 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon and welcome to Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here in the Think Tech Hawaii studios. Pacific Partnerships is all about all the great educational work that's being done all across the Pacific around education. Education in the broadest possible sense. Formal, informal learning, science, art, technology, language, all these great things. And I have two really wonderful guests in the studio today to talk to me. Dr. Sam Noffsiger of the English Learner Group. Welcome, Sam. And my colleague, Dr. Laurie Phillips. Welcome, Laurie. Laurie and I are colleagues at Prell. And both of them are involved in a whole big set of projects involving English language learners. The whole issue here in Hawaii of a lot of kids coming into our school systems at various levels who are not native English speakers who may have spoken very, very little English ever indeed. And obviously that's a problem, right? Yeah, it sure is. So why don't you just sort of frame that a little bit for us? I think probably the better word is it's a challenge for teachers. It's a challenge to make sure that their instruction is appropriate for all the students that they have in their class. We've learned about 10 or a little bit more than 10% of the population of students in Hawaii speak another language at home. And while speaking another language at home are limited in their English proficiency. So Hawaii has a system in place that assesses children's language proficiency because certainly you can speak another language at home while still being fluent in English. People speak four or five languages, right? Absolutely. So when the schools find out through the forms that the parents fill out when they enroll their students that the student's first language is not English we want to see how much English they know. Sure. So they assess them for that to see to what level they have learned English over the years. And then that information is of course given to the teacher so that the teacher can make the best instructional decisions for them. Because it's really important that you match reading materials, conversational expectations, all these kinds of things, right? Absolutely. With the kids' comfortability, you always need pushing them a little bit to keep learning English better. That's exactly right. But you can't expect a first grader to be dropped in if he's never heard English before and be on a par with his native English-speaking peers, right? In terms of English language. Exactly. We had actually a really good conversation about that today with a group of teachers. We were talking about the need for our students to be able to talk academically in English and to be able to write academically in English. And we had a pretty good conversation with teachers in specific grade-level groups like the lower-level elementary teachers were together and the higher-level elementary teachers were together. And they had a conversation about what that would look like. What is their expectation of academic English speaking and writing with, say, a kindergarten student? And how is that different than with a student who might be in sixth grade? Beautiful. Yeah. And this goes into other areas, too. Because, for instance, your specialty is more art, right? But it means nothing, really, to some extent, their understanding unless they can communicate some understanding, right? Unless they can talk about the art. Tell them what it is they like or don't like about it or I think is pretty special about it. Same with science. And there's great evidence now that says the better your language skills are in English. For instance, the more understanding you'll get in the English science class, art class, et cetera, right? It's a deeper level of knowledge of content. I oftentimes tell the story about how students can actually, for instance, do mathematics. They can add and subtract, say, a couple of two-digit numbers, like 27 plus 39. They can do that math on a piece of paper without actually saying a single word or writing a single word. Right. Well, our new standards in education say that they have to be able to express their understanding of that math. So they have to be able to explain it and or they have to be able to write that explanation. So just doing the math is no longer good enough. They just can't understand. They have to be able to express that understanding. Yeah, that's fascinating because math sometimes is referred to as a language itself, right? Exactly. You talk literacy or numeracy, you know? And people can have very deep understandings of math. But it is that communication skill. Well, it does light the heart of it. I used to joke with a bunch of doctoral students who I was working with in the Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Washington. I said, I don't care if you invent a perpetual motion machine in your garage. You cannot share that information. You cannot talk about it in a way. You haven't really done science at all. Yes, right. Well, even just a couple of months ago at our house, we had an accident, but something broke, a pipe broke in our house where we had to call a plumber. Well, the plumber came out and he did his work like plumbers have done before in our house. But this time when he was finished, he took an iPad out of his briefcase and he had to write and explain what he did and then write the parts that he used and why he used those parts. And then he hit submit and all of that went to my email account, went to his office's email account and it was the accountability of his work. Instead of just the fact that it was fixed and everything's working well, it's a way that he has held accountable in this new technological, literate society that we belong to. Our students have to be able to have those skills even in areas of adult work that we never thought they would have to have those kinds of things. They still have to be able to do. Right, and more and more, we're also dealing with the so-called soft skills. Now, I realize that kids have to be able to collaborate, to work together on projects. It's not enough to fill out a little test on your own. You've got to really be able to say, let's do this project, you're going to do this role, I'll do this role, do that role and that takes communication skills. If I speak Chukis and you speak Mandarin and you speak only English, that's going to be tough, right? And that goes to the other kind of topic that we've been talking about is the notion of the cultural implications of that. Our communication, whatever language we may speak, oftentimes reflects the culture from which we are. And even across the United States, even though we speak English, depending on the area of the country you live, it reflects a bit of a different culture. And so we did a lot of conversations Lori and I did during the classes that we've been doing about the importance of taking this learning that students are doing and making a connection to their culture and saying things like, in this particular story, there's this character and it's similar to this or asking them to make those kind of connections. Tell me what is the same in your family, in your community, in your culture. That takes us into some of these examples of artwork, right? Exactly. In the case of what's on the table, this is just out last week and basically some of the islands in Micronesia have 400 children and let's say that you're looking at just five and six-year-olds, that means there's only 72 on the whole island that speak Kosherian. So the problem is they have no books because what publisher is going to write a book for 42 kids in the whole world, right? So I had a thought lately, well, what if we had the kids illustrate their own books and then write the early childhood readers, let's say the teenagers and in this case these were done two weeks ago and I just went to Guam and they did images of their island, things that were important to them and it could be anything from coconut candy is being made to a visit to Namandal and Ponpei but you immediately have something that kids can connect to and we get around the problem of being able to publish. So we will print these out, put them on a website and teachers from all over the world that need a Kosherian book will be able to do that. This is becoming more and more important because there are now substantial Micronesian populations in places like Arkansas and North Carolina and Oregon where the teachers are, if anything, even less prepared than the Hawaiian teachers are. The Hawaiian teachers at least have been dealing with a pretty diverse population but in Arkansas when the first Marshallese showed up there the teachers had no idea what to do, right? But now with something like this, they can pull up a book like this that's written in Marshallese and then they can compare it with the other kids. Think of the difference, let's just say in California where Sam is where you're talking Spanish and so many books are written in Spanish but when you're talking about small island communities not only is there life, they don't have zebras so if you say the word zebra they're not and also they just have so few people and so few people that speak that language and even if they do speak Yappies there's like four or five different types of Yappies all different languages. So this gives us a way to immediately have them translated into the language of that island and then very easily just substitute the words out. This is beautiful, a nice use of creative thinking and art and technology all sort of merging to be a solution for an ongoing problem. And it's more of a problem I guess maybe in the Pacific Islands because there are so many, there's 20, 25 different languages just in the U.S. affiliated Pacific Islands alone and they're all rather different from each other and they're completely different from English, right? Whereas Spanish and English at least have come back to a common root and you can make some sense out of it. There's some cognates, right? The kids can really build on. You can actually, there's so many that you can actually pretty easily identify what the cognate is and if the student has an idea, a conceptual understanding of that word you don't really have to reteach the concept. It's just a new label for that word. Right. For Yappies, it has nothing really in common with English. Very different. But what is interesting about books like this, and Laurie and I were talking about it last week when she was showing me the books, is that when you start writing down these kinds of books where oftentimes they have patterns from picture to picture it might say something like, maybe they're talking about a particular game that they play with their family or something. So it might say I like this game and then on the next page it says I like this game and the next page it says I like this game. There are patterns that you can start identifying that you can really help kids to understand. I like, for instance, might be very similar from page to page. So that kids start seeing those patterns and even though they're very different than what English would either sound like or look like, they start recognizing goodness, this looks just like it said in the next page, that kind of thing. So these books are examples of how that kind of pattern of language can really be acquired by students and done in a way that's very meaningful. Instead of saying I like pizza or I like something like that that they might not know about, I don't know. But they're using the content that is most appropriate for them that they can make those connections in their culture. Excellent. Hey, we're going to dig deeper into this when we come back. Okay. Lori Phillips, Sam Noffseger, we're here on Pacific Partnerships and Education talking with me, your host, Ethan Allen. And we're going to take a brief break and then we will be back in one minute. Great. Well, that's fun. We're rolling now. Do you want to be cool? If so, watch my show on Tuesdays at one called Out of the Comfort Zone. I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool. And I want you to come watch my show where I bring in experts who talk all about easy strategies to be healthier, happier, build better relationships and make your life a success. So come sit with the cool kids at Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at one. See you there. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech, Hawaii called Konnichiwa, Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. And you're back here with Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Think Tech, Hawaii. With me today in the Think Tech studios are Dr. Sam Noffsiger and Dr. Laurie Phillips. We're talking about English language learning, the challenges, the successes of programs, how to take successful programs such as Sam's been doing for Hispanic groups in California and work with them, work these same strategies into Pacific Island groups who have very different languages and all. But the issues are still the same. The kids have got to learn languages. They've got to get master, they've got to get fluency, so they can read it, so they can write it, so they can speak it, so they can communicate effectively. They can communicate or understand what you were saying earlier, right? So Ethan, one of the reasons that Sam is here with us, though, is because there's sort of this idea that possibly all teachers can become English language teachers now. As an art teacher in a high school, that's the last thing I want to hear. But with the strategies that Sam has and that are ELL strategies, exciting, more creative ways of doing it, you actually can teach language while you're teaching your subject. So I fought it for a while until I tried it, and I realized that the knowledge of art, to get a kid to speak like an artist, to speak like an artist's story in, is really fun, and that they have to have certain, I learned today, things called academic, language within art. So when I use the word value in art, I know right away, I mean dark and light. Value means dark and light. But in any other subject, value in math is different. Yeah, value in science, I don't know what it is. But, you know, we could take any, if I was a science, your science, I'm art, your language. We could really play a game and say, if we wanted to teach, if I was a photo teacher, and say, if we wanted to teach, if I was a teaching photosynthesis, what are the absolute academic words, science words, that I would have to understand, to be able to have children understand photosynthesis. Once I know what those words are, as the art teacher, I'm good, because now I can put those words in the visual sense, and I can put them in books, I can have kids write poetry about it, I can have them tell a story about it, but I'm not doing any good if I'm doing a picture of the pilgrim cover for their report. That's not it. It's how do we pull the academic language out of the image, out of their environment, list it, and explicitly teach vocabulary through it. Yeah, no, and it's exactly it. And a lot of the key ideas in science, they have what are called cross-cutting concepts. And for instance, what I'm called, it's size and scale. Obviously important in art, how you size and scale. Systems and integration. Again, a painting is done as a system parts and a sculpture clue as a systems idea to it. Yeah, I mean these kind of ideas translate across the disciplines equally for a story, for a piece of writing. Can you imagine what that means, though, to ELL teaching? Because from my understanding, I'm not the expert in it, there's kind of two ways to do it, if you're, one is you can pull the kid out of the class and put him with everybody else that doesn't speak English. Or you can leave them in the class with the art teacher, with the science teacher. And the science teacher is just using these wonderful strategies to bring out the language and it's not going to hurt the gifted kid. Right. It's not going to hurt the kid that just got off the airplane, because in both ways, they're using language to learn within the content. Exactly. Exactly. Why, for instance, to take a science example on the periodic table, why is a symbol for lead? PB. Uh huh. It's a plumbic. Uh huh. And the Romans used lead for making the original plumbing. Uh huh. There it is. Uh huh. I mean, it would be in a pile using the back together. Uh huh. You can type your history, you can type. Right. Yeah. And how all those elements are typed, they're on that table for a reason. Right. And their location is for a reason. Exactly. So having those conversations about how this element relates to that element, there are words that go along with that. Right. The words like more, the words like less, the words like electron, the words like lighter elements. Right. So you can't really talk about science without using those words. Exactly. And so when you identify what those words are, then what we do with students is we say, okay now, we want you to explain the scientific notion that we're talking about. But while you're doing it, you must use these words. Right. And gives them an opportunity to practice using those words, maybe with a partner before they do it out loud, or maybe in a group where they kind of figure it out together. But the accountability, the academic language accountability, is about, you can't really explain the science without using the words. Right. So you've got to use the words in your explanation. Right. Yeah. I mean, there is that whole sort of philosophical argument about you can't think without words, right? That's exactly right. That's the same thing. Right. Right. I oftentimes, when I talk with secondary teachers, there are certain teachers that kind of are a little bit more open to the conversation than others. But I'm a musician. Okay. And I will tell you, there are words that I know as a musician that other people don't know. And I better be using those words as I'm doing my music. And expressing how I do this music, words like, you know, words like pianissimo, words like retard, words like piano. It's not the instrument. Right. It means something else. Right. You know? And so, as a musician, I have to be able to use those words to read them, understand them and do what it says to do, but also turn to my friend and say, it says piano. Play piano. Right. Which means soft. Right. And in the context of music, it means that. Right. So the notion there is, is that we can't really, I can't really be a musician without the language that is associated with that. Absolutely. I once, a few months ago, I put my head in the middle of a high school football huddle. And I've never played high school football. Those guys were talking English, but I didn't really understand much of what they were saying. They have their own code. Right. Their own language. Exactly right. And again, science has the same thing. You look at, you look at things that, hey, it's a tree. But, you know, what kind of tree is it? That's right. You can talk about it. It's a deciduous tree or evergreen tree. Exactly right. You know, da-da-da. You know, the scientist has a lot, as an expert, has a lot deeper, more fine-grained knowledge of that and has to be able to communicate that more often. It's what I often times tell teachers and my friends, you can really tell, you can turn on the television or listen, turn on the radio or turn on the internet and you can really tell who the expert is by how they can talk about their expertise. And that's one way that they express their knowledge. Others do it through writing, but certainly, you can really tell if someone knows. Yeah, it's a very hot area of research now is to try to tease apart how is it that experts think about problems versus novices approaching the same problem. And experts, yes, rely on a much greater realm of knowledge, much deeper connections to more diverse things. And they can build solutions more quickly. But everything, though, that Sam has sort of explained is creating a safe space. So, for example, the other day, I was with a child, we take photographs and we label the photographs and then a little girl found an apple that was half-eaten in the curb area. She took a picture of it and she held it up, but she said, apple bone. And I was not going to touch that with a ten-foot pole. That's a much better word than apple core, right? So, you know, she's on her way to understanding. That's exactly right. And so, again, another one was another little boy was pointing at the asphalt, taking pictures, and he said, little rocks, they were little tiny stones. And somebody said, pebble. And then he immediately, he got it and he used the word pebble. So, we don't have to be smart. We just need to be developing. This gets back to your idea of the cognates and helping people make those connections that they suddenly understand. Oftentimes, it's not the concept that we have to teach kids. Because a lot of our kids have a lot of those concepts already. We just have to give them the academic label for that. Right, exactly. And once we do that and we ask them to practice it, it's great. You know, Sam, so you don't sound like a snob. Yes. Why don't you tell Ethan the story about, you know, because we have pigeon here, right? Yes. So, you're not wanting to talk academically all the time. Of course not. Of course not. A large part of our conversation about the notion of academic language is that, well, I'll just kind of use this example. When I was a teenager, I would go to my father and I would talk to him. I'd start a conversation with him and he would turn to me pretty quickly sometimes and say, you don't talk to me like that. In other words, I was talking to him as though I was talking to my friends. Okay. And he taught me, basically, I'm your father, you don't talk to me like that. Right, right. And I think it's that notion that we have to help kids understand that the way I talk to my father is one way. The way I talk to my friends is another. One is not better or worse than the other. It's just different. Right, there's the way you talk in school. Correct. Academic language. And I have to be able to turn it on when I need to turn it on and turn it off when I need to turn it off. Right. And because so much success in so many different levels, so many, so many transitions depends on a good grasp of English in this current world. Yes. It's really important that we help kids make those transitions, be able to take their perfectly good understanding in their own languages and express them in English. And they have to have those tools. And they have to have those tools available to them so that they can use them when it's the appropriate. But again, I think what's most important is when we don't change the Apple Bound. No. So in the arts, in the storytelling, on the classroom, it's great. I can imagine saying to a child, I want you to explain to your friend in pigeon photosynthesis. Mm-hmm. How would that be any less valuable? It's not. More of a, you know. No, it's not. It might be more comprehensible to the other kids. Right. It's just that the kid now is able to go from academic to pigeon to classroom. And that kind of metal flexibility is powerful. That has been shown to be the evidence shows of bilingual kids. Better problem solvers. Better. Better. And they have different, they can put themselves in other perspectives. As they get older, they are much less likely to end up with dementia. That's right. All those things. They're better to maintain cognizance. All in all, it's an amazing array of good stuff. And it points how powerful this is, these connections between the language, the art, the science. And the culture. And the culture. Right? I was telling Sam that there was a story not too long ago. I don't know if you remember who he was at Prell, and he was one of the directors of education, and he came to us and he said, I'm going to give you a word, I can't remember, like Oop Long or something, some Pona Pan word. And he said, can you read that? And we all read it and he said, do you think you understand? No. Let me, can you spell it? Can you spell it? Do you understand? No. Let me give you the definition. It means shampoo your hair. And we said, okay, all right. Shampoo. And he said, now do you understand? I said, yeah, I know the definition. I can spell it. I can read it. And he said, can you put your shampoo on your hair on Tuesday if you're pregnant and you, you know, in a certain river in Pau Pan, right? So until you've experienced that culture, you really The detail there. Can not understand the deep meaning of things until you've been among and around. It's great. We have educators like you both working with our kids here because it's so important. Lori Phillips, Sam Mozzagher. Thank you so much for joining me here. Thanks for joining me. show today. It was wonderful. I learned a lot. And I hope you'll come back and join us in two weeks for the next episode of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Until then...