Imagine yourself stepping into a professional development session one morning, hot coffee in hand. You walk into the meeting space, take a look around, and suddenly it hits you: nobody around you is speaking English. In fact, nobody around you is speaking a language you even remotely understand. You run to find the instructor in hopes that you’ll be met with a helping hand. Unfortunately, you’re told that there’s only room for one language in this space, and it’s not yours.

This was the truth for bilingual learners in America prior to the twentieth century. President Theodore Roosevelt was adamant that knowledge of the English language was directly tied to American loyalty with the following statement,

We have room for but one language in this country and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house ([1919] 1926: XXIV, 554 as cited in Crawford, 2001, as cited in Nieto, 2009.)

I have been a bilingual educator in Texas for five of the eleven total years I have been teaching, and I have been witness to the growth being made inside classrooms for our English Language Learners (ELLs), but I have also witnessed the brokenness in our education system. Our system is far from perfect, and I've worked alongside educators and administrators who still share the beliefs of President Roosevelt, but differentiated instruction has become a mandatory tool in American classrooms and it is helping our bilingual students begin to thrive within a system that wasn't built for them, in a room of peers speaking a language different than their own. There are ways to differentiate the classroom in simple and effective ways, and with the use of technology, the differentiation we are able to provide will only continue to grow if allowed. Because of the resources currently available, school systems are primed to produce valuable learners with multiple language skills.

Differentiated instruction is not exclusive to bilingual learners. It exists in many different contexts to help a variety of learners in the education field. Differentiated instruction is aimed at helping to reach all learners including those in the gifted and talented program, special education students (which I will refer to as exceptional learners), and students with behavioral challenges. In its simplest definition, differentiation means tailoring instruction to meet the individual needs of learners. According to Trujo (2004 as cited in Ford, 2015) “differentiated instruction is not the same as individualized instruction. Every student is not learning something different; they are all learning the same thing, but in different ways. And every student does not need to be taught individually; differentiating instruction is a matter of presenting the same task in different ways and at different levels, so that all students can approach it in their own ways.”

For some educators, the idea of having to differentiate for every learner can become overwhelming but that shouldn’t be the case. To differentiate instruction is to recognize students varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning, interests, and to react responsively. It is a way to approach teaching and learning for students of different abilities in the same class. (Hatfield, 2002, p. 1). As educators, your goal in differentiating instruction is to be able to meet students where they are and to help guide them in their learning. Larry Ferlazzo explains differentiated instruction in the following video by breaking it down into its simplest terms:

Something that I make a point to share with my students is the quote by Rick Wormeli in the video above: “fair doesn’t always mean equal.” What is necessary for one student to succeed may not be necessary for another student to be equally successful. Students bring different backgrounds, talents, and interests to the classroom. They speak different languages at home, and their families have different outlooks on education. Some come to school ready to learn, whereas others come to school hungry, tired, or worried about their family members. The driving belief behind differentiation is that everyone deserves a chance to access knowledge, regardless of their background, learning preferences, or individual needs. If all students have opportunities to grow and learn, then our society will benefit (Alvarez, 2018).

As Ferlazzo explains in the video above, differentiated instruction hinges on differentiating three main concepts: content, process, and product. Content refers to what the teacher plans to teach and what students need to learn. Process refers to how the students will learn the lesson as well as the activities the students will engage in in order to make sense of the content. Product refers to how the student will demonstrate what they have learned. The following graphic breaks down ways to incorporate each concept.

There are a variety of ways to incorporate each concept into the classroom. This infographic explains a few of those ways. (Alvarez, 2018.)

It’s important to note that differentiated instruction is not just something that is relevant in education aimed towards young learners. Differentiated instruction is useful for adult learners as well. Regardless of whether you’re teaching a young learner or an adult learner, no two learners are alike. Because of this fundamental truth, it’s important to recognize that we as instructors must be able to reach all students. For the purposes of this work, I will be focusing on bilingual learners. Before diving into how instructors can differentiate learning for our bilingual population through tech, it's important to see just how far we've come in the world of bilingualism in the world of education in order to appreciate the progress we can make with the use of technology.

When we talk about bilingual education in America we often conjure up images of Spanish speakers and Latino immigrants, but it’s important to acknowledge that bilingualism comes in many forms. According to Counseling at New York University, while 85 percent of language diversity in today’s public schools comes from the eight most common languages — Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Somali, Russian, Haitian — there are over 300 languages spoken in US public schools (2018). The graph below illustrates the fifteen most common home languages spoken by English Language Learner (ELL) students.

Fifteen most common languages spoken by ELLs according to New York University (2018)

Unfortunately, bilingual education still has a very long way to go but we have come a long way from where we began. According to one report, the first instance of bilingual education in the future United States occurred with 17th-century Polish settlers in the first permanent English settlement of Virginia. At the time, the colony was in severe need of the Poles’ manufacturing skills for shipbuilding and glassworks. So the colonial government extended to Poles “the rights of Englishmen,” permitting them to establish the first known bilingual schools on the American continent (Seidner, 1976 as cited in Goldenberg, 2015.) Prior to 1960, bilingual education was being used in states such as Florida where programs were being created to help Cuban immigrants acclimate to their new home although it was done in such a way that forced students to assimilate quickly or get left behind. English immersion, or “sink or swim” policies were dominant methods of instruction for language-minority children. Few or no remedial services were provided and students generally remained in the same grade level until enough English was mastered to advance in subject matter understanding (Castillo, 2003, as cited in Bybee, Henderson, Hinojosa, 2014).

This approach to bilingual education changed drastically in 1960 with the civil rights movement and the courage of Latino activists who spoke up for change. In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act was passed in the United States and afforded financial assistance to schools to create bilingual programs. Unfortunately, the act did not actually require bilingual education and most students were still left behind.

The end result of bilingual education in schools has not changed much since the 1960s. My sister and I were both born in El Paso, Texas during the 1980s and Spanish was our native, and only, language. My sister attended elementary school in Fort Bliss, a United States Army post in New Mexico and Texas, with its headquarters in El Paso, Texas. I asked my sister what her experience was like as a bilingual student in 1985 and she recalled being taught only in English If someone needed help the teacher would try to assist with translation. There was no differentiation whatsoever. According to my sister, “I had no choice than to learn, but I remember being so lost half the time in school. I had nobody to help me with homework at home, so I would try to do as much as I could at school. I remember I didn’t like school. I always cried but I was always officially known as the ‘troublemaker’ so nobody paid attention to me or else they blamed my lack of knowledge on my ‘behavior issues’. Now that I’m a language educator, I can safely say that I was asking for help but nobody heard me. When we moved to Monahans [Texas] I carried a dictionary and forced myself to learn how to properly say words. I had to learn or get left behind.”

My sisters experience with bilingual education is not uncommon to students in today’s classroom nor was it uncommon in my own experience. Language diversity has always felt like something to be ashamed of, rather than something that should be celebrated. Being bilingual is not a sign of lack of intelligence; on the contrary, bilingualism takes a high level of intelligence. According to Kenneth Patterson a teacher leader at Woodmoor Elementary School in Baltimore, Md. (as cited in NYU@Counsling 2018), “These children are often highly intelligent and highly motivated. The language is a barrier, not their intellectual capacity.”

My own encounter with bilingual education in school five years later in Monahans, Texas, 1991 was eerily similar to that of my sisters. The biggest difference is that I had my sister to help me out at this time because she was speaking English. It seems that our countries idea of bilingual education has always been centered around the assimilation of its students which causes our heritage language to be lost if we don’t hold on for dear life. This isn’t just true of students in the state of Texas either. According to Ronald Schmidt, the “life expectancy of the Spanish language in Southern California is barely three generations, and that of other languages two generations (Freedburg, 2016.)”

I know for a fact that this is true because I have seen it happen within my own family. My younger brother began school in 1996 and because of mine and my sisters full assimilation to English by this time, he cannot speak fluent Spanish. The assimilation worked; the acquisition of the Spanish language in my family ended with me.

My sister and I in front of our duplex in Monahans, TX, 1991

The embracing of monolingualism in our school system is how things have continued to function in the United States until present day. Because bilingual education requirements are left to individual state legislatures, there is a huge disparity in the manner in which schools embrace linguistic resources and differentiated instruction. As stated by Goldenberg and Wagner, the United States has great linguistic resources we are not only failing to use—our schools are actually quashing them, if only through neglect. English language learners — often called ELL students or ELLs — are the fastest-growing student population group, according to the National Education Association. By 2025, an estimated 25 percent of public school students will be ELLs. While the numbers suggest these students are no longer the outliers in today’s schools, a look at their support resources suggests otherwise. There were more than 4.6 million ELL students in public schools during the 2015-16 school year, yet only 78,000 teachers dedicated to addressing their needs (NYU Counseling, 2018). The following chart helps to visualize just how big our ELL population has gotten by breaking down the number of ELLs in school by race/ethnicity.

ELL numbers by race/ethnicity (Counseling@NYU, 2018.)

More than 11 million of the countries 50 million public school students speak at least one of 400 different languages other than English at home. Yet only a negligible fraction of these students are in programs that simultaneously nurture their home language while using it to help them acquire English and also to help English-speaking students acquire a second language (2015). One of these programs available to students is the dual language model, but it has not gained popularity in the United States. According to Fenner and Breiseth at Colorin Colorado, "dual language programs, broadly defined, are educational programs in which students learn academic content in the partner language - such as Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic - and in English. Two-way dual language programs are made up of ELLs fluent in the partner language and English-speaking peers. One-way dual language programs are made up students predominantly from one language group, either the partner language or English." These programs are up and coming and ideal because, as stated by Fenner and Breiseth, dual language programming has been shown to promote the academic achievement for ELLs as well as native English speaking groups enrolled in dual language programs (n.d.) Unfortunately, this is not the way bilingual education typically functions and most schools run on the classic transitional bilingual model, in which students slowly transition out of their heritage language into English, resulting in monolingualism. Although the United States is slowly moving in the right direction, we are still extremely behind other countries when it comes to language acquisition. The U.S. could be doing much more to provide the types of dual language programs that draw from and expand students’ existing linguistic and cross-cultural skills, better positioning them for roles in a global economy – while developing or preserving languages that students may then try to learn later in high school or college if they haven’t learned them as children (Fenner and Breiseth, n.d.)  

When I first started working at my current school, we had a dual language model, but by my third year it was gone. This is because administrators did not see proof it was working and were anxious to see results reflected in the data. Protests rang out from parents and teachers alike, but administration had spoken. No results in the data meant no dual-language program. As a result, we lost many students and teachers who were drawn to our school specifically because of our dual-language model. 

Because most schools in the U.S. function on the traditional, transitional bilingual model, I will be focusing on differentiation strategies for this type of classroom setting. Unlike in the 1960s, we now have access to technology and tools that could greatly improve bilingualism in the classroom rather than creating more monolingualism in our country. What are these tools that are currently available and how can educators incorporate them into their classrooms? 

In the United States, approximately a quarter of all children are born to immigrant families and speak about 460 languages, with 79.5% speaking Spanish as their primary language. It’s no surprise then that educators are trying to find new ways to reach their English Language Learners (Daniel and Cowan, 2012, p. 99.) It’s no surprise that educators are turning to technology to assist in the differentiation of instruction for these learners. Bilingual education models attempt to close the achievement gap between ELLs and native English-speaking students.

The biggest hurdle in language acquisition is a student’s ability to develop their literacy skills. If a student is able to improve their vocabulary and their reading comprehension then they can improve their reading development regardless of socioeconomic background or individual impairments. Research states that if bilingual students develop academic vocabulary in their primary language, they are capable of transferring those skills to a second language (Méndez et al. 2015, as cited in Suero, 2018). Once students acquire vocabulary knowledge, they start to apply it metacognitively when reading a variety of texts for reading comprehension. Comprehension strategies are taught in order to construct meaning. These strategies include visualizing, predicting, inferring, and comparing and contrasting information from different sources. Students learn to connect main ideas, arguments, and authors’ perspectives by using their knowledge of text structure (Suero 2018). Schools and educators alike have found that technology can help bridge that gap.

With so many options available for districts, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It is important to first decide what kinds of tools you want to incorporate into the ELL classroom. There are three primary groups to choose from: digital academic content tools, digital productivity tools, or digital communication tools. The following are descriptions provided by the U.S Department of Education (2018, p. 7):

• Digital Academic Content Tools offer academic content resources or engage students in activities to learn academic content or skills including, but not limited to, language and literacy content or skills. Examples are a tutorial on a new math skill, a simulation of a physics concept, or visual resources such as a short video that describes a geographic formation.
• Digital Productivity Tools offer resources to help students plan, document, organize, and analyze content. These tools don’t contain academic content; examples include a slide presentation tool, a timeline tool, or a concept-mapping tool.
• Digital Communication Tools offer resources students can use to communicate, collaborate, network, or share information. These tools don’t contain academic content; examples include document-sharing tools to support joint work, or a journal or blog tool.

Once you have chosen which tools you will be using in the classroom, you can begin acquiring specific programs. The following infographics, created by myself with information by Susan at The ESL Nexus, include a breakdown of technology resources that are available to ELL students and their teachers as well as their uses. Because ELLs learn best through visuals, it’s important to find programs that provide these types of resources.

These six programs only scratch the surface of the technology available for use, yet they have the power to transform the classroom for ELLs. Something as simple as providing visuals for vocabulary is a differentiation strategy that can drastically change a learners experience in the classroom, and these programs go above and beyond that basic strategy. It is important to do research into different programs to determine which technology would be best incorporated into individual classrooms.

As always, anything that seems too good to be true usually is, especially in the world of education. Limited access to technology, lack of financial support, and lack of technology skills are huge deterrents when it comes to incorporating these types of programs for ELLs.

Many teachers have limited access to technology by way of connectivity. Even though they may have the technology necessary and the funds to acquire it, there may be too many blocked websites that impede with student research. Poor internet connections can also impede in technology incorporation in the classroom. Not everybody teaches in urban school districts, and rural schools could find themselves struggle to maintain basic connectivity. I know my former hometown in rural West Texas has very poor internet reception and when I go home to visit I often find myself struggling to get any work done. I can see this quickly becoming an issue for teachers who want to implement these technology focused differentiation strategies in their classrooms.

Other teachers simply have limited access to technology because of the lack of financial resources needed to purchase them. My school is a great example of this. We do not have enough iPads to go around the classroom and desktop computers are nowhere to be seen. We teach a large population of ELL students and it’s just not possible to provide each of them with the technology they need to help with their academic growth on a consistent basis. According to the U.S. Department of Education, only 22% of classroom teachers have access to the right level of technology in the classroom, as illustrated in the infographic below.

Teachers' Access to Technology (Infographic provided by the U.S Department of Education)

Many ELLs come to us with varying skills in technology and it can become an issue when trying to incorporate technology into the classroom. In one classroom, a teacher may have a student who learned to use the computer as a toddler, and another who is sitting in front of a computer for the first time. This requires that teachers develop their own ability to differentiate technology instruction for their students. Many ELLs may not have access to a computer or the Internet in their home. They also may not know about the services available through the school or library, or they may be unable to get to the library on a regular basis. Despite these challenges, however, there are a number of instructional strategies that teachers can use to help students' build technical skills and digital literacy. For ELL students learning technology, it is especially important to focus on effective teaching strategies that are commonly used in other content areas, such as academic language development and meaningful interaction with the content (Robertson, 2013).

There are a number of strategies available to educators to help differentiate instruction for ELLs. One of the most simple but effective strategies that can be used to help differentiate instruction is to make text more accessible by making some simple edits. Taking text and removing unnecessary material or words will make the text easier for ELLs to comprehend. You can also make the text more accessible by amplifying it rather than simplifying it. You can add headings to sections, create more white space in between paragraphs to section it off more clearly for students, or even add definitions to the bottom of texts to help ELLs.

Modifying the amount of output we expect from ELLs can also help considerably. Rather than having them choose from four multiple choice responses, eliminate one or even two. Instead of having to answer five questions, maybe they only have to answer two. By modifying the output necessary, we aren’t making the work “easier”, but we are able to make the work a bit less daunting and more accessible for students.

A huge thing we can do for students that will help retain their bilingualism rather eliminating it is to provide background knowledge in their heritage language. It is extremely helpful to tie new information with something the student is already familiar with. This is an excellent way to help students decode new information. By attaching the new information to something they are comfortable with in their heritage language, they will be able to transfer that new understanding into English more easily. We should embrace their heritage language and use it as a tool to aid in learning rather than push it away.

According to Sandra Hong, among the different types of learners -- auditory, kinesthetic, visual -- 65% of the population is said to be visual learners (2019). It comes as no surprise then that adding visuals to everyday classroom can be used as a differentiation strategy for ELLs. 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual (Jandhyala, 2017) and helps aid in learning. By adding pictures and graphics to anchor charts (these are posters that help with definitions and vocabulary), labeling the classroom with photos, or adding images to worksheets and tests, we can really help ELLs better understand new information and it may also help non-ELL learners as well.

The following document provides nine further ways we can differentiate instruction to help our ELLs:

Nine strategies to differentiate instruction for ELLs (EdMentum, 2015.)

In closing, differentiated instruction is here to stay in the world of American education. Although there are ways to incorporate differentiation using alternate methods, technological advances are such that teachers will be able to differentiate instruction even further. These advances will greatly impact ELLs in particular and will help produce learners that embrace bilingualism, which will help provide more productive and effective members of our population. Bilingual education has come such a long way, and yet there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to helping our ELLs in their language acquisition and heritage language retention. There will be roadblocks along the way for educators due to prevelant small-mindedness and lack of technology and resources, but if we can find a way to overcome these obstacles we will be able to create optimal conditions for a more diverse and inclusive society.

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