Translanguaging Landscapes in the Elementary School Math Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Translanguaging in Action: Exploring Language Practices Across Diverse Classrooms (Table 1)

Abstract

Translanguaging pedagogy can facilitate a child's learning by leveraging their entire linguistic, semiotic, and multimodal repertoire to learn academic content, like mathematics. The present study investigates how translanguaging linguistic landscapes are created and used in linguistically diverse fourth-grade elementary school classrooms. I take an ethnographic approach to analyze the translanguaging landscape of these classrooms. The analysis demonstrated three major themes: 1) how translanguaging is used in the classroom landscape, 2) the creation of translanguaging landscapes, 3) transcending the translanguaging landscape. I conclude that paying attention to semiotic and multimodal systems recruited in addition to the linguistic features in translanguaging landscapes, allows teachers and students to creatively leverage more of their meaning-making repertoires during mathematics time.

Author

• Alejandro Granados Vargas, University of California - Irvine