Washburn’s Blog: C. G. Crowell: Documenting the Strengths of Bilingual Readers.

I picked Crowell’s article because I can absolutely relate to it, but most importantly I picked her article because over 50% of my students are bilingual.

Let me begin by saying that having to memorize two pages from Shakespeare’s “Othello,” not speaking a word of English is possible…but I had no idea what I said that day in my English class and I had no idea what lady Macbeth said for at least five more years after that (I had to memorize her lines). Now, I could predict what she said by association with Shakespeare as a writer, because I have read “Romeo and Juliet” in Russian. I assumed it was a tragic love story that ended with someone dying. I used clues to construct the parts of Shakespeare’s story. It was required of me to memorize her lines despite the fact that I just moved to this country two weeks ago and didn’t speak a single word of English. How did I survive? I read each story in Russian and then, I read each story in English. I also watched movies in both languages and used many many many other exhausting strategies. I’ll never forget people talking at me smiling or pointing their finger to a word in a dictionary hoping I would understand them. Why do I speak about this? Well, I speak about this because I see my fifth grade students do the same thing.

During Reading Buddies, my Russian students read English books to their reading buddies, but they translate each word into Russian and then back to English. I see my Hispanic students use the same strategy with their Hispanic little buddies. We paired them that way during Buddy Reading because bilingual buddy reading is something that has been proven to work. Crowell concludes her article by including Bilingual Buddy Reading as one of her classroom strategies, because as she wrote, she can’t always perform a miscue analysis on all of her students, because there is just not enough time in the day. I use the same strategy in my classroom, because it works. I am my own proof of that. I can only hope that after using this strategy, my bilingual students never have to memorize a text that they do not understand and never have to deal with fingers pointing at words in a dictionary throughout their school years!