Translanguaging With Elementary Students: Humanizing Multilingualism in an After-School Writing Club

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

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the emerging research on translanguaging spaces during the writing process of elementary learners through examining and documenting their languaging processes in a translanguaging after-school creative writing club. Implications point to the need to rethink pedagogy and assessment that accurately captures and humanizes multilingualism (and uses of AAL, multiple Englishes, and Spanishes) (Author 2, 2016; 2022).

Theoretical Framework
This paper is framed through a translanguaging lens (Canagarajah, 2011; García & Wei, 2014). Garcia and Wei (2014) define translanguaging as a creative process that invokes a sense of critical play and linguistic creativity in the use of various features and contexts for use. From this viewpoint, translanguaging offers teacher educators, teachers, and students a way to understand their use of linguistic repertoires. Translanguaging pedagogy calls for practical methods from which to develop multilingual writers’ language and expression (Author 5, 2017).

Method
Ethnographic case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) research and participatory action research methodologies were employed as the main research design for this project to capture the writing choices and practices multilinguals made in after-school creative writing clubs (2018-2019). These after-school writing clubs, held in the Spring of 2018 and 2019 respectively, encouraged students to use all of their linguistic repertoires to express their thoughts. There were 22 participants (15 in 2018, and 7 in 2019 respectively) ranging from grades one through five.

Data Sources
Data sources include multiple writing samples from the students; writing artifacts generated by the group, and audio-recordings of focus-group interviews with multilinguals around the use of repertoires (translanguaging), and their specific choices in their writing pieces to gain insight into the multilingual writing process. Open coding was used to identify codes and themes (Saldaña, 2012).

Results
Writing samples revealed a range of repertoires and demonstrated uses of linguistic abilities around phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics as they use their understanding of different features and resources to language. Student interviews revealed that students knew and understood that they were making specific choices around language to express their meaning making and for a variety of purposes. For example, one student wanted to leverage multiple repertoires to appeal to a broader audience, while another wanted to emphasize certain nouns and phrases. Another student expressed ease in starting in one named language then switching to another named language. These students conveyed a sense of orgullo in their abilities to use a range of repertoires available to them, without being confined to a specific named language (García & Sánchez, 2022).

Scholarly Significance
This work seeks to contribute to teacher education and teachers in recognizing the repertoires and translanguaging practices of multilinguals. Challenging notions of the use of other named languages (AAL, multiple Englishes, Spanish/Spanishes) as deficit, othered, and substandard (Gumperz, 1965; Gutierrez & Orellana, 2006), this work builds on the long-standing research that seeks to normalize the linguistic repertoires of students of diverse cultures and races as valid, resourceful, and intelligent.

Author

• Margarita Gómez, Loyola University Maryland
  Presenting Author