Lessons from Research with Language-Minority Children

Abstract

Lupita, a third-grade student, pulled up a chair to a table and sat next to some classmates. She was doing research on the Sioux as part of a broader classroom project studying Native Americans, and had spent part of the morning selecting books from the school library with information about that cultural group. The students themselves had selected Native Americans as the general topic of study and were doing independent and collaborative research on their particular groups of choice. Lupita had already written several questions about the Sioux that would serve to guide her study. These questions were all in Spanish, her first language; the books she selected were all in English, her rapidly evolving second language (Moll & Whitmore, 1993). Eventually, with some assistance from the teacher, for the texts were difficult, Lupita was able to read portions of the books that contained relevant information to answer her questions, and she translated the information into Spanish so that she could incorporate it later into an essay summarizing her findings. Her classmate, Yolanda, doing research on the Yaquis, had developed a questionnaire in Spanish to interview a teacher aide who is Yaqui and trilingual in Yaqui, Spanish, and English. She would also write her report in Spanish but other children chose English, for they had the option of using either language as needed to complete their tasks. In yet another activity within this same classroom, a group of children decided to read a set of story books the teacher had assembled about the topic of war and how they affect people's lives (Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993). As the children read the books and discussed them among themselves and with the teacher, they struggled in understanding realistic but fictional accounts of events about other people, at other places, and in other times. They borrowed from each other's experiences in making sense of the stories, relating them to their own lives, and evalu-