Designing Translanguaging Spaces in a Third-Grade Chinese Language Arts Class Purpose

• In Event: Contextualizing Translanguaging in Different Chinese-English Bilingual Educational Settings

Abstract

Purpose
In recent years, a group of researchers (e.g., Hamman-Ortiz, 2019; de Jong, Yilmaz, & Marichal, 2019; Somerville & Faltis, 2019) have questioned the strict boundaries of the two separate educational spaces in U.S. dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs. They have called for developing flexible, multilingual spaces where the dynamic nature of bilingualism could be recognized and bilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires could be leveraged as a resource in meaning making tasks. Specifically, Sánchez, García, and Solorza (2018) proposed a translanguaging allocation policy as a guiding framework to infuse English and its partner language spaces “with translanguaging rings as scaffolds, translanguaging documentation for authentic assessment, and translanguaging transformation to liberate bilingual learners’ creative voices and critical consciousness” (p. 49). The purpose of this study is to explore and illustrate how such translanguaging allocation policy could be strategically and purposefully implemented in a third grade Chinese Language Arts (CLA) class in a Mandarin-English DLBE program where the majority of the students were English-dominant speakers.

Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework undergirding this study is translanguaging. Theoretically, translanguaging features the dynamic process whereby bi/multilinguals select linguistic and semiotic features from their full communicative repertoire strategically and flexibly to mediate complex social and cognitive activities (García & Li Wei, 2014). Pedagogically, translanguaging calls upon teachers to make heteroglossic spaces that leverage students’ bilingualism and bilingual ways of knowing and that support their socio-emotional development and bilingual identities (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017).

Methods and data sources
Taking the form of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), I (as the researcher) and a Mandarin teacher worked together to co-design translanguaging documentation, translanguaging rings, and translanguaging transformation spaces (Sánchez et al., 2018) in a third grade CLA class. During the process, we both acted as knowledge brokers, engaging in equitable forms of dialogue and listening to make informed decisions on translanguaging designs in iterative ways. Data collection included classroom and design meeting recordings, observational field notes, and teacher and students’ artifacts and interviews throughout the 2018-2019 school year. Inductive and deductive coding (Maxwell, 2013) were adopted to analyze our translanguaging activities and students’ meaning-making practices.

Results
Findings reveal that translanguaging allocation policy opened up spaces for dynamic multilingual and multimodal interactions. Students were able to develop deeper content understandings, build cross-linguistic connections, and develop bi/multilingual identities and critical consciousness in those flexible bilingual spaces. However, designing translanguaging pedagogies was a challenging task which needed to take contextual factors into consideration and involved constant (re)negotiation between the researcher and teacher’s language ideologies. It was a balancing act to create translanguaging spaces while privileging students’ use of Mandarin given the societal dominance of English.

Scholarly significance
This study highlights the opportunities and challenges emerging from the translanguaging design process and suggests that researcher-teacher collaboration provides a promising way to generate evidence-based, practitioner-informed, and context-appropriate knowledge for curricular and pedagogical improvements in DLBE programs. This will help us as educational researchers to “accept our responsibility” to translate theory into classroom practice to better serve our communities.

Author

• Zhongfeng Tian, The University of Texas at San Antonio