Equity in Early Literacy: Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Through a Translanguaging Lens

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Ten
  In Roundtable Session: Evidence-Based Reading Instruction From a Multilingual Standpoint (Table 9)

Abstract

Objectives:
Approaches to early literacy instruction, in particular phonemic awareness and phonics, have not taken into consideration multilingual students’’ dynamic and complex learning profiles, which include their language resources. “One size fits all approaches,” rooted in monolingual ideologies, have not resulted in expected gains for young multilingual students. These methods also fail to value, recognize, and integrate the resources that multilingual students bring to literacy learning (NCEL, 2022, Souto-Manning et. al, 2021). This study aims to identify and document how teachers and multilingual students currently experience phonemic awareness and phonics instruction and how to design instruction which leverages multilingual students’’ resources to improve instruction and develop an approach to word learning from a translingual standpoint.

This paper focuses on two research questions: 1. How do teachers of multilingual students conceive of phonemic awareness and phonics for young multilingual learners?; 2. In what ways do teachers both position and build upon young multilingual students’ language resources during phonemic awareness and phonics instruction?

Theoretical Framework:
While it is undeniable that these foundational skills are critical to learning to read, viewing these as a “silver bullet” for young multilingual students, especially when they are rooted in a monolingual approach, fail to truly value, sustain, and leverage students’ diverse language resources (Suoto-Manning et al., 2021). Because approaches to phonemic awareness and phonics are founded on monolingualism, they also have created de facto monolingual reading policies and practices for multilingual students (Author A, 2021; Zoeller & Briceno, 2022).

For most multilingual students, learning to read in general has been equated with learning to read in English (Author A, 2021). Therefore, even if educators generally consider emergent bilinguals’ language resources in a positive light, the day to day literacy instructional practices send a decisive message to students and their families that they must leave their knowledge of letters, sounds, language, and reading behind to learn to read when they come to school. While researchers have studied how various components of the balanced literacy block can shift based on the adoption of multilingual approaches to literacy, the ways in which these components of early literacy instruction have been both conceived and implemented has remained solidly monolingual and based on English orthography (Souto-Manning et al, 2021).

Methods & Data Sources:
A qualitative approach consisting of observations and interviews was adopted to capture teachers’ attitudes and experiences as well as document the interactions between teachers and students during instruction. Results from the pilot study phase of this study demonstrate that while bilingual teachers are open to a translanguaging approach to phonics and phonemic awareness, they are not clear about when during lessons they can adapt curriculum to leverage students’ multilingual resources.

Results & Significance:
An approach to phonemic awareness and phonics instruction from a translanguaging perspective does not currently exist. There are few, if any, models for teachers to approach phonemic awareness and phonics instruction that center students’ multilingualism. This work contributes both to what we know about phonemic awareness and phonics instruction for young multilingual students and how to enact it.

Author

• Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Brooklyn College - CUNY
  Presenting Author