The use of Spanish by a monolingual kindergarten teacher to support English language learners

Abstract

This article reports on a case study of a kindergarten, monolingual teacher and how she used Spanish, the home language of her Latino/a students who are English language learners (ELLs), in the classroom. The article focuses on how the teacher develops and uses her emerging knowledge of Spanish to scaffold students' learning, specifically when emphasizing instruction, reinforcing key concepts, checking comprehension, managing the classroom, relating to students and providing encouragement. This study provides evidence that monolingual teachers can develop skills to use students' home languages as an effective literacy teaching tool.

Keywords:

• classroom discourse
• ELL
• early childhood education
• code-switching
• literacy practices
• teacher-student interaction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ruby Li for opening up her classroom to us so generously. We also want to thank Marshall Klassen for his assistance in data collection and analysis for the full research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.