“Teacher, are those words how you spell in Arabic?”: Socializing Linguistic and Cultural Awareness through Metalinguistic Conversations in Preschool

• In Event: Translanguaging, Multimodality and Affect in School and Community Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Objectives
This study aims to understand how young children’s appreciation of different languages and cultures can be fostered through translanguaging pedagogy.

Theoretical framework
This study draws on language socialization theory (Ochs & Shieffelin 2011), translanguaging theory, and multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin 2018). It follows one graduate teaching assistant’s (TA’s) activities teaching Arabic language and culture to the 3-5 year old children in one classroom, a few of whom are heritage speakers of Arabic, through vocabulary activities, read-alouds, teaching cultural protocols of greeting and requesting, songs, cooking activities, and drawing lessons. A key component of the TA’s pedagogical practice is metalinguistic conversations, a type of translanguaging practice described by Palmer, Mateus, Martínez, & Henderson (2014). These are conversations about how languages and cultural practices are similar and different, and how they are used.

Data sources
The graduate teaching assistant’s teaching activities in the preschool classroom were videorecorded over a two-month period. As part of its curriculum, this preschool hosts a program whereby bilingual graduate and undergraduate university students implement bilingual teaching activities with dual language learners.

Method
A collection of episodes involving the TA’s use of metalinguistic conversations was made and analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis (C. Goodwin 2018).

Results
The analysis illustrates how the teaching assistant elicited co-engagement of the children in metalinguistic conversations through: providing visuals with pictures and writing, through requesting Arabic words and phrases in a fun, game-like setting, and through creating connections to children’s own hone languages and cultures. The children’s engaged participation in these conversations was exhibited through expressions like “Are those words how you spell in Arabic?”; “In Arabic, you write like this (gesturing right to left w/surprise face)?” Children’s enthusiastic responses were also seen in rounds of noticings, where they called out noticings, and tied to the format of one another’s noticings, of similarities and differences between Arabic and English oral and written forms (Kuntay & Senay 2003; M.H. Goodwin 1990; Goodwin & Goodwin 2012).

Scholarly Significance
As the language socialization framework emphasizes how children learn the values of a culture through participating in its language routines, at the same time that they learn its language (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011), by drawing on it, the study proved helpful in illuminating how children’s appreciation of multilingualism and of different cultures can be interactionally achieved from an early age through metalinguistic conversations and positive, focused discussions about different languages and cultures.

Author

• Hanna Asmaeil, University of California - Santa Barbara