Teacher Ideologies and Transdialecting Pedagogies in an Arabic Heritage Community School

• In Event: Translanguaging in Five Heritage Language Learning Spaces: Challenges and Affordances for Both Teachers and Learners

Abstract

In the United States, the number of Arabic heritage learners has increased over the past decade due to migration and wars. A heritage learner is a child who grows up speaking or hearing Arabic at home and learning a second language — typically English in the US — at school. Arabic, as a global language, is best known for its multiglossic nature, where two varieties coexist: the Standard Arabic (or Fuṣḥa) and dialects. Recent studies (Author, 2023; Oraby & Azaz, 2023) in Arabic learning contexts have shown that translanguaging as a pedagogy facilitates learning of Fuṣḥa, supporting students' linguistic and cultural identities. However, few studies have focused on teachers’ beliefs, ideologies, and pedagogical practices in k-12 schools (Deiri, 2024) and community-based schools (Author, 2024). This study examines the translanguaging practices (including transdialecting) that teachers and students utilize in an Arabic heritage community school. It also surveys teachers’ language ideologies and how these align or conflict with their pedagogical practices.

Utilizing indexicality and its nexus to language ideologies (Woolard, 2020), this study analyzes the language ideologies that are either intentionally or unintentionally indexed in teachers’ pedagogical practices in a community-based school. Through the lens of pedagogical translanguaging (Author, 2023; Cenoz & Gorter, 2021), it also explores the student-teacher interactions in an Arabic heritage classroom. The data analyzed comes from a corpus of a larger ethnographic study that consists of 25 hours of audio- and video-recorded classroom instruction and 5 hours of semi-structured interviews with four Arabic teachers. The teachers were identified through snowball sampling (Noy 2008; Woodley & Lockard 2016). Consent forms were used for classroom recordings, observations and subsequent interviews. Through constant comparative analysis and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006; Xu & Zammit 2020), the emerging themes were coded, and repeated patterns were identified using an inductive coding process, such as multidialectal awareness, functions of dialects, beliefs, and challenges. Open coding was employed to allow for the emergence of themes relevant to teacher ideologies and multilingual classroom practices.

The findings illustrate teachers’ veneration of Fuṣḥa with representations that index “perfection,” “majesty,” “purism,” and “generosity.” Although teachers seemed tolerant of using Arabic dialects strategically, their overall positioning supports teaching Fuṣḥa and minimized teaching dialects. Analyzing the teacher interviews has also shown how the two teachers recognize Fuṣḥa as a marker or index for values that go beyond the linguistic use, such as the nature of Arabic sounds and its ‘loftiness’.

Classroom observations embodied translingual practices and provided a lens to whether the ideological stances were aligned or in conflict with the pedagogical practices. The examples of these translingual and transdialectal practices centered on meaning-making, negotiation and building lexical knowledge in learning Arabic. The teacher-learner exchanges indicate the flexible and integrated use of learners’ repertoires which contradicted with what they expressed in the interview. Implications of this study suggest the need to engage teachers in critical pedagogical reflections and to embrace the history of Fuṣḥa while advancing the teaching of dialects to enhance literacy skills.

Author

• Yousra Abourehab, University of Arizona