Eleven Languages, One Classroom
I grew up in South Africa, a country with eleven official languages. My father speaks eight of them. My mother speaks four. I was never fluent in all of them, but I understood far more than I could produce. I knew which words translated cleanly across languages and which ones didn't, which idioms broke down the moment you tried to carry them into another tongue. I picked most of this up informally: South African television broadcasts in every official language, so a single evening of TV could move through three or four languages before the news came on. School added more of the same, classrooms full of kids switching between languages mid-sentence without thinking twice about it. On top of all that, I studied Afrikaans formally throughout secondary school, a fifth language stacked onto four I'd already absorbed without ever sitting through a single lesson.
At the time, none of this felt remarkable. It was just how communication worked where I was from. It was only when I started teaching in Thailand, working with students for whom English was genuinely foreign rather than one voice in a household chorus, that I understood what I'd actually been given. I hadn't just picked up an ability to learn languages quickly. I'd absorbed a sensitivity to how much scaffolding that process actually requires when the environment isn't doing the work for you. My environment was built for cross-language comprehension before I ever had a name for what that meant. Most of my students don't have that environment. That gap is something I think about constantly now.
This shapes how I teach ELA in a few direct ways. I don't treat a student's home language as noise to filter out. I treat it as a resource, a place where they already have intuitions about grammar, rhythm, and meaning that can transfer into English if I make room for the comparison rather than just demanding the conversion. I choose texts and build vocabulary instruction around context and repetition rather than rote memorization, because that's how I picked up language myself, through exposure and use, not flashcards.
And when I assess literacy, I try to separate what a student doesn't yet know in English from what they already know and simply haven't transferred over, because conflating the two is the fastest way to misjudge a capable student.
I didn't choose this sensitivity. It was built into me by circumstance, by a father who speaks eight languages and a mother who speaks four, and a country that never let me forget that language is plural. Teaching ELA is where I get to put that inheritance to use.