Pushing Against Language Boundaries: Composing in a First-Grade, Two-Way Bilingual Writer's Workshop

• In Event: Writing Instruction Across Bilingual Education Contexts: Mapping the Landscape and Illuminating Promising Practices

Abstract

This paper explores a first-grade bilingual writer’s workshop in a two-way dual language program at a Title I school in Texas. It sought to understand the teacher’s pedagogical and language choices as she adapted a monolingual writer’s workshop for emergent bilingual students, and to explore student agency, language, and modality within the bilingual workshop space. Bilingual students in under-resourced schools often experience formulaic, test-centered writing curriculum (McCarthy, 2008; Palmer & Rangel, 2011). However, research indicates that a writer’s workshop model is conducive to the social and linguistic growth of multilingual students (Laman, 2013). This National Writing Project trained bilingual teacher saw the writer’s workshop as a vehicle for working towards social justice, and assumed personal and professional responsibility for centering students’ voices in her classroom.
I view the workshop through the lens of humanizing pedagogy (Bartolomé, 1996) as a space for adults and children to problem pose and work towards mutual humanization. Translanguaging (Garcia & Wei, 2014) illuminated interactions and composing within the workshop space, upsetting dual language programs’ tendency to view languages as separate.
Data sources for this case study included ethnographic observations, audio/video recordings, interviews, and written artifacts. Data collection and analysis were iterative, and utilized a constant comparative method (Glaser & Straus, 1967) to analyze data inductively, followed by focused coding (Charmaz, 2006).
Findings reveal that the teacher fostered a humanizing and culturally sustaining bilingual environment, which made space for linguistic exploration. Though writing units alternated between Spanish and English instruction, and students were given the choice to compose in the “English classroom” or the “Spanish classroom”, students often muddied this linguistic separation through translanguaging, multimodal composition, and movement of their physical bodies. For instance, some “simultaneous bilinguals” chose to write in the “Spanish room,” but created multimodal texts that included translanguaging, for instance writing speech bubbles in one language and text in another.
Bilingual education can be a way for educators to accept responsibility for the ways multilingual and multi-varietal Students of Color have been marginalized by normative, English-only education. Teachers and teacher educators can better serve students by understanding their complex languaging resources, and giving them space to explore and compose in their languages and varieties.

Author

• Rosalyn Harvey-Torres, Georgia State University