Science, Stories, and Binaries That Plague Us

Last week I received a wonderful email from Kinga Varga-Dobai, a professor of language and literacy at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA. She had just attended a monthly Zoom discussion I help moderate with my colleagues Jana Echevarría and Kari Kurto. Our guest had been Paola Uccelli, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and principal investigator of the Language for Learning (L4L) Research Team.

One of the topics in the discussion had to do with “false binaries,” the assumption of incompatibility between things that actually are compatible, for example:

• It’s possible to honor, even build on, students’ home languages and teach them to acquire proficiency in—let’s call it—the language of school or “academic” language; or

• It’s possible to use what’s variously called culturally responsive, compatible, or sustaining pedagogy alongside—but not replacing—literacy instruction that is sufficiently structured to teach foundational and other literacy skills as explicitly and systematically as necessary.

Kinga has just published a book, Cultivating Care, Wellbeing, and Reflection in Teacher Education: Stories That Teach. (If you order from the publisher at this link you can get 15% off by signing up for the mailing list…. no kickback to me! ) She attached a copy of chapter 10, “Data and Assessment as Storytelling,” which you can get here.

In the email, Kinga told me that the “main goal with this book was to take binaries apart.” She went on:

The chapter argues that the science of reading and culturally responsive, asset-based practice are not merely compatible but mutually dependent — that one without the other is incomplete. Since I finished this book, I rebuilt my curriculum around the argument that these frameworks are not in opposition — that effective instruction for English learners requires both.

Please read the chapter and the post below that I invited her to write. And consider getting the book.

The Binary We Cannot Afford

Kinga Varga-Dobai
Professor of Language and Literacy
Georgia Gwinnett College

I learned English at fourteen in a Hungarian high school in Transylvania, Romania. It was 1992, and my teacher, Jutka néni, taught me through sentence stems, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and orthographic rules I copied into a separate notebook. I tracked spelling patterns. I drilled irregular past tense forms. I studied phonology, morphology, etymology. I unscrambled and turned many phrases into sentences. Then gradually and purposefully we engaged with literature as well. Speaking came later, through immersion. But the structure of English came first, and it came explicitly.

In the United States, that instruction would have been called drill-and-kill. And yet, for me — someone who came to English in high school, already behind peers who had started in middle school — it was not just effective. It was necessary.

I became a teacher and eventually earned a doctorate in literacy education in the United States. Currently I teach at Georgia Gwinnett College in Gwinnett County — the most linguistically diverse county in Georgia, with over 100 languages spoken in its schools. Many of my students are first-generation college students who were themselves English learners. I have spent nearly two decades preparing teachers to work with multilingual learners.

In my experience, cultural and linguistic responsiveness and systematic language instruction were never separate. My high school teacher moved between languages with me constantly, translanguaging before any of us had a word for it. When she taught the present perfect, she reached for Hungarian to show how the concept of completed action works differently across languages — and why English marks it the way it does. When we encountered words like invisible or transition, she pointed to the Latin roots we already knew, making the morphology of English suddenly legible. When I struggled with the th sound — absent in Hungarian and Romanian — she named it explicitly: this sound does not exist in your language, here is how your mouth moves differently. Teaching the difference was the lesson. Structure and translanguaging coexisted in her classroom. It wasn’t called anything. It was just called teaching language.

By fourteen I already understood that written symbols represent sounds — graphemes map to phonemes. But the languages I grew up with, Hungarian and Romanian, are transparent: one symbol maps to one sound. English is not—its patterns are irregular and complex. Although my multilingualism helped me make sense of many linguistic features, English still contained sounds and spelling patterns that had to be taught explicitly, sound by sound. Systematic and explicit language instruction cannot replace cultural and linguistic responsiveness; it has to exist underneath it.

About a year ago I enrolled in a dyslexia certification program at the University of Georgia, my alma mater. I did not have to — our college went through the mandatory science of reading training and we did well — but I was intrigued and wanted to go deeper. I had studied phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics in my own teacher training, but I had never encountered it framed as the science of reading. The more I learned about the science the more I recognized it. Not as theory, but as something I had done as an English learner.

This recognition came with discomfort. For years, even as I taught the Writer’s Workshop in my teacher education courses, I knew something was missing for my English learners. The Writer’s Workshop is a beautiful framework for developing voice and process. But it assumes children can hear the sounds of English well enough to encode them, that they develop writing skills through exposure to texts, that oral language is already there as a foundation. For a multilingual learner, none of those things can be assumed.

I never said this out loud for a long time. Balanced literacy gave me and my preservice teachers a genuine framework for thinking about culture, identity, and meaning-making in literacy and the question of why reading matters. But it also assumed a hierarchy of values in which explicit, systematic instruction was seen as the opposite of child-centered practice — as something done to children rather than for them. That hierarchy had consequences. For typically developing monolingual English speakers with rich literacy environments at home, the writing process could carry a lot of weight. For a child navigating two phonological systems simultaneously, for a child whose home language doesn’t map onto English orthography, it was not enough. And we did not always say so. So I continued with the writing process — and sneaked in syntax and semantics whenever I could.

Almost ten years ago I developed the Multilingual Learner Analysis assignment, or MLA. [See chapter link above.] The assignment asks preservice teachers to conduct an ethnographic observation of one multilingual or multidialectal child over two to three weeks — across classroom, cafeteria, playground, and hallway — and to interview the classroom teacher, ESOL teacher, and family when possible. They document linguistic biography, sociocultural context, academic performance, social interaction, and family literacy practices. Then they design two explicit language development activities grounded in what they found.

The assignment has evolved. In the most recent revision, Activity One must address a structured language focus — vocabulary, morphological awareness, or syntax. Activity Two must address oral language, discourse practices, or cross-linguistic transfer and translanguaging. Both must be grounded in observational data and supported by citations reflecting both structured literacy and translanguaging perspectives. It means a preservice teacher can no longer stay comfortable on one side. They have to look at a child’s writing sample and ask: is this a phonological pattern I can address explicitly? This is contrastive analysis in practice — using systematic comparison of linguistic systems to identify where explicit instruction is needed most. They have to look at a child’s silence and ask: what social and linguistic conditions would let this child take risks with language? The assignment now requires both questions.

The most common question I get about this assignment is: how do you do this with an entire class? It is a fair question. The MLA is not designed for an entire class — it is designed to change how a teacher sees one child, so that they see all children differently afterward. The depth of understanding that comes from observing one child carefully — noticing where she struggles with English vowel patterns, that he is animated and articulate at recess but silent in reading group, that the family learns English together every night that depth is what I am trying to cultivate. Through sustained observation, preservice teachers build habits of mind. They notice cross-linguistic transfer patterns. They read silence differently. They see a writing sample as linguistic data. My hope is that those habits transfer to every child in the room.

But this cannot happen in one assignment or one course alone. My course — the final in our teacher education sequence — builds on foundational reading courses and explicitly addresses syntax, morphology, semantics, and etymology through practical exercises that give preservice teachers the metalinguistic knowledge they need to teach language systematically. This has to be built deliberately into preparation programs, not assumed. When I served as department chair, one of my most deliberate hiring decisions was bringing in a colleague with expertise in both bilingual literacy and the science of reading. That profile was considered exceptional, and it was.

Teacher education alone is not enough. We prepare teachers but we do not control the conditions in which they teach. Georgia is currently mandating a literacy coach trained in the science of reading in every K-3 school — an estimated 1,300 coaches statewide. According to the Georgia Department of Education, universal screener data from the first year of the state’s literacy coaching initiative showed a 15% improvement in student reading outcomes in participating high-need elementary schools, with the strongest gains reported in kindergarten (GaDOE, 2025). While structured literacy is necessary, coaches will also need to understand cross-linguistic transfer as a pattern not a deficit, to hear a child’s silence as data, to recognize that a family’s oral storytelling tradition is funds of knowledge that can anchor vocabulary and comprehension instruction.

The bridge was always there for me and my English teacher because we were both multilingual, trained in a system with a strong tradition in systematic language instruction. But multilingualism alone is not enough. As pre-service teachers thirty years apart we both studied syntax, morphology, phonology, and linguistics as part of our teacher training. She had the lived experience of multilingualism and the technical knowledge of how language works. Many American teachers are monolingual, and that shapes what they can see in a multilingual and multidialectical child’s language use. This means they have to learn to understand language and its parts, to hear a child’s language not as broken English but as a linguistic system in contact with another. That is what teacher education has to build — not just awareness or acceptance, but knowledge to make language visible.

In my own life, learning the language fully became a door to engagement, to literature and story, to taking risks, to a world I could not have entered in any other way. We have seen what happens when frameworks are implemented badly and in isolation. What we have not yet seen is a system where story and science can live together — in teacher education, in coaching, in policy, and in practice.