Learning From Spanish-English Emergent Bilingual Children's Literature Discussions in Spanish

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Pushing Boundaries in Bilingual Elementary Education

Abstract

This qualitative case study describes how a group of second grade Spanish-English emergent bilingual children in a one-way immersion classroom draws on their prior cultural knowledge in discussions of three realistic fiction texts with different levels of cultural relevance. Data sources include video and audio recorded classroom discussions, observational field notes, and interviews with the classroom teacher. A priori and open coding are employed to identify salient themes and patterns across the data. Translanguaging theory (García & Wei, 2014) and Rueda’s facilitative encoding hypothesis (2011) are employed to analyze and interpret data. Preliminary findings suggest that child participants draw on prior knowledge more frequently and effectively to participate and comprehend in discussions when a text contains culturally familiar events.

Author

• Amy Clark, DePaul University