Global voices – Cynthia, USA

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Cynthia, USA

My curiosity about language began early in life. As an American university student, I experienced immersive British English while on a year abroad at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, England. I fondly remember my fascination with how multiple words, across multiple cultures could have the same meaning! Expanding my American English to include British English colloquialisms opened doors of communication in Europe and beyond. I was hooked on language as a means of connecting to citizens – and students – of the world!

Achieving Spanish language fluency as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer (USPCV) in Honduras, Central America, expanded the allure of multilingual populations upon my return stateside. Based on the immersive experience of living, working and acquiring a second language, I was invited to supervise Spanish-speaking teacher candidates seeking to acquire a bilingual authorisation in their university teacher credential programme. This authorised them to teach in multilingual classrooms where one part of the day was dedicated to English literacy and one part of the day was dedicated to Spanish fluency. Enrolled primary students were seeking multilingualism, either L1 Spanish speakers seeking English fluency, or vice versa. Not only did I supervise the multilingual teacher candidates in their clinical practice and student teaching, I was also privileged to prepare them in their credential courses.

Supporting these candidates in fulfilling their professional dreams of becoming multilingual teachers necessitated scaffolding strategies. In my courses, I prioritised scaffolding content by offering it in multimodal ways (visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile), through demonstrative graphics of theoretical models, as well as representative videos of content. This allowed my students to access the content in their best modality of language acquisition, as well as to refer back to the content when necessary. One quality these candidates share is that they are resourceful; my aim was to present the content to learn in the short term and to refer back to in the long term. Also important was modelling these strategies to be implemented in their future classrooms of multilingual primary students.

As an L1 American English speaker, my own journey to multilingualism deepened my impact with those I instruct. I am a supporting hand to L1 English speaking as well as L2 English-speaking teacher candidates pursuing their dream of uplifting the next generation of multilingual primary and secondary students to a life of multilingualism.

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