Preservice Teachers Engaging in Discourse Analysis of Translingual Read-Alouds in English-Medium Schooling

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

Abstract

Overview
Over the past two decades, scholars have documented how bi/multilingual students benefit both academically and socially when they are in classrooms that sustain (Paris & Alim, 2017) and leverage (García-Sánchez & Orellana 2019) their cultural and linguistic knowledges within instruction. However, preservice teachers (PSTs) preparing to enter linguistically diverse classrooms commonly engage in literacy methods classes that employ monolingual ideologies which ignore bilingual students’ linguistic resources and identities. Responding to this need, a growing number of scholars have called for teacher education programs to take a practice-based, discourse-analytic approach to teaching PSTs to draw upon bi/multilingual students’ language practices in schooling (Martinez et al., 2017). In this proposal, we take up this call by examining how PSTs who do not share the linguistic backgrounds of their students engage in and reflect on discourse analysis of videos of themselves teaching think-alouds using translingual children’s books to small groups of Latinx bilingual students as part of a literacy methods comprehension course.

Theoretical Perspectives
In this paper, we draw upon a social literacies perspective (Street, 1995) which foregrounds literacy as a situated sociocultural phenomenon that is collaboratively constructed and locally negotiated. From this perspective, literacy practices are not neutral, but are influenced by ideologies and power relations. However, literacy practices are not deterministic. Through interaction, both teachers and students can construct reading and writing in ways that depart from the typical, monolingual norms of schooling.

Methods
In this study, we blended research methodologies – ethnography (Blommaert & Jie, 2010), practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2015), and discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2022). Data includes videos of PST read alouds, audio of planning and discourse analysis sessions, PST written reflections, and field notes. This analysis focuses on PSTs’ lesson planning and discourse analysis of their read aloud videos. We used inductive analyses (Thomas, 2016) to examine patterns in the data and then identified rich points (Agar, 2006) for closer analysis within each of these patterns.

Findings and Significance
Several themes emerged from our analyses of PSTs’ planning and discourse analysis of their translingual read alouds. First, PSTs often toggled back and forth between developing critical sociocultural understandings and read aloud pedagogy as they planned, enacted, and reflected on the process. Second, PSTs engaged in perspective-taking on bilingual students’ experiences in schooling when they anticipated and did mispronounce Spanish words in the text. Lastly, PSTs reflected on how bilingual students often showed up differently as readers during the read alouds. Students who were perceived as “low-level” readers, “disinterested” or “quiet” were some of the most engaged in their small groups, leading some PSTs to problematize normative comprehension practices in schooling. The significance of these findings points toward the affordances of experiential learning through practice-based, discourse-analytic approaches for PSTs when they engage in pedagogies that draw upon students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Authors

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Megan Chaffin, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Carpenter de Cortina, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
  Presenting Author