Prefiguring Translingual Possibilities: The Transformative Potential of Translanguaging in Dual-Language Education

• In Event: Educators' Perspectives on the Translanguaging  Landscape in Multilingual Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper articulates a vision for how translanguaging can transform dual language education in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data from elementary and middle school classrooms, we highlight both the possibilities and constraints that obtain with respect to translanguaging in U.S. schools. We share examples of bilingual Latinx children and their teachers translanguaging spontaneously within monoglossic instructional settings, including English immersion and dual language classrooms. Despite coming from two different program models, all of these examples emerged within instructional arrangements that were meant to be monoglossic (i.e., in which Spanish and English were understood to be separate and meant to be kept separate); and they all showcase the creative and dynamic bilingualism in which bilingual Latinx children and their teachers engaged despite these monoglossic constraints.



The paper employs a translanguaging (García, 2009) lens in order to examine everyday examples of spontaneous and unmarked language mixing, framing these examples as powerful reflections of linguistic dexterity and dynamic bilingualism. In addition, the paper draws on the notion of prefigurative pedagogy (Allman, 1999) to explore how these examples of everyday translanguaging foreshadow fundamentally different kinds of speaking and learning even within the practical constraints of monoglossic schooling.



This paper focuses on ethnographic data collected at two different public schools in Los Angeles, California. Comparing data from an English-only middle school classroom and a K-1 Spanish-English dual language classroom, we analyze examples of spontaneous translanguaging that emerged within the contexts of everyday classroom interactions between teachers and students. Video-recordings of classroom interaction were logged and transcribed. Fieldnotes and transcripts were subsequently coded inductively for emergent themes.

 

Data sources consist of participant observation fieldnotes and transcripts of video-recorded classroom interactions.



Analysis of the data suggests that these students and their teachers disrupted the supposed linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish, transforming officially monoglossic spaces into more flexible and dynamic learning contexts—into more translingual spaces. Such examples, we argue, are instructive precisely because they emerge within monoglossic instructional arrangements. We argue that these classrooms represent prefigurative spaces—sites where bilingual Latinx students and their teachers foreshadow forms of interaction and instruction that we might envision as part of a more translingual approach to schooling.

By showing us what is possible even within the constraints of monoglossic instruction, they provide glimpses of what might be possible absent such constraints, pointing towards a vision of what dual language education might become.



This study contributes to a more robust understanding of translanguaging pedagogies by foregrounding the everyday bilingualism of students and teachers, and by grounding pedagogical implications within these spontaneous moments of bilingual expression. The prefigurative spaces that we explore can directly inform theory, research, and practice in ways that transform dual language education for bi/multilingual Latinx learners.

Authors

• Victoria Melgarejo, Stanford University

• Neida Basheer Ahmad, Stanford University

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University