"I Write to Show How Beautiful My Languages Are": Examining Teachers' Approaches to Translingual Literacies

• In Event: Interrogating the Climate of Diverse, Multilingual Schools: Views From Students, Parents, Teachers, and Administrators

Abstract

Objectives
As research on multilingual literacies among early childhood and elementary writers (Author 1; Gort, 2006; Ranker, 2007) and calls to broaden students’ communicative repertoires (Dyson & Genishi, 2009; Faulstich-Orellana & García, 2014) grow, questions still remain as to how English-dominant teachers of ESL classrooms can enact these efforts. Scholars of linguistic diversity (i.e., Canagarajah, 2013; Palmer et al, 2014) have noted how theories of multilingual literacies have outpaced what is unfolding in classrooms, particularly those where English is the primary language of instruction. There remains a growing need to study and articulate these practices within elementary literacy contexts that serve students with diverse linguistic histories. With these demands in mind, we asked, how do elementary classroom teachers with different linguistic repertoires and multilingual student populations support translingual literacies for learning?

Theoretical Framework
We situate our work in the scholarship on translanguaging and draw upon the work on translingual literacies to theorize and provide examples of how elementary classrooms, beyond dual language and formal bilingual contexts, can also honor and develop students’ linguistic resources for writing. Translingual literacies (Horner et al, 2011) share similar conceptualizations of translanguaging (Gort, 2015; Pennycook, 2007) and composition studies to better understand what the writer is doing with language(s) and why, rather than assess a writer’s command of dominant language standards. Together, these theories afford a lens to better understand how teachers and their students compose across their languages. This is distinct from a tradition of additive notions of multilingualism and multilingual writing studies in elementary classrooms that illustrate how young children leverage their language varieties to learn to write in English-only.

Methods
As a cross-case analysis (Stake, 1995), we brought our collective data sets together to analyze how teachers supported students’ fluid language use (translanguaging) in their classrooms and cultivated translingual approaches to writing. Data from three elementary writing workshop classrooms in different educational contexts—a predominantly Latino, ESL third grade; an ethnically diverse fourth-grade ESL setting; and a second-grade general education classroom with multilingual children—were analyzed using a constant-comparative approach.

Results and Implications
We found that teachers and students drew on linguistic differences not as deficiencies, but as resources for literacy learning, particularly writing. In this cross-case analysis, we illustrate how three distinct approaches to translingual writing were enacted across all three classrooms despite the constraints of their English-dominant contexts for instruction. These facets included intentional community engagement that informed students’ writing topics and provided language models for students, a meta-awareness and modeling of language negotiations in the teachers’ own writing, and the shared study of linguistically diverse literature as models for young writers. This study contributes to and expands upon a developing and democratic vision for teaching writing (Fraiberg, 20011; Lu & Horner, 2011; Young & Martinez, 2011) that ensures students’ diverse ways with words (Heath, 1982) are valued, leveraged, and taught, across different kinds of multilingual contexts.

Authors

• Angie Zapata, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Tasha Marie Tropp Laman, University of Louisville