Episode 172: 76 Languages, 1 Community

This week, we discover the hidden strengths of our multilingual students as we explore how speaking multiple languages builds powerful neural pathways for academic success. We discuss how our district supports over 76 languages and celebrates the cultural diversity each student brings from home. We also get the details on our upcoming Family Fun Night at Spanaway Lake High School, and we tackle some useless animal trivia, from bird to buffalo! 

--TRANSCRIPT--

Conor: Hey everybody, I'm Conor, that's Doug, and this is the Bethel School District presents podcast, the greatest podcast ever invented, bar none. And as usual, we have a fantastic show for you. We're talking all things languages today, and Doug, I'm going to kick it over to you for useless trivia because I know you got a banger.

Doug: I've got a really fun one, and I know you have one that's about language. So we'll get mine out of the way first. I was actually just with my parents at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, one of my favorite places on this earth. A wonderful place to take a walk. And if you're a birder, photographer, you just like looking at birds, you like looking at nature, it's a great place to go. When we were there we did see a great blue heron which is my favorite bird, so seeing my favorite bird in my favorite place was really fun. And it got me thinking about their neck, because they have this gigantic neck, they curve it into this S shape when they're flying which is cool, and we got to watch one hunt pretty close up. And they stand very still in the water and then their neck shoots out like a spear gun. And I was wondering if there was anything special about their neck. So Conor, on this very podcast, and I'm getting to my useless trivia, stop pointing at your watch. One of our useless trivia was before was how giraffes and humans have the same number of neck vertebrae. It's just a mammalian rule. So great blue heron ignores those rules, of course, because they're a bird. They have twenty neck vertebrae. And that allows them to tuck their neck into that signature S shape when they're flying. But their real secret is their sixth vertebra. It's specially elongated and hinged so it acts like a cocked spring. So that allows the heron when it's fishing, it doesn't just reach out, it launches its head forward like a harpoon at speeds the human eye can barely track. And that my friend, is my useless trivia for today.

Conor: That is useless. I'm just going to leave it there.

Doug: My sources are the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Veterinary Information Network, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Journal of Zoology. Beat that, sir.

Conor: Okay, well I will do my best. And as I mentioned we are talking languages this week, so I figured I'd get a little useless trivia in there as well. So Douglas, did you know that the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is actually grammatically correct?

Doug: I felt like I needed to smack you on the head there like a skipping turntable. I did not know that. That makes no sense.

Conor: Okay, well it makes sense, actually, sir, because it uses buffalo as a place, a noun, and a verb. So Buffalo with a capital B is the city of Buffalo in New York. buffalo lowercase, the noun, is an animal like bison. And buffalo also lowercase is a verb, to bully, to confuse, to intimidate. So bison from Buffalo that are bullied by other bison from Buffalo also bully bison from Buffalo. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Doug: I think when we're done we're going to have to go to the old chalkboard and diagram this sentence. You got a source on this piece of weirdness?

Conor: It wouldn't be me if I didn't have an air-tight source, and my source this week is Dr. William Billy J. Rappaport. And he is a professor of language at University of, you guessed it, Buffalo.

Doug: Well that is a fantastic, really great piece of trivia, fantastic source also, I love the extra buffalo there on the end. And our very special guest joining us in studio is Carla Louck, secondary MLE TOSA. And Carla, before we go any farther, we're going to have to define what that actually means. TOSA, as regular listeners know, is Teachers On Special Assignment, and MLE, not Major League Eating, Conor, it is Multi-Lingual Education. So Carla, MLE used to be ELL, used to be ESL, English as a Second Language, which a lot of people might be more familiar with. But we're talking about MLE. Who are these students?

Carla Louck: So multilingual students are students who are speaking more than one language. They come to our schools and some of them have been speaking both English and another language at home and so sometimes they're arriving right at kindergarten and they just have more than one language spoken at home. Traditionally we think about multilingual learners coming from other countries, but actually more than, well probably about 40% of our multilingual students are born right here. They have homes that speak more than one language, so they arrive with that skill. And because they do have more than one language, sometimes one language can be more predominant than the other. So in our program a priority is learning the academic side of English, especially if the previous experience they've had has been more conversational English.

Doug: Right. Yeah, and I think that'd be really important especially just being in school talking to friends in English is very different than learning some math terms in English and things like that. That's not something that would just float around the home, even in one that you know, maybe spoke Spanish primarily and a little bit of English, they might not be talking about fractions and things like that.

Carla Louck: Mm-hmm. Yep. One thing though, because that can be complicated, one thing that they have found with our multilingual learners outside of just in education is that when you are having to think in more than one language and when our students are coming and they're they maybe have a more predominant home language than English, they're hearing instruction in English, their brains are constantly like making those neural pathways. And so what happens is multilingual students just have these really strong pathways for learning. Also, side note, sometimes those alternate pathways help in other areas, so for example, they have found sometimes that people who have Alzheimer's, they might have the markers of it but they don't have the symptoms because their brains have all these different ways that they access information. So multilingualism in general is just such a strong skill to have to be able to think and talk in more than one language has a lot of great benefits. I love that our school district has a dual language program so that you know, we really thinking about how that can impact student learning. Also in our other buildings that do not have that program we do have the opportunity to have diverse learners who speak more than one language.

Doug: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because we recently did a video about our dual language program and Principal Arturo Gonzalez told us about that study and the impact on dementia later in life of just being bilingual. That's that's really amazing. So speaking of multilingual and knowing lots of languages, a little birdie told us that you have a pretty impressive history of language, not only in your academic career, which I want to hear about, but also prior to that you made up your own languages as a kid. Tell us about that.

Carla Louck: I did. I thought everyone did. Did you not make up your own languages as a kid?

Doug: I didn't do that. I had a hard enough time with English.

Carla Louck: I don't know, I just would decide that some as I was playing, I don't know, I'm very verbal, would just decide that something had a different name and I'd just make up my own language for it, make up my own words and then I would of course try to say these words to my mom who didn't exactly understand the language that I had made up in my head. Yeah, from a young age I was always fascinated with other languages.

Doug: And do you remember any of your made up words?

Carla Louck: Oh, I wish I did.

Doug: Should have wrote those down. I love that. I just have a visual of these notebooks full of this, it says dictionary on the front in crayon and that's fantastic. Well as you headed on to high school, most of us had to learn language, I took a couple years of Spanish. You took more than a couple years of a couple different things. Tell us about that.

Carla Louck: I did. Initially Spanish was the language I wanted to learn. However, I did ninth grade at the junior high and they did not offer Spanish, they offered French so I'm like okay well I'll try French for a year and switch when I move to the high school. I really liked learning French. It was it was fun. So year two I was in French and Spanish, and then my geometry teacher was like "you're taking two languages, I teach Japanese, you should add that one on". So I ended up with three years of French, three years of Spanish and two years of Japanese. So eight years of foreign language in high school.

Conor: And so how much of that have you been able to retain over the years?

Carla Louck: Mostly Spanish, partly because I lived in the Yakima Valley and I utilized that language the most. I still, okay, I wish I was completely like qualify as bilingual in Spanish, but I'm still working on it. Last summer I went to Costa Rica for three weeks. Two weeks I was in a Spanish immersion program for two reasons. One, I would love to improve my Spanish skills. I'm really good at understanding, like most multilingual learners, we can hear a lot, I can read pretty well in Spanish and comprehend, speaking is always an issue. The other part is that because I'm an MLE TOSA, I'm working with multilingual learners and I really wanted to understand what it was like to be completely in an immersion program where everything being taught was in Spanish with no translations, just learn because I just really wanted to experience what that felt like as a student as I support teachers and students in that program here.

Conor: And we we are in a diverse district and a district where we have students speaking a whole lot of languages. Off the top of your head do you know how many languages are spoken in our district?

Carla Louck: I think 76.

Conor: Isn't that incredible?

Doug: 76.

Conor: I love that, I love that diversity. And one of the ways we celebrate all those languages and all those cultures is our annual Family Fun Night. And I go to this event every year, not just because I'm getting paid to be there but because it's a lot of fun actually. It's believe it or not the third largest event that our district hosts every year. This is a huge event, widely attended. Can you tell the people who maybe haven't been there what they could expect from Family Fun Night?

Carla Louck: My favorite part of the evening though, because we have performances that showcase the various cultures and languages that we have represented in our district. We had a Filipino dance troupe that came in and watched and so I can also say it was multi-generational. So watching our various cultures connect like across cultures and across age groups, and seeing them connect, so the performers were performing and then they came back and they were hanging out and talking and talking about collaborating and we like just watching how everyone is connecting across cultures was like my most favorite part of the night. And then okay so the whole night itself, we have booths from communities resources, we also have a lot of heritage booths from the various high schools. We have performances from a lot of our heritage clubs here within our district, for example Asian American Club, we also have Liberty had their step team perform. Just various grade levels, elementary, middle school, high school performances along with a few outside of our Bethel well part of our Bethel community but not part of our schools. We have food, Karma has been amazing and a big donor to our evening, they have provided food every year for us and they'll be here again this year. So that's pretty awesome. Activities for kids, make and takes that represent the various cultures that are here. Overall it's just a super fun night and as a former secondary teacher, it's I guess my push was to get some more of our secondary schools and students involved and last year it was really great just to see students volunteering as well as participating and you know, I love a bit of karaoke, we had a karaoke booth, so we had a lot of students performing there songs that I would say are pop songs, also songs that represent their own culture and language too. It was pretty cool to walk down the hallway and hear the different types of music that kids were performing. So yeah, overall it was just such a fun night. There's always lots of things that we plan and then unexpected things that happen like someone bringing their guitar and serenading us during our dinner, awesome GK student who's very talented. He started taking requests as well. So it is May 1st at Spanaway Lake High School from 5:30 to 7:30.

Conor: Yeah, you really don't want to miss it. The name is very befitting of the event, it is fun, it is family, and it is at night.

Doug: Well thank you once again to Carla Louck, our secondary MLE TOSA for joining us this week and we hope to see everybody at Family Fun Night, May 1st at Spanaway Lake High School. And we'll be back next week with another great show.