Emergent bilingual students draw on their linguistic repertoires, moving fluidly between named languages and varieties to meet communicative ends. However, these translanguaging abilities are often not supported in English‐dominant school settings. The author proposes six design principles that educators can use to create instructional strategies that support emergent bilinguals’ translanguaging in the classroom. The author then describes an instructional activity that was created and implemented following the design principles. During this activity, second‐grade emergent bilingual students used tablets to record and share multilingual e‐books. As a result, not only were students’ translanguaging abilities supported, but students were also able to create bilingual written texts and develop strategies to effectively translate for one another.

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Research is needed exploring how teachers and students in Englishmedium schools transform classrooms to welcome and value bilingualism and biliteracy. This article draws on social literacies and placed resources perspectives to explore how one classroom of second-grade students used Google Translate as a tool to support their biliterate composing. Constant comparative analyses revealed three patterns related to students' use of this tool. Students used Google Translate to support their inclusion of bilingual text and to interact with peers. They also negotiated limitations around the use of Google Translate. Examples of each pattern are used to illustrate how students interactionally engaged with this tool, using it to position themselves as bilingual authors and language learners, and grappling with material and ideological baggage (e.g., standardized language ideologies) the tool brought to the classroom. Implications for educators working in similar contexts are discussed, including how the use of digital translation tools can foster students' bilingual writing by offering in-the-moment spelling and vocabulary support. Further discussion includes how the use of Google Translate might contribute to shifting monoglossic classroom ideologies towards ones that value multilingualism.

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Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English‐medium schools where their bi‐ and multi‐lingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. This article draws on a social literacies perspective to explore how a second‐grade teacher and her multilingual students re‐framed one English‐medium classroom to welcome and include biliterate composing practices, in opposition to monoglossic norms. Findings illustrate moves made by a teacher to launch new biliterate writing practices, including talking about rationales, and providing invitations, support, and recognition for bilingual composing. In particular, analyses show that talking about rationales or reasons for biliterate composing was central to disrupting English‐only discourses and instead building new ways of thinking about and enacting bilingual writing. Analyses then trace intercontextual connections across events to illustrate how repeated, connected talk about these rationales over time opened spaces for students to take up bilingual composing practices. The article concludes by discussing implications for teachers and researchers who are interested in supporting emergent bilingual students’ bi‐ and multi‐lingual language use in English‐medium schools.

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Under dominant, autonomous views of literacy, students’ humorous language use during literacy events is often dismissed as ‘off task’ behaviour. Taking a languaging perspective, this paper considers how third-grade, emergent bilingual students’ humorous language use functioned in both ‘official’ and ‘peer’ worlds during eBook composing events across one year. Microethnographic analyses of humorous events suggest that students’ humorous languaging practices not only supported the work of composing texts but also helped them connect to peers and construct their own and others’ social positions within the classroom. Implications for pedagogy, including the importance of creating classroom spaces where students can talk and interact with one another while composing, are discussed.

Monolingual children sometimes resist learning second labels for familiar objects. One explanation is that they are guided by word learning constraints that lead to the assumption that objects have only one name. It is less clear whether bilingual children observe this constraint. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that bilingual children might be more willing to accept second labels for objects and ask how they are affected by different amounts of information relevant to the second label. Although monolingual and bilingual children benefited from increased levels of information, only bilingual children chose the referent at above chance levels when they were offered increased levels of information. They were also more likely than monolingual children to accept second labels. Differences emerged even when English language vocabulary size was controlled for in the analyses.