How can we better support multilingual learners in content learning and language development? Author and coach Jennifer Throndsen says frontloading is “one of the most effective practices I have seen with the greatest impact on student learning and motivation.”
By Jennifer Throndsen
In the early years of my career, I was hired to be the English Language Learner Coordinator for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Palmer, Alaska. In this role I supported approximately 20 ELL teachers and staff in serving about 500 multilingual learners with Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Hmong and a variety of native languages being the most common languages spoken.
Now, almost twenty years later, the multilingual population in Alaska and across the United States has grown consistently and rather quickly and is expected to continue to do so (NCES, 2024).
This continued growth means that more and more educators will be called upon to support an increasing number of students whose first language is not English. Among those educators who have already experienced this increase, many are struggling to effectively address the needs of their multilinguals.
This is evidenced by the performance of multilinguals on state and national assessments, where averages for English learners fall below most student populations, including students with disabilities.
To complicate matters, educators must possess specialized pedagogical knowledge and skills designed to meet the needs of multilingual learners, overcoming the “myth that simply ‘good teaching’ will meet the needs of this unique populations of learners” (Dubetz & Collett, 2020, p.12).
Multilinguals require instructional practices that consider the linguistic demands of the lesson and explicitly teach and engage students in the content in a comprehensible, scaffolded way.
So what effective instructional practices can we use in the classroom to support multilingual learners in both their content and language development? In this article, I present frontloading as one of the most effective practices I have seen with the greatest impact on student learning and motivation.
You may even find, as I have in my years in the field, that this strategy may benefit some of your non-multilingual students, too.
What is frontloading?
Frontloading is an instructional practice teachers use to:
- preview key vocabulary,
- build background knowledge, and
- introduce essential concepts prior to initial class instruction.
So, for example, if you are a science teacher and your class will be starting a unit on heredity, then you would identify the most critical vocabulary, concepts, procedures, etc. that students would need to be able to access the core instruction that you will be providing to the whole class.
Let’s say as part of a unit on heredity, the students are expected to learn about genetic mutations and that they may result in harmful, beneficial, or neutral effects to the organism. In this case, the teacher would think about the most essential concepts and language needed to understand genetic mutations and then preteach, or frontload, that information to prepare the students for being able to engage in the learning activities, discussions, and assignments that will be presented in the upcoming days.
Once we identify what is most critical for learning, then we will want to consider how we provide focused and repeated practice with that information during frontloading (Dubetz & Collett, 2020).
So, going back to our mutations example, let’s say you want them to be able to sort the examples of mutations into three columns: harmful, beneficial, and neutral.
To prepare students to do this sorting, you would want to preteach the terms mutation, harmful, beneficial, and neutral, provide concrete, visual examples of mutations that represent each type, and engage in academic discussion using the language of explanations to help them articulate why they would place a particular mutation in a specific category.
You might even provide students with language frames to help them to explain their thinking:
Additionally, you may lean on the student’s native language to help them to understand the less familiar topics. For example, you might have them watch a short video about genetic mutations in their native language or present them with cognates for the key vocabulary they are learning (e.g., beneficiouso for beneficial, mutación for mutation). Any time we can leverage their home language to aid their understanding of the concepts we are teaching in English, we can expect increased understanding.
Furthermore, you may want to consider what visuals – pictures, realia (physical objects), gestures, drawing, diagrams or videos – you can include to help lower the linguistic demands of the language, thus enhancing understanding (Lee, Bauler, & Ocul, 2022). When we can bring in some type of visual to support the language describing the concepts, we provide the necessary scaffolding to increase comprehensibility.
Ways to use frontloading
So whether you are solely responsible for the language development of your MLLs, co-teach with an ESL teacher, have your students pulled out, or have a dedicated period for English language development (ELD) served by you or the ESL teacher, you can accelerate their language development and content understanding by using frontloading.
Unlike typical ELD instruction – which often fails to connect to the students’ core classroom instruction – when we deliberately incorporate frontloading in our instructional plan we prepare students to better absorb the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn in their core classes.
Repurposing ELD time or finding 10-15 minutes a couple days a week to provide small group instruction for MLLs will yield significant benefits because the language learning is directly connected to what students will be learning in the core classroom, setting MLLs up for greater success.
Why frontloading?
There are numerous benefits that materialize from engaging in frontloading. Academically students are more prepared for the in-class learning activities that they will engage in. They have a stronger command of the key language, vocabulary and concepts that are being taught.
Furthermore, frontloading supports the co-development of content literacy as well as language literacy, and when done together learning accelerates for both (Jacques, Traxler, & Rae, 2016). Best of all, MLLs often demonstrate more confidence, higher levels of engagement, and lower levels of frustration and helplessness when they have been “frontloaded.”
I have trained educators to use frontloading strategies for over a decade, and time and time again teachers share with me that not only are the students learning more in their classes, they are more motivated, more willing to participate and often demonstrate more independence. Given these benefits, I encourage you to give it a try and see how frontloading impacts your students’ learning and attitudes.
References
Dubetz, N., & Collett, J. (2020). Investigating the enactment of core teaching practices for multilingual learners across teaching contexts: A case study. Journal of Multilingual Education Research, 10(1), 1.
Jaques, S., Traxler, R., & Rae, E. (2016). What the Front-Load?: Learning Language Through Complex Tasks. University of Calgary: PRISM Repository.
Lee, O., Bauler, C. V., Kang, E. J., & Ocol, T. (2022). “Doing” science, using language: Professional development to promote science and language integration with a focus on multilingual learners. NYS TESOL JOURNAL, 3-15.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2024, May). English learners in public schools. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf/english-learners-in-public-schools
Dr. Jennifer Throndsen is the author of Raising Up Readers: 25 Scaffolding Strategies to Help Students Access Challenging Text which includes additional ideas of how to scaffold learning. She is a former elementary and middle school teacher, instructional coach, district office specialist, and state director, known for her impact on student learning and passion for student-centered learning.
See Jennifer’s earlier MiddleWeb article, “Scaffolding Strategies to Teach Challenging Text,” and visit her website for additional resources and more information about her coaching and consulting.
