by The Educator Collaborative Associate Member Beth Puma
Author’s note: I started writing this blog post a few months ago, but had to put it aside as work’s competing demands piled up. However, with the current systematic attack on students and our education system, translanguaging seems even more critical to our instructional design and teacher hearts.
The global majority is multilingual and has always been. In the United States, 10.4% of those enrolled in public schools are considered English learners, according to the Office of English Language Acquisition. Yet, too often our schools and classrooms neglect this multilingual identity, even going as far to repress it, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is why it is an act of love to understand our students’ multilingual translanguaging processes and the pedagogical strategies that cultivate that power.
Even if a child speaks the language of instruction, an educator who learns about their students’ multilingual lives helps them feel seen, known, and loved.
How might we weave translanguaging into our instructional spaces in order to tap into our students’ funds of knowledge, nurture their identities, and build cross linguistic connections between home and school languages?
What is Translanguaging?
According to Dr. Ofelia García, Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs of Urban Education and of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, translanguaging is “the theory that posits that bilinguals have one unitary language system that enables them to use all the language features fluidly. It also refers to the pedagogy that leverages that fluid language use” (2017).
In short, it is the practice of both making and expressing meaning by those who are multilingual. For students, this might look like discussing something in one language, but writing in another. It might also look like explaining an idea in one language, but inserting a word from another that is more precise in order to emphasize an idea. And it is fluid and dynamic like water. It’s quite magical, qué no?
Concurrently, translanguaging encompasses the pedagogical strategies that an educator might use in their classroom to tap into that multilingual magic. It represents a decision to love, respect, make space for, and leverage students’ full linguistic repertoires. A translanguaging pedagogy knows that students’ full selves have space in the classroom and can also help facilitate new learning.
This space between the practices of the multilingual student and the pedagogical decisions of a teacher who commits to a translanguaging stance is also fluid and dynamic like water. Dr. Garcia calls this the “translanguaging corriente.”
What might translanguaging look like in the classroom?
Tapping into Our Students’ Multilingual Funds of Knowledge
Partnering with our students’ families can help build school and home relationships that strengthen the bones of education and communities. Additionally, when we tap into the knowledge and understandings of our families, it helps paint a picture of what their child is learning at school while, at the same time, demonstrating that we care about their linguistic well being.
When engaging in a new unit of study, for example, teachers can send home a list (paper and shared digital document) of vocabulary terms and larger concepts that they and students will be exploring, inviting parents to share how to talk about these in their home language. Of course, the words we use in various languages don’t always have one to one correspondence, so this invites further discussions about language between parents, children, and teachers. These home language connections might show up in a multilingual word wall, a cross linguistic analysis, or as part of the vocabulary experiences students might have throughout the unit. Collectively, students and teachers can learn the languages of their classroom community with the goal that all students will feel the power of inclusion, multiple perspectives, and metalinguistic awareness.
Nurturing Our Students’ Multilingual Identity
When we engage in units of study, how diverse are the thoughts, thinkers, and texts? Do they reflect the backgrounds of their students? Do they showcase the stories of multilingual individuals? Are they playful with language, moving between linguistic worlds in text? By intentionally planning read alouds, book clubs, or showcasing the work of multilingual movers and shakers in our disciplines, we can provide our students with what Sims-Bishop (1990) calls “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.” This not only invites multilingual students to see themselves in the texts of school, but also invites non-multilingual students to see into the lives of some of their peers. Additionally, by showcasing texts that share the experience of multilingual students, we can offer the students who are learning English a little bit of tenderness, a little bit of understanding, and a small roadmap to help them through a language acquisition process that might be full of mixed emotions.
Teachers might also invite students to name and notice the dynamic nature of their languaging practices by creating a language self-portrait or language map. Using a graphic organizer or an outline of a person, a teacher can document their own languaging practices by:
- Mapping out their languages and exploring the when, why, and where they use different languages in their everyday lives;
- Shading in different spaces with different colors and patterns to represent different languages and where they “live” in their bodies.
These visual representations of students’ dynamic languaging practices invite our learners to notice the fluidity in how languages show up in their daily lives. The experience invites conceptual thinking alongside nonlinguistic representation while also ensuring our students’ whole selves are seen, known, and loved.
Building Cross-Linguistic Connections Between Home and Additional Languages
As students are exploring ideas and concepts in subject areas, we can build a word wall. A word wall is a tried and true practice that can make classroom walls come alive and aid in teaching. (Please note: the type of word wall I am referring to here is designed primarily to aid in comprehension, not sound or spelling, as some high frequency word walls are used in the primary grades). The “wall” would include words from a unit of instruction or inquiry and would include target vocabulary that is domain specific and/or high leverage.. The words would be presented both in English and in the languages of your students. This practice nurtures “word curious” and “language curious” dispositions within our students. Think about all the cross linguistic connections, where students might notice cognates, similar root words, or patterns in non-roman alphabetic print. Additionally, a multilingual word wall can assist in learning the meaning of each word as new learning anchors onto the familiar.
This next strategy might take a little more nuance for monolingual educators, but we got this, my 先生.
Language investigations (Escamilla, 2015) provide a way for students to engage in sentence level work, building off their home language as they investigate the “target” language. Teachers project two sentences for students to analyze: one in English and one in a language that mirrors student’s backgrounds. Invite students to notice the features and structures of each sentence (e.g., word order). Where is the emphasis?
This practice moves the cross-linguistic connections from the word level to the sentence level. If we really want to engage students in metalinguistic and cultural awareness work, we might even invite students to turn and talk to discuss what a sentence’s structure reveals about a larger idea or cultural practice. Monolingual educators, of course, might use translation apps to assist with such an exercise (with an understanding that they don’t always get it right!). But this also provides an opportunity to build bridges between the funds of knowledge of your multilingual families and those centered in school.
A Translanguaging Stance as an Act of Resistance
As educators and as advocates, we can offer one another information and continue to support our students while, at the same time, deepening our own practice. In the current climate that seeks to erase diversity, impose executive orders about English as a national language, and terrorize multilingual communities through federal agencies, translanguaging pedagogy can be an act of love and resistance. .لقد حصلنا على هذا
References:
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix–xi.
Escamilla, K., Hopewell, S., Butvilofsky, S., Sparrow, W., Soltero-Gonzalez, L., Ruiz-Figueroa, O., & Escamilla, M. (2014). Biliteracy from the Start: Literacy Squared in Action. Caslon Publishing
Espinosa, C., & Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2021). Rooted in strength: Using translanguaging to grow multilingual readers and writers. Scholastic.
García, O., Ibarra Johnson, S., & Seltzer, K. (2017). The translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Caslon.
González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition. (2022). English learner demographics and state policies. National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. https://ncela.ed.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/ELDemographics_20220805_508.pdf
