Engaging Multiple Englishes: Anglophone Caribbean Students' Translanguaging in Secondary School

• In Event: 60.062 - Learning From African and Caribbean Students' and Teachers' Experiences

Abstract

Globalization has increased the number of students living transnational lives, i.e., they simultaneously participate in the broader US culture and their heritage culture(s). Drawing on transnationalism as a theoretical framework, this critical ethnographic study illustrates how classroom writing by Anglophone Caribbean students, a quintessentially transnational group, is affected by their participating and languaging in two or more cultures, and the implications for pedagogy. Microethnographic discourse analysis of a student-teacher interaction in response to a student’s text revealed transnational influences in her language; how she languages around a written assignment; and how student and teacher co-construct meaning and negotiate agency and power. A translingual approach to the teaching of writing is recommended as one way to engage transnational students’ language practices.

Author

• Shondel J. Nero, New York University