Supporting Emergent Bilingual Students Using Culturally Sustaining Practices and Translanguaging

• In Event: Equity-Focused Scholarship as Emancipatory and Liberatory Advocacy for Women of Color in Academia

Abstract

Purpose
In this investigation, I ask the question: How can teachers support emergent bilingual (EB) students within their classrooms using culturally sustaining practices and translanguaging? The goal of this study was to offer teachers a means for providing high quality educational experiences that are differentiated for EB needs.

Theoretical Frameworks & Perspectives
Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is a theory that promotes new language and learning within the school context, while allowing students to also maintain and learn more about their own culture and language (Paris, 2020). One example of CSP in practice is translanguaging (Garcia, 2020) which allows students to use their entire linguistic repertoire to make meaning of the world around them. Together CSP and translanguaging are a praxis where theory and practice converge.

Applying theory to praxis was informed by both my role as a doctoral student/scholar and as a bilingual teacher seeking to support bilingual students’ literacy in early elementary school. Despite the use of typical bilingual scaffolds such as color-coding materials, translations, and incorporating cognates in my teaching I felt my bilingual students were underserved relative to their monolingual peers. This investigation sought to reconcile theory and practice by understanding CSP through translanguaging in elementary classrooms.

Methods
Through a systematic review of the literature I examined the research on CSP and translanguaging practices used to support emergent bilinguals. Online search engines EBSCO and Google Scholar were used to identify peer-reviewed articles from 2012-2020 that include key terms: bilingual education, culturally sustaining practices, and translanguaging. This yielded a sample of 6,240 citations that were then sorted to only include studies that were published in education journals that specifically discussed translanguaging as a form of CSP within school settings. This led to the analytic sample being reduced to 15 articles that met the inclusion criteria.

Data Sources
Abstracts from the 15 peer-reviewed articles were collected and analyzed according to how they framed translanguaging and CSP. These articles were entered into a data analytic table that highlighted the methods and strategies used to apply translanguaging within a CSP framework.

Findings
I found that teachers can enact CSP by creating classroom environments where students feel represented, with books and content relevant to their experiences while also learning about other cultures (Osorio, 2020). When translanguaging, bilingual students use cross-language transfer between Spanish and English to help understand content and use Spanish as a scaffold to support their English acquisition (Geisler et al, 2007; Khote, 2018; Tsokalidou & Skourtou, 2020). Furthermore, CSP oriented teachers can support bilingual students by providing multimodal representation of content, collaboration with peers with different language proficiency, and using cognates to make meaningful connections between the Spanish and English (Garcia, 2020; Early & Kendrick, 2020).

Significance
Findings from this literature identified specific strategies that teachers who seek to enact CSP through translanguaging can employ. Bilingual teachers who offer translanguaging to their students not only sustain their student’s cultures and languages, but help them build bridges learning new languages and literacies.

Author

• Soarlyn Lopez, Hunter College - CUNY