Reclaiming Bilingualism: Translanguaging in a Science Class

• In Event: 68.037 - Translanguaging With Multilingual Students: Learning From Classroom Moments

Abstract

Traditionally, and viewed from a policy perspective, languages in a dual language bilingual program are strictly separated. From this official standpoint, rarely are students invited to bring their entire linguistic repertoire to construct meaning in the different learning events that take place in a classroom (Menken & García, 2010). Yet, in daily practice, teachers and students challenge this notion to teach and to learn. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which a dual language bilingual teacher utilizes translanguaging to support student learning. It also examines the ways in which bilingual students utilize their entire linguistic repertoire to construct meaning in a middle school science classroom, as they reclaim their own bilingualism.

Translanguaging is an emerging and growing concept in the field of bilingualism. Baker (2011) argues that, translanguaging is “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages (p. 288). García’s (2009) conceptualization of translanguaging moves beyond the “two languages” concept to extend its meaning to involve the “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds” (p. 45). The present study is guided by García (2009) and García and Li Wei’s (2014) notion of translanguaging, and focuses on the students’ and their teacher’s use of translanguaging strategies in a Spanish-medium middle school science classroom. This study differs from previous classroom case studies exhibiting the use of translanguaging in that it aims to uncover how students and their teacher utilize their bilingual resources in a minoritized language-medium classroom.

This study utilized the methodology of transformative action research, a mode of inquiry that is collaborative and participatory. Two university researchers and a classroom teacher engaged in collaborative pedagogical practices as well as research. It is an attempt to describe what it might be rather than implement and evaluate what already is (Wells & Haneda, 2000). Data sources included: observational notes, digital audio recordings of the planning and debriefing session with the teacher, video recording of the lesson with the students, teacher and student artifacts. The researchers coded the data axillary as they engaged in multiple re-readings of it.

The findings of this study indicate that through the use of translanguaging strategies, the students are developing what Bourdieu (1991) called “linguistic capital,” a competence in the societal standards of language, but through engaging their own internal language capacities. It is these translanguaging literacy practices that “provide an area for constructing and performing identities" (Merchant & Carrington, 2009, p. 63). Participants deployed their entire language repertoire, including features of Spanish that they use at home, to build this new and full linguistic competence. It is the teacher’s knowledge of her local context and the individual student’s strengths (Carini & Himley, 2010), her metis (Scott, 1998), that enables her to take up translanguaging to engage students as scientists. Translanguaging allows the teacher and the students to mediate complex content learning and language learning as they reclaim Spanish.

Authors

• Cecilia M. Espinosa, Lehman College/CUNY

• Luz Yadira Herrera, City University of New York