Supporting Multilingual Learners Through Artificial Intelligence

Hi, Thurgood Marshall community!  If I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet you, my name is Cynthia Kniffin, and I am in my first year as one of the Multilingual Learner teachers here. I have enjoyed getting to know the students, staff, and families at Thurgood!

On May 3rd, I will have the opportunity to lead a breakout session at the 2025 Washington Association of Bilingual Educators (WABE) annual conference. Over 1,000 educators from Washington State will come together at this three-day event to discuss best practices, current research, and practical strategies related to educating multilingual learners. The topic of my breakout session is Using AI to Integrate Reading, Language Development, and Content Areas. This session was born out of a question I have wrestled with this year in my work with beginning English learners: Our newcomers need to learn basic English vocabulary AND they need to quickly advance in their reading skills so that they can access and interact with concepts in Math, Science, and Social Studies! What should I prioritize and how do I balance it all?

AI has been a helpful partner as I’ve come up with ideas about how to integrate reading and language development. Some AI basics I’ve learned are:

1. A good prompt is essential—you will get the best results if you provide context for your request, give a clear and specific task, and give examples of the type of output you are looking for. 

2. AI can get you 80% of the way there, but you must check, refine, and personalize the work it generates.

3. AI can :

   • Produce Content—For example, when my newcomer students were learning school vocabulary, I asked AI to produce a short story about a new student taking a tour of Thurgood Marshall. I requested that it use my students’ names in the story, gave it a list of school vocabulary and a list of reading sight words to integrate. 

   • Adapt Content —3rd grade TM teacher, Caitlin Reddy, shared a great example of using AI to scaffold a text for her newcomer English learners. First, she asked AI to rewrite the article using a lower reading level. Then, she had AI translate the text to Spanish so that students had the opportunity to fully comprehend the content before tackling the text in English.

   • Edit content—AI can edit writing, images, presentations, and more! As AI editing capabilities get more sophisticated, it is essential that we teach our students how to use these tools responsibly to improve and enhance their work, rather than doing the work for them.

AI has so much potential in the field of education! I look forward to continuing to learn and experiment to leverage its usefulness in our work.

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