This article draws on qualitative data from two Spanish-English dual language elementary classrooms to explore how teachers in these classrooms made sense of the everyday practice of bilingualism. Methodologically, this study relied on participant observation, video recording, and semi-structured interviews. Conceptually, this article draws on the notion of translanguaging to describe how these teachers and their students moved fluidly across multiple languages and dialects in their everyday interactions. Drawing on language ideological inquiry, this article illustrates that these teachers' perspectives on translanguaging sometimes echoed ideologies of linguistic purism that emphasize language separation, while also reflecting counterhegemonic ideologies that privilege Spanish and promote bilingualism. Teachers' everyday language use and instructional practices both reflected and contrasted with their stated ideologies. It is argued that a more nuanced understanding of teachers' complex language ideologies can inform efforts to help them embrace translanguaging pedagogies that recognize and build on students' everyday bilingualism.
This study explored how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of bilingual Latina/o first-grade students. Drawing on translingual theories of literacy and scholarship describing the role of audience and audience awareness in skilled writing, this study qualitatively documented and analyzed students' writing and talk about writing for a variety of audiences. Analysis suggests that children both addressed, or responded to, their intended readers and invoked particular kinds of audiences. Children's audience awareness influenced their use of language (Spanish, English or both), as well as rhetorical strategies and design choices. This study expands theories of audience to include linguistically diverse settings, and contributes to scholarship on asset-based pedagogies for literacy teaching and learning.
This paper examines student and teacher talk in a first grade classroom in a two-way immersion school in Central Texas. Drawing on audio and video data from a year-long study in a first grade two-way classroom and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, the authors explore how pluralist discourses are constructed and lived in by bilingual students and teachers. These findings have implications for understanding the ways in which teachers and students are influenced by language policy, as well as how they might either support or undermine that policy.
This study adds to the small but growing body of work demonstrating the instructional potential of linguistic flexibility and hybridity to support student learning. Our findings from two elementary classrooms illustrate the way that translanguaging pedagogy contributes to students' understanding of content-area material as well as their mastery of language arts skills. Student language practices described as reflecting academic language, language variation, and code-switching represent three domains that are often talked about separately. We consider the ways both focal teachers created spaces for students to draw on linguistic resources across these domains. In our discussion of the findings and their implications, we attempt to unite these perspectives in order to extend current understandings about translanguaging pedagogy and highlight ways to value and employ a broader spectrum of language practices for academic purposes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.