Translating Literacies: Latina/o Youth Leveraging Their Language-Brokering Skills and Documenting Their Linguistic Repertoires

• In Event: Multiple Literacies, Multiple Contexts: Leveraging Urban Students’ Literacies in Schools and Beyond

Abstract

“Classroom teaching and curriculum must engage with students’ own experience and discourses, which are increasingly defined by cultural and subcultural diversity and the different language backgrounds and practices that come with this diversity.” (New London Group, 1996)

Sociocultural researchers have long exhorted schools to recognize and build upon the skills youth display outside of school (Alim, 2004; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1999; Hull & Shultz, 2002; Heath, 1983; Rogers, 2001). However, teachers have expressed concern over how to effectively build on the language resources of non-dominant groups (Gándara, P. C., Maxwell-Jolly, J., & Driscoll, A., 2005; LeMoine, N., & Hollie, S., 2007). This is especially concerning given the pressure on teachers to have their students perform on assessments that only privilege academic varieties of English (Menken, 2009). In addition, the everyday language and literacy practices of students from non-dominant groups, though recognized as complex and sophisticated by researchers (Gonzalez, 2001; Rymes, 2001; Alim, 2004) are often treated by teachers – and youth themselves – as inferior to school language practices (Alim, 2005; Martinez, Orellana, Pacheco & Carbone, 2009).

This paper reports on research conducted on and with Latina/o middle school youth and their teacher, Ms. Reyes, at Pueblo Unido Charter Academy, a middle school located in an urban Los Angeles community. Our research team sought to understand the usefulness of students’ everyday language and literacy practices for schooling tasks. We worked with these youth and their teacher during their 7th and 8th grade years. In our first year, our research team and Ms. Reyes created a curriculum that leveraged the language brokering skills of Latina/o youth as they wrote persuasive essays to two audiences--what youth referred to as their peer audience, and a more “professional” audience--thus highlighting the notion of translation that these youth were accustomed to performing out of school.

The range of languages drawn upon during this project led our team to work with these youth for an additional year. In our second year, we worked with youth to create short films that made visible their everyday language and literacy skills, or their linguistic repertoires (Gumperz, 1964; Zentella, 1997; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). This paper will report on both the theoretical and practical significance as it contributes to our knowledge base about the current nature of urban youths’ language and literacy practices and to a scant body of research on the relationship between everyday language practices and academic literacies, even as it integrates this research into pedagogical practices.

The paper is framed within a sociocultural perspective on the relationship between home and school practices. In particular, we build on research that documents youths’ ability to shift registers, styles, and modes (Alim, 2004) and that identifies continuities as well as discontinuities between home and school practices (Lee, 2007; Rogers, 2001). Rather than trying to reconcile differences, as called for by earlier research that identified cultural “mismatches” (Au, 1980; Philips, 1993), we aim to leverage one set of skills for another (Michaels, 1991; Morrell, 2008; Orellana & Reynolds, 2008).

Authors

• Elizabeth Montaño, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis