Password: YCIS2025EKC

Password: YCIS2025EKC

Password: YCIS2025EKC

Password: YCIS2025EKC

Password: YCIS2025EKC

What specific steps will you take to ensure your assessment practices are fair, comprehensive, and responsive to the unique needs of your bilingual/multilingual students?

Next, list two ideas that you're keen to try to implement in your classroom in the next couple of weeks.

Identify two specific elements you can add or modify in your classroom environment and explain how these changes will contribute to a more inclusive and empowering learning experience for all students.

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Password: YCIS2025EKC

Identify one specific strategy you can implement in your teaching practice and explain how it will support your students' language development and overall academic success.

Based on the Mandarin phonemic inventory, linguistic features and phoneme charts; share one specific insight or strategy you plan to implement to better support these students' language development and academic success.

Then, complete the goal-setting portion individually, choosing one guiding principle to focus on and listing three concrete action steps you will take to strengthen that principle in your classroom or sphere of influence. Share your goals with your group and identify ways you can support one another in implementing culturally responsive practices.

You can access these resources if you choose to dive deeper into the content - however, you don't need to! Everything you need to pace your learning, is in the Padlet entitled 'YCIS EKC Asynchronous Course Guide | August - October 2025'

One specific action to leverage students linguistics and cultral assets we can do is for the students to write the task in their own language before they write it in English.

Chapter 2

One specific step we can tak to enhance inclusivity in our classroom to give children time to share cultural backgrounds, this not only validates their experience but enriches the learning environment for all.

Chapter 3

A new strategy we could implement to activily encourage translanguing practises in our classroom is share-pair-talk in their own language and then share back in their own language.

CHAPTER 1-3

OPTION 3:  How the Languages we Speak Shape the Ways we Think. 

A practical and inclusive translanguaging strategy for our Year 1 international classrooms with mostly Chinese and a few Korean students, is to allow and encourage students to use their home languages during collaborative tasks—such as group discussions or brainstorming activities—before sharing ideas in English with the class. This approach can be applied during activities like "turn and talk”.

Why This Strategy Works:

*Allowing students to think, discuss, and plan in their strongest language first reduces cognitive pressure and builds confidence.

*By leveraging the full linguistic repertoire, students gain deeper comprehension and develop the ability to transfer academic concepts between languages, enhancing both language development and content mastery.

*This fosters a sense of belonging, validates students' home languages and cultures, and helps create an equitable, supportive environment where all backgrounds are valued.

Implementation Example:

*During an Inquiry lesson on weather, students can "turn and talk" with same-language partners to discuss observations or ideas.

*After sharing in their home language, students prepare their thoughts and present summaries or key points in English to the group.

*With visual supports (e.g., bilingual word banks, illustrated anchor charts), students move fluidly between languages, making connections and supporting each other’s language growth.

Impact on Academic Success

*This translanguaging strategy boosts both English proficiency and content understanding, helping students bridge gaps—especially for complex ideas—while maintaining and growing home language skills.

*Research shows enhancements in reading comprehension, vocabulary, classroom engagement, and positive attitudes toward learning through the use of translanguaging.

By systematically integrating opportunities for students to use and share ideas in their home languages, we can create lessons that are inclusive, equitable, and more responsive to the diverse profiles of international school students.

Option 3: Strategy: Multilingual Note-Taking

Allowing students to use any language for note-taking, annotating complex texts, or outlining initial ideas.

Impact:

This strategy lets students focus first on deep conceptual understanding. Using their strongest language prevents students focusing only on word-for-word translation. It also lowers the initial barrier to starting complex assignments.

It also validates the student's entire linguistic understanding, making the learning environment more equitable.

Principle 2: Culturally responsive instruction simultaeneously supports and challenges students.

Wishing to focus on two of the points:

• Instruction includes activities that require students to consider alternative ways of understanding informaiton and push students to challenge the status quo.

• Instruction includes activities that foster critical thinking and reflection (eg. open ended discussion prompts and student monitoring of their learning).

  
  

Can focus on maths to help delvelop the above points. Some maths questions we provide are differentiated through the perceived expected difficulty of the language the questions use. Some students are 'locked out' of tricker questions through the language not always being translated. I can help make activities more inclusive so that we are assesing their mathematical abiliites rather than their current English language proficiency.