How Do Students' Languages Compare with English?

So when we think about all those languages in our country, our students are so linguistically diverse, many languages are what we call an alphabetic language, which means they have a symbol that's a letter in their language and that symbol, that letter has a sound. And so languages like French and German and Arabic, those are alphabetic languages, right?

But we have other languages that are non-alphabetic. Like when we think about Mandarin or Cantonese, it's not like so much a letter and a sound, but even in those languages, what's so interesting, there are many sounds that transfer from those languages to our languages. So that's a starting point. Let's see where we have some similarities and let's use those similarities in our instruction. And so that is so wonderful to think about.

And what we also have to realize is these sounds of the English language, many of them are very new. And so have we taken the time to actually show how you listen and discriminate the sounds that are very similar, like the S and Z? Those are similar, but some languages don't have the Z sound, that Z sound. And can they produce the sounds with precision? And that goes not only for consonant sounds, but also vowel sounds. Let's take the time to be explicit and systematic, making sure our students can take in these new sounds and produce them because how I listen and take them in and how I produce them will be, that's me listening and speaking, that'll be how I read and write. So those are the foundational skills for getting to that strong literacy.