Horizontes de Observación: Using Linguistic and Spatial Resources to Teach Across Language Difference

• In Event: 41.048 - Moving Toward Linguistically Responsive Teaching Across Content Areas

Abstract

This paper builds on an ongoing design-research study aimed at helping bilingual students leverage their full linguistic repertoires to improve reading comprehension by having them translate short passages from grade level texts during a modified guided reading program. Four 8th grade language arts teachers in a linguistically diverse school were trained to facilitate collaborative translation, then observed trying out the activity over three weeks. The paper describes how teachers combined familiar and novel practices to navigate shifting peripheralities during collaborative translation, leveraged material and spatial resources to create horizons of observation for teacher and student learning, collaboratively constructed a professional vision of translation practice, and combined this emergent vision with reasoning about specific moments of student activity to transform practice.

Author

• Samuel David, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities