Supporting Neuroplasticity in Multilingual Learners

When experts talk about culturally responsive teaching and learning, they often automatically mention students who identify as English language learners. When we dig deeply, the definition of culturally responsive teaching and learning becomes skewed. Some assumptions are that making instruction accessible for language learners means making it “easier.” However, in her book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, author Zaretta Hammond discusses the importance of supporting our students in ways that encourage them to become independent learners rather than dependent learners.

Being an independent learner means a student can carry more of a cognitive load in the class without so much reliance on their teacher. A lot of this comes from educators designing and creating innovative opportunities for students to learn language, continue to expand their neuroplasticity, and become more critical thinkers.

Encouraging Productive Struggle for Language Proficiency

It’s important for educators to recognize that the balance between support and challenge is not only about language but also about fostering cognitive growth. Productive struggle is the space where students encounter tasks that push them slightly beyond their comfort zone, requiring effort, reflection, and persistence to succeed. This struggle, when framed positively, builds resilience and encourages students to take ownership of their learning. For multilingual learners, it also enhances their ability to process and internalize new language structures in meaningful ways, making the learning experience richer and more impactful.

Educators can build a community that fosters that productive struggle for students of all language proficiency levels through reconsidering students’ language output. Additionally, when considering language learners and neuroplasticity, understanding culture is key. As educators, we can bring students’ cultures into our classrooms, but as we do this, we can still maintain the rigor. The ideas we discuss can be supported in elementary through high school environments and allow educators to build a language experience while offering learning that is still challenging.

Reconsidering Student Language Output

When considering student language output, we need to go beyond Bloom’s taxonomy level of comprehension within the expectations of student learning. Regardless of their language proficiency, it’s essential for students to have opportunities for analysis and activities that utilize their knowledge. Sometimes, we struggle to understand that helping students build language proficiency doesn’t mean that we solely focus on activities that are only based on the knowledge level of retrieval. We have to give students thinking opportunities with linguistic support. 

What does this look like when it comes to learning in our classrooms?

Creativity: We can take typical assignments and add creativity to those assignments. For example, a paragraph describing a scene in a complex text such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby can be accompanied by a drawn mural on large paper.

Project-based learning: This instructional approach is a great way to utilize a language experience in a classroom and still provide higher-level thinking. When students are asked to build a project around an idea rather than write an essay on it, they’re participating in an activity that immerses them in language—expanding their vocabulary and communication through a natural experience of using it. Many of these projects can also use students’ cultures by incorporating community issues and asking students to find solutions to those problems. This pulls students into work that requires them to use critical thinking and analysis. 

Incorporating STEM: For example, Thamir created a hands-on classroom experience in his second-grade bilingual classroom by displaying a diagram of the water cycle and going through each stage on the smart board and passing out vocabulary flash cards. He then introduced and scaffolded terminology in students’ home and second languages. After that, he facilitated a simple hands-on experiment to show evaporation and condensation. He had students observe water under a heat lamp and note how the water changed over time. Then there was a discussion in both languages about students’ observations. 

Incorporating Cultures And Maintaining Rigorous Assignments

Moreover, integrating students’ cultural identities into the classroom isn’t simply about representation; it’s about creating opportunities for rigorous, meaningful engagement. When students analyze artifacts from their cultures or solve real-world problems that resonate with their communities, they see their lived experiences reflected in academic work. This connection between culture and cognition strengthens their investment in learning while maintaining high expectations. Rigorous assignments that incorporate cultural relevance demonstrate to students that their backgrounds are valuable and that they are capable of tackling complex, meaningful tasks.

By fostering productive struggle and embedding cultural connections into challenging assignments, educators can create a classroom dynamic that supports both language development and critical thinking. This approach ensures that multilingual learners are not only mastering academic content but also building the cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills necessary for success beyond the classroom.

As mentioned earlier in this article, it’s important for us to rethink experiences that support language but also still involve rigorous work. Here are some examples of rigorous assignments that we’ve used in our classrooms:  

Utilize readings or artwork of authors and artists from students’ communities. For a rhetoric assignment in Sarah’s senior multilingual college prep English class, students visited a large Latinx community in Chicago and learned about the murals of artists in the community. Students analyzed the ethos, pathos, and logos of the murals. Then they produced their rhetoric project with Canva posters on the topics of the murals. 

Ask students to explore relevant real-world issues. Students can research an environmental issue in their community and learn how it impacts day-to-day life.

Introduce leaders in STEM from students’ cultures. Have the students participate in experiments on concepts of discovery from those leaders.

Students of different cultures and different language backgrounds learn in different ways. When we offer our multilingual learners tasks that don’t require high levels of thinking, we’re creating a larger education gap for them. As a community, it’s important for us to be aware of the brain science behind learning a new language. When students are learning English as a second language, it shouldn’t stunt their growth in any other content area. Students should still be able to have content that promotes critical thinking and problem-solving. When we create a classroom community that offers this, we foster productive struggle and engage learners through thinking that supports neuroplasticity.