Beyond Translanguaging: Building on Shared Linguistic Heritage for Academic Literacy Development Among Immigrant 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

This paper examines how Moroccan immigrant children’s cultural funds of knowledge (Moll & González 1997) and everyday language practices can be used as points of leverage in their acquisition and development of academic literacy skills.

I bring into critical dialogue sociocultural studies of literacy, linguistic anthropology, and cultural modeling inspired research. These frameworks have countered deficit views of the verbal abilities of non-dominant groups, as well as suggested how quotidian communicative and sociocultural practices can become a base for school practices that allow students to exploit their full linguistic repertoires (Alim 2004; Lee 2007; Zentella 1997; Orellana and Reynolds, 2008).

This paper builds on a larger linguistic ethnography documenting the linguistic repertoires displayed by Moroccan immigrant children in Spain, aged 8-9, across learning contexts. In school, I focus on children’s videotaped interactions in a Spanish Literacy Enhancement pull-out program. Outside of school, I videotaped children interacting with peers during games, acting as language brokers, and in other family interactions and activities. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I examine (1) academic practices in which Moroccan immigrant students participates in class activities, and (2) on language practices that the same group of children engages in outside of school.

The comparative examination of these everyday language practices shows that while there is a high degree of overlap between the communicative practices and literacy strategies that are expected of Moroccan immigrant children at school and what they do outside of the classroom, there are also significant differences. For example, when playing games with friends or translating for families, there is an ethos of collaboration in which participants negotiate interchangeably expert/novice roles and pool the resources of their distributed linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. Further, in these contexts, children’s bilingual knowledge is an asset enabling children to engage in forms of multimodal translanguaging (Author, Forthcoming) to mediate linguistic, social, and cognitive activities. In the literacy enhancement pull-out program, however, there is a strong emphasis on children’s individual engagement with texts and comprehension is not collaborative. Also, children’s bilingual expertise is neither valued nor used to solve problems. Related to this, perhaps the biggest difference is how in all the out-of-school contexts analyzed, children dynamically draw on Spanish and Arabic as an integrated system to achieve activity goals successfully. Yet at school, Arabic and Spanish inhabit completely separate linguistic, social, and cognitive realms.

Given these similarities and differences, this paper discusses ways in which linguistic-ethnographic analysis can help schools tackle literacy in ways that build on children’s strengths rather than deficits. In particular, the paper suggests how translanguaging strategies (García 2013) that build on students’ everyday language practices outside of school can be powerful tools for learning. The paper also elaborates on the idea that Arabic itself can be productively used a vehicle to promote Spanish academic literacy. Cultivating Moroccan immigrant students’ metalinguistic awareness about historical linguistic connections would enhance their knowledge of cultural and formal properties of both languages, while validating their multilingual repertoires in a way that disrupts linguistic inequality.

Author

• Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, Temple University