Teaching With Translanguaging as a Critical Literacy Pedagogy in Elementary Bilingual Education

• In Event: Translanguaging and Multimodal Practices in Education

Abstract

- A translanguaging stance aims to empower multilingual learners to draw on their entire communicative repertoires to transform classroom language borders (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015). In elementary dual-language immersion (DLI) contexts, the purpose of translanguaging should be both biliteracy development and social transformation. This research offers both a global and local view of how elementary DLI teachers engage the purposes and tensions of translanguaging. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multiple case studies, it demonstrates how teachers engage translanguaging to teach for more than biliteracy/biculturalism, teach as a co-learner, and to disrupt raciolinguistic ideologies, while also confronting tensions related to English hegemony, negotiating weak and strong translanguaging, and valuing teacher expertise. It also proposes translanguaging as a qualitative research methodology.

Author

• Kevin Donley, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author