Building and Sustaining Linguistic Equity in Multilingual Communities

This keynote will highlight the importance of language equity beyond the classroom. It will showcase ways to involve the entire school community, including administrators, staff, families, and community members, in supporting multilingual learners and creating equitable opportunities for them to thrive. Attendees will learn how to establish a school-wide culture that celebrates multilingualism, language diversity, and equal opportunities for language development.

Creating Equitable Access for Multilingual Learners

Language Empowerment: Harnessing Generative AI to Support Emergent BMLs (Bilingual & Multilingual Learners)

Creating the conditions for success for experienced MLs

Let's shift beyond the limits of the long-term English learner (LTEL) label to embrace a new way of honoring secondary multilinguals’ valuable life experiences and academic potential. By focusing on experienced multilinguals’ strengths and what teachers can do, we will create the conditions for long-term success. In this keynote, Tan will share the conditions where experienced multilinguals can thrive. While the examples will be from secondary schools, these conditions are applicable to elementary school MLs as well. The goal of this keynote is to affirm what participants are already doing to serve their MLs and to offer additional approaches.

Establishing Comprehensible Input

One condition for academic success is when instructions are accessible to students. When instruction, text, videos, and other forms of content delivery are inaccessible to MLs, they experience significant barriers. Fortunately, there are strategies and approaches to make instruction more comprehensible. After attending this interactive session, participants will leave with additional methods to establish comprehensible input. Though the examples will mainly be from Grades 5-12, the principles can be applicable to elementary as well.

Structuring Academic Output

Social and academic language are equally important. However, MLs often use social language when the task requires academic language. Therefore, it rests upon educators to explicitly teach and structure academic language output if MLs are to communicate proficiently like scientists, historians, musicians, engineers, and business people. By the end of this interactive session, participants will learn approaches so that MLs can effectively communicate in an academic register at the word, sentence, organization, and context level. While the examples come from Grades 5 - 12, these approaches can be modified for the elementary school.