High School 19933. The Brooklyn International High School 19944. Bronx International High School 20005. The International High School at Prospect

Heights2004

6. The Flushing International High School 20047. International High School at Lafayette 20058. International Community High School 20069. Pan American International High School,

Queens2007

10. Oakland International High School 200711. Pan American International High School

at Monroe2008

12. San Francisco International High School 200913. International High School at Union

Square2010

INTERNATIONALS HIGH SCHOOLS

The INPS is a U.S. nonprofit organization thatsupports the work of 13 public (government-supported) high schools for newcomer immigrantadolescents who are new to English with whatis called the “Internationals approach” (Sylvan& Romero, 2002), which we will describe later.As of September 2010, 11 of these InternationalsHigh Schools (IHSs from now on) are located inNew York City and 2 in the California Bay Area.Table 1 displays a list of the IHSs in 2010.

In response to the growing immigrant commu-nity in New York City and challenges of preparinglate-entry immigrant adolescents for the rigors ofcollege study, the first IHS opened in the boroughof Queens in 1985. The success of the educa-tional model led to the opening of Manhattanand Brooklyn IHSs in 1993 and 1994 and BronxInternational in 2001, as well as the establish-ment of an Internationals Schools Partnershipamong the schools to coordinate interschool col-laborative projects. With grants from both a fed-erally financed program aimed at disseminatingexemplary programs for immigrant students whowere new to English and the Annenberg Foun-dation’s “Networks for School Renewal” projectin New York City, the Partnership supported newschools as well as provided continuous learn-ing and growth opportunities for all schools andtheir faculties. In 2004, with support from theBill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the INPS in-corporated and supported the opening of nine

more IHSs—seven in New York City and two inCalifornia.

Although originally IHSs were linguistically di-verse, serving newcomer immigrant adolescentsof many language backgrounds who were learn-ing English, two new IHSs have recently openedspecifically to serve the large number of Latinoimmigrants in New York City. Thus, there are twomodels of IHSs. There is a multilingual plurilin-gual model serving immigrant students with manydifferent home languages and supporting the useof students’ many languages in sense-making andlearning. There is also a bilingual plurilingualmodel serving immigrant students with Spanishas their home language and using English andSpanish to make instructional meaning in the twoschools called Pan American International HighSchools (PAIHSs). The important point, however,is that regardless of whether the classrooms aremultilingual (with students who speak many lan-guages other than English) or bilingual (with stu-dents who speak only Spanish), the pedagogy isa plurilingual one, dynamically centered on theindividual students’ language practices—that is,on the singularity of the plurality in the classroom(for more on pedagogy at the IHSs, see De Fazio,1999; see also Walqui & van Lier, 2010).

The Internationals approach was developedbased on the understanding that individuals areincredibly diverse and that immigrant adoles-cents, who are emergent bilinguals and arriving withlimited knowledge of English, still have a largearray of abilities, knowledge, and experiences—linguistic, cognitive, artistic, social, in many otherspheres. In the United States, emergent bilingualsare most often referred to as English languagelearners or limited English proficient. We followGarcıa (2009b) in referring to students who arenew to English as emergent bilinguals, thus recog-nizing their complex abilities and strengths andfocusing on their social, emotional, and academicdevelopment beyond that of just learning English.Building on the immigrant adolescents’ existingstrengths and understanding the centrality of lan-guage to human culture and individual beings,the Internationals approach focuses on prepar-ing adolescent immigrants to succeed in collegeand careers in the United States and especially onsupporting the development of complex languagepractices that include academic English languageand literacy.

In addition to being newcomer immigrants whoare new to English, the IHSs’ student popula-tion is also poor. In 2009, 92% of students atIHSs were on free or reduced lunch—a mea-sure of poverty—compared to 71% in all New


York City high schools. Yet, despite their poverty,their limited English, and their recent immigra-tion, adolescents at IHSs are doing better, as wewill see, than other immigrant emergent bilingualstudents in New York City.

Traditionally, high school study in the UnitedStates consists of 4 years. For newcomerimmigrant students, it is difficult to develop thelevel of academic English required for high schoolgraduation in 4 years. Yet, the graduation rate ofemergent bilingual students in the IHSs is 57%.This is 13 percentage points higher than the 44%graduation rate of emergent bilingual adolescentsin all high schools in New York City. It takesimmigrant adolescents who are learning Englishsometimes longer than 4 years to pass all of thehigh school graduation exams. Whereas the highschool graduation rate of these emergent bilin-guals citywide is 49% after 5 years and 42% after6 years, the high school completion rate of stu-dents in IHSs is 72% after 5 years and 74% after6 years—that is, 23 percentage points higher af-ter 5 years and 32 percentage points higher af-ter 6 years. Clearly, the IHSs are more successfulin graduating immigrant students who are learn-ing English than many other high schools in thecity. Likewise, if we compare the rate of successof IHS students in the English Language Arts andMath exams required for graduation with otheremergent bilinguals in New York City, 70% of IHSstudents passed the English Language Arts examcompared with 47% of all emergent bilinguals inNew York City high schools. Whereas 82% of IHSstudents passed the Math exam, 61% of emer-gent bilingual students in all New York City highschools passed the same exam. (Data from 2009.)

What, then, accounts for the success of theseIHSs? Eight principles lie at the core of the IHSinstructional design:1

1. heterogeneity and singularities in plurality;2. collaboration among students;3. collaboration among faculty;4. learner-centered classrooms;5. language and content integration;6. plurilingualism from the students up;7. experiential learning; and8. localized autonomy and responsibility.

Before we describe each of these principles of theInternationals approach, we illustrate what class-rooms in IHSs might look like.

A SNAPSHOT: IHS CLASSROOMS

The IHS classrooms are noisy, active, and in-teractive places. Students are generally sitting in

groups of three to four, usually at hexagonal ortrapezoidal tables so as to promote interaction.They are talking, arguing, trying to make theirpoints, and collaborating on a project together.In so doing, they are using different languagepractices, including those they bring from home.In a multilingual–plurilingual model classroom,an observer will hear several languages at onceand may see materials in many languages. In thebilingual–plurilingual model of the two PAIHSs,an observer will see students alternating betweenSpanish and English and using materials in both.

In a well-functioning IHS classroom, you findstudents talking in small groups, using bilingualdictionaries (both electronic and paper), andswitching between English and home languagesas needed to complete complex cognitive tasksand put together a collaborative project, often anoral presentation in English to their peers or awritten product. Students are asked to do oral pre-sentations from their earliest days in the schoolsand are supported in taking risks to use their newlanguage practices publicly. The length and com-plexity of the presentations will vary based on stu-dents’ linguistic proficiency in English.

Students walk around periodically to get ma-terials they need to complete their project. Theteacher is not in the front of the room talking orsitting at the desk, but rather sitting with the stu-dents listening, redirecting conversation at times,asking and answering questions, or just being partof the small group discussions as he or she movesfrom table to table.

The teacher will almost always be using Englishwith students and asking other students to trans-late for him or her when a student is using alanguage other than English. Despite the manylanguages that may be involved in the processof creating a project, students use English on adaily basis because the project (with the exceptionof home language projects and work in Spanishin a PAIHSs model) will generally (although notalways) be in English. Students will be asked topresent orally often and generally in English; so,many times they are practicing their English pre-sentations or preparing for their presentationsusing their home languages.

Most of the texts and documents in the class-room will be in English, although the student ta-bles also have dictionaries in many languages andprint and Internet material in languages otherthan English. Although students may be asking fortranslation from other students or having somediscussion in the home language around the textor document, they go back to English to interactwith peers on their project.


Students are usually working with an activityguide provided by the teacher that walks themthrough each step of the project. The activityguides are in English, so they require constantnegotiation in English. The guides contain manygraphic organizers that ask students to summarizeand categorize the information and then to useit to make conclusions, ask questions, synthesizedifferent ideas, or compare perspectives. Theyalso include different media (written word,poetry, visuals, primary documents, etc.) that stu-dents of different levels can use to make sense oftheir learning. Some guides may contain almostno English text and instead have pictures andgraphics so that students who are not literate orthose who are completely new to English can haveaccess to the information.

There are resources on the walls that providestudents with sentence starters, key vocabulary,and phrases that they can use to add ideas orpolitely disagree—all in English. However, as wesaid earlier, tables always have dictionaries in var-ious languages and students consult them fre-quently. Documents in different languages andInternet access to home language materials areoften available. Multiple conversations are hap-pening at multiple times in many languages withoccasional breaks in the “chaos” for the teacherto explain a concept or practice a skill collectivelythat students immediately apply in the work theyare doing.

There is often a student discussion leader/facilitator at each table, with every other studentplaying a key role or assuming responsibility fora meaningful piece of the culminating project.Groups of students pool their knowledge. Stu-dents have considerable choice in how they ar-rive at the final project, including the languagepractices with which they negotiate, and the even-tual form that the project takes on, but activityguides and rubrics (often collectively designed be-tween teachers and students) establish parametersin which students operate.

A student who knows little English will oftenbe sitting next to a more proficient student whoshares a home language so that he or she canget support and better access the information.Students depend on one another to share theirexperiences, knowledge, perspectives, and under-standings of the text; they teach each other. Theteacher is not the only “expert” in the room, andconsiderable control is handed over to the stu-dents. Content is made accessible because stu-dents work on figuring out the content, lan-guage, and implications together. Students areconstantly asked to “re-present” the information

they are reading and studying and to discuss itcollectively.

Authentic experiences are woven into differ-ent parts of the class—a unit is often introducedthrough a field trip, movie clip, pictures, hands-onactivity, or small group discussion about a familiarconcept/experience that relates to the more aca-demic concepts central to that project or unit ofstudy. These shared oral experiences that are de-signed to be accessible to all students anchor themajor concepts for students, provide an accessi-ble avenue to return to when the concepts andlanguage get to a higher level, generate key vo-cabulary and ideas that students can relate to thebroader topic, and often provide a hook or mo-tivation that gets students interested in the topic,understanding how it relates to their own life orthe world around them. Students are constantlyasked to reflect on their work—to look at wherethey are as learners and where they need to go.Students are also asked to think about the broaderimplications and the “so what?” aspect of what theyare studying.

The work of the teachers at the IHSs is heav-ily focused on designing the activity guides (notlesson plans) to direct students through activelearning of academic content. Rather than talkabout “lesson plans” that describe what teachersare doing, the Internationals approach encour-ages teachers to plan curricula and projects to in-volve students in active learning, in which studentsand teachers rely on each other and in which stu-dents utilize English and their home languagesto complete projects by building on their existingknowledge (both content and linguistic).

In short, teachers in IHS classrooms usedynamic plurilingual pedagogy and build ontranslanguaging in the classroom. By allowingindividual students to use their home languagepractices to make sense of the learning moment,these IHSs go beyond traditional second-languageprograms (such as English as a second lan-guage [ESL], English structured immersion, orSheltered English in the United States) or tra-ditional bilingual education programs. Insteadof the top–down traditional approach that oftendictates language policy in schools and that in theUnited States results in classrooms being English-only or bilingual, the IHSs have designed a dy-namic plurilingual system of education. At theseIHSs, emergent bilingual immigrant adolescentsare developing English language and literacy sothat they can graduate from U.S. high schools.However, they are doing so by being empoweredas individuals to use their home language prac-tices in singular agentive ways to make meaning


of their learning of rigorous content and new lan-guage practices.

Now that we have described what IHS class-rooms might look like and we have identified thesubtle translanguaging practices that characterizethe dynamic plurilingual education of the IHSs,we turn to explaining each of the core principlesof their sociolinguistic and socioeducationalphilosophy.

CORE PRINCIPLES

Heterogeneity and Singularities in Plurality

Optimizing heterogeneity builds on the strengthsof every single individual member of the schoolcommunity. The IHSs have a different approachto heterogeneity than that found in most pro-grams or schools that work with language-minoritystudents. Because IHSs believe that inevitably allgroups are by nature heterogeneous, instructionalprograms are designed to leverage diversity.

The students at the IHSs are highly diverse,coming from over 90 countries, speaking about55 languages, and ranging in prior academic ex-perience from never having attended school tobeing at or above grade level in their homelanguage. They have vastly different experi-ences, with some commonalities. All students arenew learners of English and have been in theUnited States 4 years or fewer at the time of admis-sion. About 70% of students have been separatedfrom one or both parents in the course of immi-grating to the United States. They may have seenparents and relatives killed in violent upheavalsand wars, or have lived in refugee camps, or havebeen victims of narco-terrorists. The IHSs are de-signed to promote respect for different languageand cultural practices and to leverage them in allaspects.

In looking at heterogeneous/homogeneousgrouping models, educators at IHSs understandthat even if students have the same scores on lan-guage proficiency tests, they may not have gottenthe same items correct and thus their languageproficiency differs. Even if, amazingly and with-out cheating, two students have answered all ofthe questions in the same way, educators at IHSsunderstand that the thinking that led students tochoose their answers is inevitably divergent. Fur-ther, IHS teachers and administrators know thatstudents differ on numerous other characteristicsand proficiencies and that language proficiencyis impacted by the content of study (e.g., study-ing astrophysics in any language would be beyondthese authors’ proficiency level). Thus, educators

at IHSs recognize that every individual student’slanguage characteristics and use differ from thoseof others in the class, even when supposedly thestudents speak the “same language”; that is, ev-eryone at IHSs recognize the singularities of thepluralities in language practices that make up theclassrooms.

Collaboration Among Students

Collaborative structures that build on the strengthsof every individual member of the school communityoptimize learning. Because the Internationals un-derstand the individuality of the emergent bilin-gual experience, students with varied levels ofEnglish proficiency as well as literacy levels andhome language proficiency are in the same classby design.2 They study complex and sophisticatedtopics, through working collaboratively.

Collaboration leverages the benefits of a hetero-geneous class and addresses its challenges. Stu-dents are able to share their different perspec-tives, experiences, and talents. While buildingcommunity in the classroom and in the school,different students are challenged in multipleand divergent ways through these heterogeneousclasses. While supporting struggling students,collaborative grouping also challenges more ad-vanced students who must understand the mate-rial fully in order to explain it to others. Collabora-tion also allows students to form friendships acrosscultural and linguistic lines because they have areason to talk to one another and are not silentlyfilling out worksheets or listening to a teacher.

Collaboration enables all students to engagein challenging and creative projects because stu-dents of different levels work together to accom-plish a final product they would not be able to doon their own. This instructional approach relieson the advantages of small group collaborativelearning and peer-mediated instruction while rec-ognizing the linguistic heterogeneity of all groupsof students and their singularities.

Collaboration Among Teachers

The collaborative structures in which students workand learn mirror those in which faculty work andlearn, capitalizing on everyone’s diverse strengths andmaximizing their ability to support one another. Justas students work in groups, IHS teachers workin groups. Teachers, like students, are assumedto be diverse and have various strengths. Theywork in teams with teachers from different disci-plines (at a minimum, an English language arts,social studies/history, science and math teacher)


and share responsibility for a cluster of 75–100students, who are subdivided into three or fourclasses that are, by design, heterogeneous in allrespects (language proficiency, home language,literacy level, prior academic experience and/orsuccess, etc.).

These teams are responsible for students’progress collectively and holistically—linguistic,academic, sociocultural, affective, and so on.Time is built into the day (and often added toit, with compensation) to allow teachers to meetfor anywhere from 2 to 6 hours a week so that theycan learn from each other. These small groups ofteachers focus on the design of their curricula andtheir pedagogies, their challenges and successes,and their students’ progress.

Teachers’ collaboration prepares them toreplicate for students their own learning environ-ments. Teachers learn not from lectures in profes-sional development sessions and faculty meetings,but from each other. The Internationals approachexpects that the adult learning model and themodel for student learning will mirror each other.The IHSs build on the diversity of the teachers sothat the staff can then construct learning experi-ences based on the linguistic and cultural differ-ences of the students with whom they work.

Learner-Centered Classrooms

Constructing learner-centered classrooms formeaningful student linguistic and content output isimportant. The collaborative pedagogy followedin the IHSs takes teachers away from the front ofthe room and enables them to help individualstudents or groups that are struggling as well as toleverage their home language practices in orderto learn. Thus, classrooms are learner centered.

Many L2 programs and bilingual education pro-grams around the world provide teacher-centeredinstruction, insisting that the language input thatstudents hear from the teacher is the main el-ement in language acquisition (Krashen, 1985).Yet, teacher-centered instruction limits linguisticopportunities for all students. In a traditional lan-guage classroom, the teacher lectures in what iscalled a “target language” and the students fol-low a common textbook in the same language.Bilingual education programs also tend to sepa-rate languages strictly, with teachers speaking onelanguage or the other and students working onworksheets in one language or the other or fol-lowing a textbook also written in one languageor the other. In both traditional foreign and L2classrooms and bilingual classrooms, all studentsare expected to be at the same proficiency level

and to achieve the same result. This is not possi-ble when you have students with English languageproficiency ranging from very little knowledge inEnglish to grade-level use of English. This is alsonot possible if students have different literacy lev-els in their home languages and diverse schoolingexperiences, academic and literacy traditions, andclassroom scripts.

As Swain (1996, 2000) has posited, collabora-tive dialogue is very important in the developmentof an additional language. Educators at the IHSsbelieve that students are best served when teach-ers use their professional expertise, not princi-pally as providers of knowledge but as facilitatorsof a process that enables students and faculty tolearn while making language choices to accom-plish meaningful activities.

Students’ active use of language is critical tothe academic program of the IHSs. No one learnsto ride a bicycle by watching someone else rideit. Thus, the Internationals model is designed tohave students actively use the additional languagepractices for as much of each class period as possi-ble. Students use English as well as their homelanguages to understand the material they arestudying and to prepare oral presentations andwritten work in English.

Language and Content Integration

Language emerges most naturally in purposeful,language-rich, interdisciplinary study. The IHS“mantra” is that “every teacher is a teacher of lan-guage and content.” Language means both theadditional language they are acquiring (English,as all students are emergent bilinguals who arelearning English), as well as their home language(which students use to support learning of bothacademic content as well as English).

The Internationals approach promotes the lan-guage practices of all students, especially thosethat include academic English, as students si-multaneously explore interdisciplinary academiccontent. Language does not exist apart from thecontent of life and the world, and language ismore readily remembered when it has meaningand when it is in context. Content-based languagedevelopment suggests that language use is an out-growth of content; that is, by experiencing andlearning new concepts, students extend their lan-guage base. Language and content integrationmeans that “content is the driver.” Teachers payattention to the language load and provide system-atic support for students who are developing anadditional language, but the content is not drivenby the aim of teaching a particular linguistic


structure, nor is the language simplified and sacri-ficed to content. Instead, content is rigorous andexpressed in authentic and rich language that isscaffolded by collaborative structures that allowfor peer mediation and teacher support, as de-scribed later.

For teachers, language and content integrationmeans that when designing a project and creatingan activity guide, they promote students’ progresstoward key standards in all content areas. Theyconsider, in their project design, questions of lan-guage load. They provide materials with differentlevels of linguistic complexity but also supportstudents’ work with complex materials througha variety of scaffolds. These scaffolds include re-viewing key words, designing graphic organizers,supporting students’ use of home languages, hav-ing students write double-entry journals in whichteachers raise questions and they respond, anno-tating (or having students annotate) as studentsread, and analyzing common linguistic structuresof a discipline or in a particular reading. Fromtime to time, teachers might make brief explana-tions about the grammar of the new language, butthis is for the purpose of helping students under-stand how to use the additional language ratherthan using grammar to teach the language.

Plurilingualism from the Students Up

Rather than having a structure where languagepractices are controlled by a rigid external languageeducation policy, the students use diverse languagepractices for purposes of learning, and teachersuse inclusive language practices for purposes ofteaching. In the IHSs, the locus of control for lan-guage practices lies with the students. Teachers,who may or may not speak the home language(s)of any particular student or group of students,encourage individual students to use their homelanguages to make sense of their learning. Thestudents’ language practices are flexible and dy-namic, responding to their need for sense-makingin order to learn.

However, teachers also encourage groups topractice language in nonexclusionary ways andwill do so themselves whenever possible. In work-ing with one particular student or group of stu-dents with whom the teacher shares languagepractices, the teacher may use those practices.Sometimes, the teacher may ask students to ex-plain using their home language. However, mind-ful of not excluding anyone, teachers use Englishwhen speaking to a whole class with diverse homelanguages. The teachers are alert to language usethat is not conducive to group progress—for in-stance, when a group is consistently leaving out

a member by using a different home language.At that point, teachers intervene in that groupprocess, as they would in any issue of group dy-namics.

Experiential Learning

Expansion of the schools beyond the four walls ofthe school building motivates immigrant adolescentsand enhances their capacity to negotiate their newbilingualism and successfully participate in society.As we have said, the instruction of language,content, and skills is embedded in experientialprojects that are carefully structured to incorpo-rate student experience and build necessary back-ground knowledge. For example, many projectsengage students with people outside of the school(e.g., surveying community members, letter writ-ing advocacy campaigns, service learning, build-ing something in the community of the school).In most cases, projects begin with a shared oralexperience to build background knowledge andprovide students with a foundation to then accesshigher level content (i.e., to build schema). Theseexperiential projects also allow for reinforcementof necessary content and skills.

Experiential learning also refers to the beliefthat education has to happen beyond the fourwalls of the school. All IHSs place a strong empha-sis on field trips, inviting outside speakers, and get-ting students involved in projects that take themoutside of the school. IHSs also send all studentsto an internship outside the school that lasts aminimum of 12 weeks. During these internships,usually two to four afternoons a week (during theschool day), students work usually in an office,hospital, school, or community center. Projectsthat guide the internship experience help stu-dents gather important information and reflecton what they are learning. The resources for lan-guage development in experiential learning gobeyond faculty and other students to include com-munity members and families.

An experience-based curriculum, which en-ables the students to understand the conceptsthey are dealing with, firmly supports their En-glish language acquisition. In the process of en-gaging in experiences and project development,students practice language structures that teach-ers and other students have modeled. In these in-teractions, students formulate and investigate hy-potheses about how their new language functions.

Localized Autonomy and Responsibility

Linking autonomy and responsibility at every levelwithin a learning community allows all membersto contribute to their fullest potential. The


underlying assumption of having students andteachers work within collaborative structures isthat individuals achieve to their highest capacitywhen they feel ownership of, and support for, theirefforts and outcomes. Thus, students are respon-sible for their learning, and teachers are respon-sible for their teaching. However, beyond this, ad-ministrators at IHSs support teachers in whateverways they can to be successful with their students.At IHSs, team meetings are a key professionaldevelopment opportunity for teachers, and theseare supplemented by discipline meetings, full-staffprofessional development, and a wide range ofInternationals Network professional developmentopportunities across schools that include, but arenot limited to, intervisitations, network planningcommittees, and network conferences and work-shops.

CONCLUSION

In the 21st century, as classrooms become moreand more linguistically diverse, the greatest chal-lenge will be how to educate all students equi-tably and meaningfully. Imposing one school stan-dardized language without any flexibility of normsand practices will always mean that those studentswhose home language practices show the greatestdistance from the school norm will always be dis-advantaged. Clearly, monolingual education is nolonger relevant in our globalized world.

However, models of bilingual or multilingualeducation that impose norms of language use inone or the other language without any flexibilitywill also privilege those whose language practicesfollow monolingual norms in two or more lan-guages. This may have been appropriate in the20th century without the speed and simultaneityof movement of people, goods, and services thattechnology has made possible today. However, the21st century is characterized by the concurrentmeans of communication in many media and lan-guages and, thus, conceptions of bilingualism andmultilingualism must also become more flexible,more dynamic.

Schools that respond to this more dynamicmodel of bilingualism/multilingualism adopt adynamic plurilingual approach with translanguag-ing as an important strategy so that students andteachers can make sense of learning momentby moment. Rather than languages being strictly“assigned” a space, time, place, or person in thecurriculum, these dynamic plurilingual programsuse the individual student’s languages to act onlearning. We have just begun to understand the

potential (and the possible limitations) of theseeducational programs.

This article has focused on describing a modelpracticed by a group of such dynamic plurilin-gual programs in the United States—those ofthe INPS. We have described the principles thathave supported their success—heterogeneity, col-laboration, learner-centeredness, language andcontent integration, language use from studentsup, experiential learning, and local autonomyand responsibility. All of these principles supporta dynamic plurilingual use of languages of in-struction that, in turn, develop students’ plurilin-gual and pluriliterate abilities. As a result, stu-dents become not only more knowledgeable andacademically successful but also more confidentusers of academic English, better at translan-guaging, and more plurilingual proficient. Theseare all important linguistic practices in the 21stcentury.

However, it is important to point out that inthe hands of ignorant or misguided educators,dynamic plurilingual programs could have disas-trous results. On the one hand, dynamic plurilin-gual programs could undermine all bilingualeducation efforts. They could have the semblanceof a plurilingual education, when in fact they aresimply another form of submersion education inEnglish only. On the other hand, without teacherswho truly understand how to use students’ homelanguage practices to make sense of new languagepractices and academic content, translanguagingcould become random, not sense-making.

For dynamic plurilingual education to succeedin the 21st century, teachers would have to be ed-ucated to pay close attention to the singularitiesthat make up our plurality—to clearly notice theindividual linguistic experience that is the “mov-ing force” in learning an additional language andall learning. In so doing, teachers would learnthe value of having students use their home lan-guage practices to support learning. Rather thanbeing told what language to use when and where,educators must practice noticing the learner ashe or she is engaged in meaningful instructionalactivities. In this way, educators can learn to ad-just their language and instructional practices tosupport students’ linguistic and cognitive growth.The goal is for students to be aware of their ownlanguage practices as well as those of their peers asthey are engaged in learning activities. Ultimately,this empowers students themselves so that theyare able to adjust their own language practices totake into account their singularities in the plurali-ties of a multilingual classroom and society. At thesame time, a dynamic plurilingual approach helps


immigrant newcomer adolescents gain high lev-els of translanguaging competence that they cancarry forth into the world of work and democraticlife, increasingly impacted by global as well as localforces that are multilingual.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to the editors of this issue as wellas the two anonymous reviewers for their insightsand comments on an earlier draft of this article.

NOTES

1 The Internationals Network defines its work aroundfive core principles (heterogeneity and collaboration,experiential learning, language and content integra-tion, localized autonomy and responsibility, and onelearning model for all). For this article, we have morespecifically defined the Internationals approach utiliz-ing eight distinct principles to allow a more granular de-scription of specific aspects and to more closely align ourdescription with the theoretical constructs discussed.

2 Even in “leveled” classes designed to be homoge-neous, students will inevitably vary in their English pro-ficiency and literacy levels.

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