Exploring Affirmative Stancetaking Towards Multilingualism in a Renewed Era of English-Dominant Reading Instruction

• In Event: Interrogating Reading Policies and Practices for Emergent Bilinguals in Changing Political and Instructional Contexts

Abstract

Overview
English monolingual approaches to the teaching of elementary reading are dominant within the Science of Reading (SOR) approach that now dominates early reading instruction (Herrera & de Jong, 2023), despite that the elementary aged U.S. schooling population is majority students of Color (NCES, 2021) This presentation draws upon data from a microethnographic study (Bloome et al., 2022) to explore how a teacher, working in a district that adopted an SOR approach to reading curriculum, reimagined reading curricula to incorporate translanguaging pedagogies. The purpose of this study is to examine the co-construction of affirmative stances to multilingualism within a translanguaging approach to reading instruction in a second-grade classroom and students’ responses to these stances set within the SOR discourse.

Theoretical Framing
We draw upon a social perspective on literacy in which ideologies such as monolingualism and monoculturalism influence how literacy is constructed in situated contexts (Street, 1995). We also draw upon translanguaging pedagogies (García et al., 2016) to understand how teachers encourage students to fluidly draw upon full linguistic repertoire while challenging linguistic hierarchies. Lastly, we draw upon sociolinguistic theories of stance-making to examine how stances are constructed in which participants evaluate multilingualism while also invoking social, political, and ideological orders (Jaffe, 2009).

Methods
This study was conducted in a second-grade classroom in a mainstream school that serves over 75% bi/multilingual student population. The corpus of data includes video recordings, interviews with teachers and students as well as student work products collected across the school year. We first identified all moments of affirmative stances through descriptive coding and then engaged in pattern coding to determine the types of affirmative stances (Saldaña, 2021). We then drew upon discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2022) to examine how affirmative stances were formed through a four-part discursive process: proposal, acknowledgement, recognition, and sustainment. We also examined field notes to understand how students’ responses to affirmative stances shifted depending on the audience for their reading and writing.

Findings
Findings show that five types of stances were co-constructed in microinteractional moments: personal, relational, ideational, textual, and political. The findings also reveal that students’ responses to affirmative stances shifted when they were asked to create reading responses to be hung in the hallway, a space that the students perceived as a highly-surveilled and involving crossing of academic borders (Nuñez, 2021) that required a strict adherence to English, reflecting culturally produced boundaries embedded within Science of Reading. By providing students with opportunities for children to experience themselves initiating opportunities to advocate for multilingual approaches for audiences within their classroom, the students showed increased comfortability to write multilingually for audiences in the hallway.

Significance
These findings point towards the readiness and excitement of children to construct affirmative stances to multilingualism in reading instruction in their classroom yet how linguistic hierarchies embedded within the current English-dominant approaches to teaching reading (e.g., SOR) can influence what audiences and spaces students feel comfortable taking up those approaches.

Authors

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College

• Lexi Woodward, University of Arkansas