Translingual Writing Among Young Emergent Bilinguals in a Community Literacy Center

• In Event: Translanguaging Perspectives on Writing: Learning From Findings Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares the findings from an ongoing, publicly engaged research project at a community literacy center, Autores Fuertes, located in urban Philadelphia. The center is one site among a network of centers that provides a variety of writing programming for children aged two to 17. This site, in particular, was founded to serve the bilingual and diverse Latinx community of South Philadelphia. The center offered an afterschool-writing program, evening and weekend writing workshops, and summer writing camps.

Theoretical Framework
To frame this project, the author turned to scholarship in translingual writing (Canagarajah, 2013; Zapata & Laman, 2016), translanguaging pedagogies (Author 5, 2017), and critical, genre-based writing approaches (Harman, 2018) to understand what was happening with the linguistic practices of the children who attended the center and the respective writing pedagogical practices that were implemented at the center.

Methods
Starting in 2015, this project coupled ethnographic case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) with participatory research (Kinloch, et. al., 2016) to craft a long-term research relationship with Autores Fuertes. The project began with ethnographic data collection through participant observations of the after-school writing program and the evening workshops. Initial observations indicated that the space was operating mostly monolingually in English in both spoken and written language. As the project progressed, the author began teaching writing workshops at the center that were meant to promote more bilingual, specifically Spanish, writing. Each writing workshop was free, offered on Saturday mornings for six to eight weeks, and open to children between the ages of six and twelve. Attendance ranged from four to twelve children in each session, and all the children used Spanish and English in their daily activities and had a heritage connection to a Latin American country.

Data Sources
The data corpus was generated from this series of writing workshops from 2016 to 2019 that covered a range of genres including poetry, family stories, graphica, and community language mapping. The corpus consisted of field notes, interviews, written artifacts, audio recordings, video recordings, and transcriptions of the recorded data.

Results
Findings show that the dynamic and creative translingual writing of these young children complicated the notion of a singularly held linguistic repertoire and challenged the claim of linguistic mismatches between home and school language. Also, the use of multilingual children’s literature, planning for flexible speech practices, and allowances for flexible writing practices were fundamental to creating critical, translingual writing workshops. Finally, the children demonstrated their translingual repertoires by incorporating authentic dialogue into their written narratives, capturing authentic writing and speech from the surrounding community, and using their translingual imaginations to challenge traditional written genres.

Scholarly Significance
While the writing practices of emergent bilinguals have often been construed as “behind” or lacking in spaces of “official” schooling, community learning spaces are sites of great potential for demonstrating the beauty, creativity, and authenticity of translingual writing.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Abraham, Rowan University
  Presenting Author