Measuring the Effects of Translanguaging Information on Preservice Teachers' Linguistically Equitable Decision-Making: An Analog Study

• In Event: Teacher Preparation in Special and Inclusive Education

Abstract

We conducted an analog experiment to identify whether providing preservice teachers with increasing levels of translanguaging (TL) information improves the quality of their educational decisions about a hypothetical English language learner (ELL)’s bilingual writing performance. We measured four decisions made by 145 preservice teachers: (a) their academic appraisals of a fourth grade ELL’s bilingual writing sample; (b) selections of bilingualism (in)sensitive classroom accommodations for the student; (c) attributions about the code-switching involved in the writing sample to positive or negative bilingual features, and (d) recommendation decisions for a special education referral. The working hypothesis, receiving more TL information would help preservice teachers make more linguistically equitable decisions about the ELL, was not confirmed across all the dependent variables measured.

Authors

• Sumin Lim, The University of Texas at El Paso

• Gregory Cheatham, University of Kansas