A Newcomer Emergent Bilingual Learner Engaging in Disciplinary Inquiry Practices through Translanguaging (Poster 10)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

Purpose:
This paper reports on how a newcomer emergent bilingual learner (EBL) engaged in meaning-making interactions with the teacher and peers during the disciplinary practices embedded in social studies inquiry through translanguaging.

Theoretical Perspective:
Scholars in social studies education are increasingly calling for implementation of culturally and linguistically relevant practices in social studies classrooms serving emergent bilingual and multilingual students (Jaffee & Yoder, 2019; Ramírez & Jaffee, 2022; Salinas et al., 2017). Translanguaging - drawing on students’ full language resources to make meaning - has emerged as a pedagogical approach that can address these students’ educational, linguistic, and cultural needs in socially just and equitable ways in subject-matter classrooms (García et al., 2017; Hernandez Garcia & Schleppegrell, 2021).
This study is informed by García and colleagues’ (2017) translanguaging classroom framework. To create a translanguaging social studies classroom, teachers (1) develop a stance that bilingualism is a resource to think, talk, and develop perspectives on social and civic issues that build from students’ lived experiences; (2) purposefully design instruction that includes (a) constructing collaborative structures, (b) using multilingual resources, and (c) implementing translanguaging pedagogical strategies; and (3) flexibly shift to respond to individual student’s language needs during learning. The study also draws on Halliday’s (2004) perspectives that as students engage in work across school subjects, they are simultaneously learning language, learning through language, and learning about language.

Methods and Data:
During 2021-2022, an Arabic-speaking teacher and I co-taught an inquiry-oriented social studies curriculum to 23 Arabic-speaking sixth-grade EBLs in a midwestern school located in a community with ongoing migration from the Middle East, encouraging translanguaging to support their participation. This paper focuses on Yardan, a recently arrived student from Yemen who was new to English, and whose participation was key to the development of translanguaging in the classroom. I ask: How does a newcomer sixth-grade emergent bilingual learner engage in the disciplinary work of social studies inquiry through translanguaging?
The data for this study is taken from translanguaging events in forty-five lessons video-recorded during four inquiry units (“investigations”) in which Yardan participated, two interviews with Yardan, and Yardan’s written work. I used time-series analysis (Yin, 2014) to assemble these translanguaging events in a chronology to help me analyze how Yardan engaged in the disciplinary inquiry practices across a school year, in interaction with the teachers and other EBLs.

Results and Significance
Findings show: (1) Bilingual inquiry curriculum and the teachers’ support for translanguaging provided the newcomer with multiple ways to engage in thinking and talking about social and civic issues and access to disciplinary language in Arabic and English. (2) The newcomer increasingly translanguaged to complete the disciplinary work and contribute to classroom knowledge across four investigations: (a) when deliberately paired with a bilingual student who was willing to support him and use Arabic to talk about content, and (b) when encouraged to write in Arabic and/or English.
The study contributes to understanding about creating a social studies translanguaging classroom and supporting newcomer EBL disciplinary learning and language development through translanguaging.

Author

• Mina Hernandez Garcia, University of Michigan