Author(s): Nancy Hornberger, Holly Link
Published: 2012 in Theory Into Practice
URL to article
Research Focus Area: English Language Learners: instructional strategies, assessments, developing academic language
Abstract:
As US classrooms approach a decade of response to No Child Left Behind, many questions and concerns remain around the education of those labeled as English language learners, in mainstream, English as a Second Language, and bilingual education classrooms. A national policy context where standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction, and first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued, poses unusual challenges for learners whose communicative repertoires encompass translanguaging practices. Drawing on ethnographic data from two different educational contexts, we argue via a continua of biliteracy lens that the welcoming of translanguaging in classrooms is not only necessary, but desirable educational practice. We suggest that Obama’s current policies, on the one hand, and our schools’ glaring needs, on the other, offer new spaces to be exploited for innovative programs, curricula, and practices that recognize, value, and build on the communicative repertoires and translanguaging practices of students, their families, and communities.
Research Question(s):
How can educators engage with the notion of translanguaging as a strategy to facilitate academic achievement for students from culturally and linguistically different – often minoritized – backgrounds? What can a ‘continue of biliteracy lens’ illuminate about the educational practice of translanguaging in the classroom?
Methods:
Ethnography
Setting:
- a Mexican-heritage first grader in a Philadelphia suburb who moves fluidly between Spanish and English over the course of her school day
- Students in a bilingual BA program in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies (CEMS) at the University of Limpopo in South Africa speak freely in both Sepedi (one of the country’s 9 officially recognized languages) and English
Key Findings:
Translanguaging:
- Translanguaging refers broadly to practices in which bilingual students communicate and make meaning by drawing on and intermingling linguistic features from different languages.
- Translanguaging can also function as a pedagogical strategy meant to foster language and literacy development. It describes practices in which students hear or read a lesson in one language and develop their work in another.
- The idea of translanguaging can be extended to recognize the intermingling of language varieties (such as formal and informal varieties of Spanish) along with distinct languages. The continua of biliteracy
- Biliteracy, the meeting of bilingualism and literacy. Though it is often characterized in terms of opposites, it is in actuality a phenomenon that encompasses several continua spanning the space between such supposed opposites (between first and second languages, monolingual and bilingual individuals, oral and literate societies, etc).
- Most biliteracy use and learning occur along this ‘continua of biliteracy’
- individuals’ biliteracy develops along the continua in direct response to contextual demands placed on them
- individuals’ biliteracy development is enhanced when they have recourse to all their existing skills (and not only those in the second language)
Implications:
- The continua of biliteracy reminds educators that they can aid in students’ full language and literacy development by allowing students to draw from the whole of every biliteracy continuum
- The continua of biliteracy bring into focus the four dimensions that research says should be considered in creating learning environments that honor the language repertoires students bring to school
- Context: educators might focus on the mix of multilingual-to-monolingual language use and oral-to-literate language practices that might best facilitate students’ learning; this can be done from contexts of microlevel interaction to macrolevel policy.
- Content: educators might consider to what degree they are organizing their pedagogy to include a gamut of perspectives and experiences along a majority-to-minoritized spectrum, a range of styles and genres from literary-to-vernacular, and texts that represent decontextualized-to-contextualized language and literacy use
- Media: educators might consider the actual media of instruction—the structures, scripts, and sequencing of the languages, literacies, digital, and other communicative resources teachers employ in their pedagogy
- Development: this lens allows educators to understand how learning may start at any point and proceed in any direction along each continuum
Limitations:
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