Interactions With New-to-Teacher Language Resources: Supporting Translingual Composing in a Multilingual Elementary Classroom

• In Event: Supporting Children and Families in Early Childhood Education Contexts Through Translingual Practices and Pedagogies

Abstract

Purpose and Framing
Educators in English-medium classrooms should support emergent bilingual students’ bilingualism and biliteracy (García & Kleifgen, 2010). However, this can be challenging when teachers seek to support students’ use of languages that those teachers do not speak. In this paper, I explore this issue by asking: How did teachers talk about and interact with language resources that were new to them, while attempting to support translingual composing in an English-medium, second-grade classroom? I draw from a collective translanguaging perspective (Orellana, 2016) to explore how teachers talked about, took up, and positioned new-to-them language resources. This perspective highlights how translanguaging can be a group practice in which people draw on their individual linguistic resources, including multiple named languages, to collectively make meaning.

Methods of Data Collection and Analysis
Data were collected using ethnographic (Heath & Street, 2008) and practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) methods in an English-medium, second-grade classroom across one year. I visited the writing workshop three times a week, collecting video recordings of teacher lessons and student composing and photographs of students’ texts. Half of the students in this class spoke Spanish at home, and three students spoke Korean, French, and Tagalog, respectively. The classroom teacher and I both spoke English and some Spanish. We invited students to compose translingually, and often spoke with students about their language use. Data analysis occurred in two phases. First, I descriptively coded (Miles et al., 2014) all data to identify every instance in which a teacher participated in an interaction involving a new-to-them named language (n = 90). Second, I re-examined these 90 events, using constant comparative coding (Thomas, 2016) to identify interactional patterns.

Findings and Importance
Analyses identified patterns in teachers’ interactions around new-to-them language resources, including: 1) positioning students as language experts and teachers as language learners, 2) drawing on shared language resources to support student composing in new-to-teacher language, and 3) expanding audiences to support student composing in new-to-teacher language. Drawing on illustrative examples of each pattern, I discuss how teachers, through their interactions with students, built collective translanguaging practices, but also at times contributed to ongoing “othering” of named languages beyond English. Implications for teachers and researchers working in English-dominant contexts are discussed, including pedagogical steps teachers can take to support students’ use of new-to-teacher language resources, and ideological and social implications of teacher talk about those languages.

Author

• Lindsey Rowe, Clemson University
  Presenting Author