PLF Reflections

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Helping Students Feel Linguistically Safe in our Classrooms

By Carly Spina, Multilingual Education Specialist at the Illinois Resource Center and EduMatch Award-Winning Author

In our classrooms, safety is paramount. We spend much-needed time on considering physical and emotional safety. We talk about internet safety and creating and nurturing safe spaces to engage in difficult conversation. Another important element of safety we must consider is linguistic safety. Every student deserves to feel safe as they language in our classrooms. This drives us to address current realities of the world today, including our sociopolitical climate in our communities. We also must elevate the way our students language and move away from a mindset of “fixing” how we and others language. Finally, we can explore how we can create, nurture, and sustain a classroom community where students feel linguistically safe to express themselves.

Current Realities

Many of the students and families we serve have experienced varying levels of linguistic oppression in our communities. In fact, Sesame Street published a pair of books to help equip educators, families, and caregivers with tools to have conversations about how to navigate these situations in 2022 called “Spanish is My SuperPower” and “El español es mi superpoder.” In the book, Rosita shares the story of a time where she and her mother went to the supermarket and they were approached by someone who shamed them for dialoguing with each other in their heritage language. It makes us sick to our stomachs that this resource had to be made to help our littlest learners navigate these situations. While this example is a rather obvious example of linguistically oppressive situations, it can sometimes be more difficult to recognize when these moments are happening inside of our schools or classrooms. While it may be more difficult or make us feel uncomfortable, these are the reflections that can help us become more aware of potentially harmful practices and become more responsive educators.

We All Language Beautifully

When it comes to languaging (reading, writing, listening, and speaking), would you guess that more students are corrected more often than they are complimented? We all have beliefs about who we are and how we are as mathematicians, as scientists, as readers, as athletes. We also have ideas about who we are and how we are as languagers. 

How many of our students have ever been told that they language beautifully? Consider how many of us still second guess ourselves for our word choice, the way we tell stories, or the way we phrase things? We need to do more to explicitly remind our students that they have linguistic talents rather than deficits- ESPECIALLY if they are multilingual. 

May we also consider the impact that annual language assessments can have on our students. As students get older and progress through grade levels, and they haven’t reached a certain score required by our state to “exit” our program for language support (EL, ESL, Multilingual Learner Support, etc.), they remain in the program and must take the language assessment again and again each year until they can reach that score. Not surprisingly, we see students start to dismiss these tests every year because of the layers of frustration. If I was told every year by a language assessment that the way I language (in reading, writing, listening, and speaking) isn’t good enough, how might I respond?

Needed Conditions

If, as a teacher, I am constantly overcorrecting and never complimenting or elevating the language choices of my students, then eventually I will lose the opportunity to engage with students as they express themselves freely. That’s one loss that we simply cannot afford - it’s . Our students deserve to language with each other and with us without fear, especially in our learning spaces. As teachers, we often dialogue with each other about amplifying student voices - whose voices are being prioritized if we don’t prioritize linguistic safety?

Students should feel safe to engage in linguistic risk-taking inside of our classrooms. This means playing with words, trying out new vocabulary, and making mistakes. If someone corrects my grammar in a social media post or at a social gathering, I find myself consciously disengaging from that person. If I can’t language freely around them, I don’t want to be around them. We need our students to know, feel, and believe that their language is openly accepted in our spaces. Does this mean we allow inappropriate language? Does this mean we never address grammar? No - it means that we are tuning into the conditions needed to create linguistically supportive spaces. 

How do we do this?

Call out those awesome languaging moments in content learning, and encourage students to do the same. When providing feedback to students on a written task (perhaps you utilize a student self-assessment tool, or when you are assessing students), you should identify at least one phrase, word choice, or statement to praise, and share specifically what you appreciated about it. A simple, “I love the way you said/captured/expressed ______” or “I noted your word choice in paragraph 3 and it really made me feel ____ as a reader.” 

Also take time to highlight and elevate the fun expressive language our students use. You might even take this a step further by publishing students’ mic-drop statements in a platform like Canva.

Create space for engaging in reflections about how comfortable we feel languaging across different content areas, across different situations, or across different platforms. Using a simple template like one of these (with sentence stems and additional think-points to consider) may be helpful to get students reflecting on their comfort level and how us teachers can help them. A goal-setting template with sentence stems and starters may also serve as a tool to help facilitate these reflections. 

What do we want our students to believe about themselves as readers, writers, listeners, and speakers? By building our awareness of how our communities face linguistic oppression, we can become more responsive to how we support languaging practices in our classroom. When we can recognize that there’s no one “right way” to language, we can stretch our own linguistic flexibility and help empower students to language for a variety of different contexts, situations, and audiences. Ongoing work, reflection, and dialogue can help all of us to create, nurture, and sustain linguistically safe learning environments.

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