Multilingual Learners’ Metalinguistic Awareness During Collaborative Translanguaging

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Language, Ideology, and Identity in Bi-/Multilingual Education (Table 4)

Abstract

Culturally sustaining and translanguaging pedagogies offer promise to improve students' language, literacy, and content area learning by leveraging cultural and linguistic strengths of students to create equitable learning spaces. In this roundtable, we present initial analyses of students’ metalinguistic awareness produced during a collaborative translanguaging activity. Teachers identified rich sentences in the source texts (Spanish and English), and student dyads collaboratively generated translations of the sentence. Then, dyads came together to discuss and evaluate the different translations. Findings demonstrate that students produced a wide variety of complex metalinguistic discussions, although engagement with given pieces of source and target text were confined to single days. We hope to generate audience feedback on current analyses and ideas for future analyses.

Authors

• Mikel W. Cole, University of Houston

• Marwa Elshafie, University of Houston

• Yan Yan, University of Houston

• Zhenjie Hou, University of Houston

• Hien Thi Tran, University of Houston