Social Functions of Students’ Translingual Composing in an English-Medium, Second-Grade Classroom

Abstract

While translingual and translanguaging orientations have been posited as supportive for emergent bilingual children in schools, limited research explores how children in English-medium spaces enact translingual composing practices. Drawing on theorizations of translingual composing as an interactional process, this paper analyzes data from a year-long, qualitative study. It explores how children in a second-grade classroom in an English-medium school composed when invited to use multiple language resources during Writing Workshop. Specially, it examines two questions: (1) What translingual composing practices did children employ? and (2) How did children's use of translingual composing function socially? Descriptive analyses of students’ writing show that, across the year, children created increasingly sophisticated translingual texts. Inductive analyses of events involving these texts identified six social functions that children interactionally constructed for their translingual writing: (1) responding to the teacher, (2) addressing bilingual audiences, (3) gaining peers’ attention, (4) teaching others a language beyond English, (5) positioning oneself as a language learner, and (6) positioning oneself as bilingual. These patterns illustrate the composing-oriented, peer-oriented, and identity-oriented work children enacted, in-the-moment, through their talk about translingual texts. Translingual texts became the occasion for new sorts of interactions that opened space for students to negotiate ideologies and positionings that valued the use of multiple named languages in the classroom writing space.

Translanguaging with Digital, Collaborative Writing: Early Multilingual Composers

“…Translanguaging in composition can help encourage MLs by engaging in authentic social tasks such as responding to peers and teachers, engaging bilingual audiences, teaching and/or learning another language, and positioning oneself as bilingual (Rowe, 2022b). Students may translanguage across writing processes, including during the initial idea generation to the final production, but most importantly, use their languages flexibly (Salmerón, 2022a).…”

“…Furthermore, to develop a classroom that supports collaborative writing and translanguaging, students need space and time to contribute to the dialogue and composition (Rowe, 2022b). Working in small groups gives students with differing resources opportunities to contribute meaningfully, specifically through translanguaging.…”

“…A typical entry point for meaningful writing in elementary grades is a morning message, a letter to a local class, or a letter to a more global audience, such as a multilingual pen pal class (Panos, 2017). Coauthoring messages to classes and other worthy audiences, addressing bilingual audiences, responding to peers and pen pals, and teaching and learning other languages (Panos, 2017;Rowe, 2022b) invite students to engage in authentic writing for a unique audience. An authentic audience is imperative for multimodal composition (Daniel et al, 2023) and translanguaging (Ghiso, 2013;Panos, 2017;Rowe, 2018Rowe, , 2022b.…”

“…Coauthoring messages to classes and other worthy audiences, addressing bilingual audiences, responding to peers and pen pals, and teaching and learning other languages (Panos, 2017;Rowe, 2022b) invite students to engage in authentic writing for a unique audience. An authentic audience is imperative for multimodal composition (Daniel et al, 2023) and translanguaging (Ghiso, 2013;Panos, 2017;Rowe, 2018Rowe, , 2022b. For this example of digital collaborative writing, students compose messages to their local class.…”

“…To disrupt monolingual ideologies that perpetuate linguistic hierarchies, classrooms must be places that position multilingualism as powerful (Paris & Alim, 2014; Rowe, 2022a). Translanguaging is a theoretical framework and pedagogy that repositions MLs powerfully by accessing their entire linguistic repertoire to bring and make meaning (Axelrod & Cole, 2018; Bauer et al., 2017; García & Wei, 2015; Rowe, 2022a, 2022b). In other words, translanguaging encourages composers to flexibly use their full linguistic repertoires across all stages of the writing process, including when their compositions are written exclusively in one language.…”