Four Ways to Engage Multilingual Learners With The Times

This teaching idea was submitted by Sarah E. Elia, a teacher at Saugerties Central School District in Saugerties, N.Y., and a past president of New York State Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

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In New York State, the high school graduation rate for English learners was 65 percent as of August 2022. Although it has been improving over the years, it is still well below the graduation rate of native speakers of English. In 2018, the state Education Department released a Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework to help. The goal? To create student-centered learning environments that, among other things, “affirm cultural identities,” “develop students’ abilities to connect across lines of difference” and “contribute to individual student engagement, learning, growth and achievement through the cultivation of critical thinking.”

Our school has a subscription to The New York Times, and it has been invaluable for all those things. Via the articles, images and videos on nytimes.com and in the print paper, students in both my high school English as a New Language classes and my elementary school World Language classes are able to find stories that interest them, and read and talk about them together.

Here are four ways I use The Times to help my students learn about culture and language in their new home in the United States — and help them connect news and ideas from their home countries.

Public Presentations From a Global Perspective

The preparation and delivery of public presentations is one of the most rewarding projects I do with my English learners.

To start, students gather relevant information from The Times on topics related to an interest of their choice — whether politics, the economy or their homeland — and collaborate on group presentations. Sometimes we leaf through the paper together. Other times they choose a topic and search it on the Times website. Occasionally I choose a list of articles for my students so they have a starting point. For example, here are three articles my students and I found for a group project on animals:

“The Return of the Jaguar”
“White-Lipped Peccary Species May Be in Steep Decline”
“Before Vaquitas Vanish, a Desperate Bid to Save Them”

Given their limited English skills, my students use Google Translate to scan and instantly translate the text into their native language. They also examine and annotate photos and charts and incorporate these into their presentations. I provide scaffolds in the form of premade PowerPoint templates, slides with titles and bullet points with sentence starters. Scaffolding and repetitive practice gradually lead them to be more confident and ultimately more independent in their later assignments.

When they are ready to present, they might share with other classes and grade levels. For instance, some of my students presented what they had learned about wildlife from the articles above to a junior-high science class, where they discussed the ways various animals are viewed in their home countries. As they spoke, they mixed information they gleaned from the articles with their own experiences, and incorporated words from their native languages.

Presenting their work to audiences throughout the school has boosted my students’ confidence and given them a greater presence in the school community. It also has given listeners the chance to learn from and engage with their international peers in contexts that are connected to the curriculum.

Bilingual Discussions of Times Articles Published in English and Spanish

Because our school does not offer a bilingual program, I find alternate ways to promote bilingual academic exchanges. Most students in the school have taken a Spanish class, so I invite anyone interested in joining us to come during a study hall or after school, and we talk about news stories like these together — in English and in Spanish.

To facilitate, I sometimes line students up in two rows facing each other — native speakers of English in one, native speakers of Spanish in the other — and have quick “speed dating” conversations about prompts, which I give in both languages. As they try out their newly acquired language skills, students are also encouraged to use a translation app to help deepen the conversation and support understanding.

This activity also helps my students participate in their social studies classes, since there they are required to discuss current events with their native English-speaking classmates.

Comparing Cultures With Venn Diagrams

In my elementary World Languages classes, we have used Venn diagrams to compare students’ family cultures with the culture of a country we are studying. We watch videos and examine photographs that I have chosen from The Times, and then students work in groups to articulate what they see and understand, and develop a list of questions that they would like to ask about what they have seen in the video.

For example, this video about Beijing (embedded above) from The Times’s 36 Hours travel series gives a comprehensive overview of what you can eat, see and do in the city, which is quite different from what can be found here in the Hudson Valley of New York. Based on this information, students complete Venn diagrams to express the commonalities and differences in the ways of life in different cultures.

This activity helps students appreciate the differences among people, but it also brings them closer to understanding that we all are more similar than we may realize.

Culture-Themed Art Projects With Times Images

For this assignment, students use photographs from The Times to create culture-themed art projects. For example, searching “Lunar New Year” on nytimes.com produces fascinating visual portrayals of the holiday — crowded train stations in China, travelers carrying large duffel bags full of their belongings, tables laden with traditional dishes surrounded by family and friends.

I print the photos and provide craft materials for the students to create dioramas that depict the cultural theme. As you can see in the image above, they also write about the many ways people celebrate the holiday. We then put the dioramas on display and groups take turns sharing their creations, explaining the significance of the artifacts to the various cultures.