Learning in Multilingual Contexts: Language Policies, Cross-Linguistic Transfer, and Reading Interventions The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation de Galbert, Pierre Gaspard. 2019. Learning in Multilingual Contexts: Language Policies, Cross-Linguistic Transfer, and Reading Interventions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42081466 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Learning in Multilingual Contexts: Language Policies, Cross-linguistic Transfer, and Reading Interventions Pierre de Galbert Dr. Felipe Barrera-Osorio Dr. Sarah Dryden-Peterson Dr. James Kim Dr. Dana McCoy A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education 2019 © 2019 Pierre de Galbert All rights reserved Dedication For Inbal, Daniela, and Luca. This work would not have been possible without your support, grounding, and love. In memory of Sylvia Acana, who dedicated her life to improving children learning outcomes in Uganda, and addressed me as Dr. Pierre, nearly a decade too early. “Multilingualism is the oxygen of cultures. I hope we choose oxygen.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Cambridge MA, April 17, 2018 i Acknowledgements To the children of Oshikuku, their parents, and my colleagues at Nuuyoma Senior Secondary School, thank you. It is during my years as a teacher that I discovered what learning in a multilingual context entailed, where I first engaged in passionate conversations about whether teaching in Oshiwambo, English, or Afrikaans would best serve my students. You will find no data from or reference to Namibia in this dissertation, but I cannot overstate the influence these relationships had on the scholar I have become and aspire to be. Nda pandula. I want to thank my committee for guiding and supporting me through writing this dissertation: Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Dana McCoy, and Jimmy Kim. The four of you brought a range of perspective from different disciplines that ultimately made my work so much better. Felipe, I am so appreciative of the time you gave me over the last six years, time spent working with data, revising manuscripts, or discussing how to best support students in your courses. When I wandered through HGSE in search of complementary disciplinary approaches, methods, and epistemologies, you were supportive even when it defied rational choice theory, at least when it comes to efficiently meeting doctoral milestones. Sarah, I feel privileged to have worked with and learned from you over the last ten years. The rigor with which you approach your work as a teacher, scholar, and ii advisor is only matched by the warmth you show to all of us around you. I learned so much from your feedback on my qualitative work during the qualifying paper. My dissertation work is much stronger thanks to your pushing me to think more about framing my studies and interpreting ambiguous findings. Dana, I am really thankful you joined my committee. I anticipated the high quality of support you provided on my methods from having taken a class with you. Your thoughtful and detailed feedback on methods as well as writing made my analyses and framing much better. Jimmy, I feel lucky that you invited me to serve as your TF a few years ago, which started this professional relationship. I admire the attention you bring to preparing your teaching, and the purposefulness with which you approach your research to improve children’s reading outcomes. Through your feedback on my papers, you always reminded me to think about the bigger picture and larger impact of our research. In addition to my committee members, many faculty members at HGSE helped shape my journey. First, I must acknowledge Catherine Snow and Paola Uccelli. Through taking their classes and joining their research labs, I both learned a tremendous amount about language development, and was able to receive critical feedback on my second dissertation paper. As a faculty for courses I served as a teaching fellow, or more informal mentoring, I learned a lot from Andrew Ho, Fernando Reimers, Vicky Jacobs, and Dan Koretz. I am also thankful to Eileen McGowan who served on my committee for the Qualifying Paper and always cheered me on. iii Staff at HGSE made this university more than a workplace for me. In particular, I want to thank the office of student affairs (OSA): Tracie Jones for her social justice work and constantly pushing us to make this place welcoming to all, and Kevin Boehm for his good humor and making sure student-parents feel seen; the doctoral programs office: Clara Lau and Jennifer Schroeder De Vries did the thankless work that helped to keep me pushing in this process. Last, but not least, the Gutman librarians are a treasure of this institution. Marcella Flaherty, Carla Lillvik, and Carol Kentner each supported me in small ways – researching literature, citations in APA, finding the right maps and copyrights – and all the while providing a warm and supportive space on the second floor with each smile. The doctoral student experience is a journey that only those who go through it (and their partners) can really appreciate. Thank you, Ben Piper, for serving as a model of hard work and humility both as my Teaching Fellow all those years ago and as a scholar and practitioner now. For taking part in my various writing groups along the years, thanks to Jeraul Mackey, Sarah Bruhn, Shireen Al-Adeimi, Wenjuan Qin, Anne Lamb, and Nell O’Donnell. The Mowana research group led by Sarah Dryden-Peterson brought more than an intellectual home. In particular, thank you Celia Reddick for the numerous chats about language and East Africa; Lizzie Adelman for your passion and being vulnerable about how hard research and parenting is; Vidur Chopra for your laugh and positive attitude, support in every step of this journey, and treats from the field; Zuhra Faizi for your smile and the courage you bring to the difficult work you do in a challenging context, and feeding my family such good food. Thank you Francisco Lagos, Andy de iv Barros, and Mariam Dhabi. Thank you, Sonia Alves, for the laughs, lunches, and spending all those hours trying to write during our S&P writing blocks. Thank you, Preeya Mbekeani, for these six years forging a friendship built around laughs and cries caused by problem sets, births, BBQs, birthday parties, and so much more. Funding for my dissertation came from several sources enabling me to dedicate time to research. I am thankful to have received the Harvard University Presidential Scholarship for the first five years of my doctorate. I also benefitted from the HGSE Dean’s Summer Fellowship in 2015, 2016, and 2018, which allowed me to make progress toward my qualifying paper and my two empirical dissertation papers. The Additional Insights for the 21st Century 2016-2017 Fellowship from Global TIES for Children at New York University provided funding toward the third paper of this dissertation. Equally important, the fellowship included support and feedback from Andres Molano and Kate Schwartz. Finally, the Comparative International Education Society (CIES) awarded me with a travel merit grant to attend the 2018 conference and participate in the dissertation mentoring workshop where Frances Kvietok and Professor Desmond Odugu provided helpful feedback on my work. My most intimate thanks must go to my family. My parents were my first teachers, and their difficult conversations about where I should go to school – moving between bilingual and monolingual schools – planted the seeds for my appreciation of languages and curiosity about their role in education. My mother studied and wrote about language in her field – psychology – and, consciously or subconsciously, added fuel to my interest of the role language plays in our life. My father supported our bilingual v upbringing, and observing him oscillating between inclusion and exclusion from conversations with my American family speaking what he calls a langue de barbare served as a model for me in the years I lived immersed in languages I understood with various levels of proficiency. My brother Edouard shares my passion for languages and his command of German or Arabic, as well as his attempts to learn many other languages, was always a source of admiration. My brother William does not share our passion for learning languages, but his love for me has always manifested itself through complimenting me and unashamedly bragging about me, to my embarrassment, to his friends, and setting unrealistically high expectations for me. My aunts Brinton and Cathy have provided continuous support in Boston through love, meals, knowledge of navigating higher education, and childcare. Shoshana took me in as a son long before this doctoral journey started and maintained her mother-in-lawing through a careful balance of pushing me along and worrying about where the next adventure might take her grandchildren. Finally, the three most precious thanks. Inbal, thank you for everything. Your love and support in all aspects of my life is so important it seems futile to limit it to the ways in which you made this work possible. Watching you grow into such an amazing teacher over the last 5 years may be the least obvious way in which you’ve helped me. The countless hours you dedicate to preparing for teaching and your dedication to searching for ways to make sure each one of your student is seen and valued in the classroom, regardless of the language they speak at home or the country they come from has been an inspiration to do better.