Tweaking WordSmart

Margo Gottlieb, PhD, Assessment and Evaluation Director for the Illinois Resource Center, and World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment lead developer, dialogued with CNMI education professionals last week on the subject of assessing English language learners.

To comply with the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act required to continue Federal fund support of State public and private schools, assessing the proficiency of English language learners, those whose primary language is one other than English, as well as their level of academic achievement in the use of the same language, is a must.

Dr. Gottlieb engaged educators in a two-day seminar held at the Napu Room of the Pacific Islands Club, in clarifying the difference between proficiency in social discourse against the more specialized concepts of core curriculum academic language. Both are concurrently measured against standards on curriculum content.

In a system where an overwhelming number of students learn English as a second or third language, the CNMI public school system is doubly challenged now not only in setting up measurable standards as opposed to the nebulous previously stated ones but also in providing the necessary support for effective instructions that is informed by the advances in the on-going research on multiple intelligences. Professional development sessions at the State and local levels are designed to address both of those challenges.

Learning English as a second language to some students is also not functionally assisted by their native, heritage, or cultural language, particularly those oral symbols which had not evolved into a written form, as is the case in many Pacific Island languages. Oral traditions tend to be symbolic and great catalysts of emotive and affective responses. As to concrete correspondence of word to object, reflective concepts that might have an empathetic hearing within a field of knowledge, and interpretive significance, requisite in a complex language like English, the familiar cognition of the limited kind assessed by standard intelligence tests is often missing particularly where language is primarily a tool for maintaining and sustaining interpersonal relationships.

Where a fully developed language system that has built in disciplines in the four domains of speaking, listening, reading and writing, the process of transference of meaning occurs more swiftly than those “weaker” language where the evolution into the written form has been arrested or curtailed. Thus, speakers of such fully evolved written and spoken languages like Mandarin, Hanggul and Nihonggo, tend to appropriate faster the social and academic utility of English as a second language. It is thus not surprising that while the Korean, Japanese and Chinese in our midst, who continue to operate in their heritage language, excel better in academic achievement compared to their peers in less developed language.

Fortunately, the verbal-linguistic intelligence is not the only venue from which and to which learning can take place. Since Howard Gardner of Harvard University proposed in his classic 1983 book “Frames of Mind” that the curriculum for instructions is best served if students are viewed to have multiple intelligences, the setting of standards and determining strategies to best delivery teaching goals and objectives may have become more complex and complicated, but it is also comprehensive enough that those who used to be dismissed as possible candidates for special education may now be mainstreamed when taught through another intelligence portal. The administration of assessment tools and standardized tests can no longer be simply a singular track favoring those better adept at verbal-linguistic intelligence over others. For indeed competence in language is not similar to competence in communication. While language is a great tool for communicating, language is hardly the only means by which humans communicate.

Gardner identified eight candidate intelligences: the linguistic and the logical-mathematical that are such a premium in schools; the musical, the spatial, the body-kinesthetic, the natural; and two forms of personal intelligence, one, self-directed and the second, other-directed. The intelligence categories were meant to be suggestive rather than definitive. Gardner earlier suggested spiritual intelligence as another category.

Popularizers of multiple intelligence conduct numerous seminars and workshops on the subject utilizing eight categories of smarts: ImageSmart, BodySmart, NumberSmart, NatureSmart, MusicSmart, WordSmart, PeopleSmart, and SelfSmart. Gottlieb suggests that the iteration in pedagogy should begin with setting standards, determining assessment, developing curriculum, and designing instructions. The first PSS Central’s domain; Ms. Gottlieb’s expertise is on the second. The third and the fourth are the proper subject of professional development at the local school level.

Dr. Gottlieb was an accomplished group facilitator engaging the likes of a WSR principal, a Southern High English and Social Studies teacher, a Dandan reading specialist, a Hopwood vice-principal, a Tinian administrator, Central Office language and reading coordinators, private sector educators, and many others, in a lively exercise on what could easily have been just a drab subject best served with a passed out four-page flyer. But then, that would have served only those proficient in WordSmart. Dr. Gottlieb ably demonstrated how varying instructional style can serve all the other “Smarts” and still attain the same pedagogical objective.