Where Everyday Translanguaging Meets Academic Writing: Exploring Tensions and Generative Connections for Bilingual Latina/o Students

• In Event: 14.045 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.045-4 - Everyday Practices in Transcultural and Translingual Communities: Connections to School

Abstract

In schools nationwide, bilingual Latina/o students often communicate by moving fluidly across English and Spanish—an everyday language practice that has been variously referred to as Spanglish, Spanish-English code-switching, and translanguaging. In this paper, I explore potentially fruitful connections between this everyday form of bilingualism and the kinds of writing valued in academic settings. Drawing on ethnographic data from my research in urban elementary and middle schools, I examine the everyday translanguaging in which bilingual Latina/o children and youth engage as they skillfully and creatively blur the supposed linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish in their everyday talk. I highlight the bilingual skills that these students deploy in their everyday interactions, and I showcase their attentiveness to the aesthetic dimensions of bilingual speech. I further examine how these linguistic competencies overlap with specific skills highlighted in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, including the use of “precise” vocabulary and the composition of writing that is “appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.” I argue that the skills already evident in the everyday translanguaging of bilingual Latina/o students constitute an untapped pedagogical resource that could potentially serve to support the teaching and learning of academic writing.

I situate this analysis within a broader critique of monolingual approaches to schooling, in general, and to writing instruction, in particular. I argue that the monolingual ideologies undergirding current standards and instructional approaches prevent educators from recognizing bilingual Latina/o students’ everyday linguistic competencies. As currently articulated, for example, the Common Core State Standards actually call for students to develop a more limited set of linguistic skills than those that bilingual Latina/o students deploy in their everyday interactions in school. Indeed, I suggest that these students’ everyday linguistic competencies are more reflective of the kinds of communication skills necessary for success in an increasingly multilingual society. I conclude by offering conceptually grounded practical approaches to leveraging students’ linguistic competencies as resources for writing pedagogy across both monolingual and bilingual instructional contexts. Such approaches, I suggest, might help bilingual Latina/o students successfully meet and exceed existing standards, and they might also help educators begin to embrace more rigorous standards that are aligned with the communicative demands of our increasingly multilingual reality.

Author

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University