Translanguaging Children's Literature: Cultivating Understandings of the Past, Present, and Place in a Bilingual Classroom

• In Event: Situating Students: Four Approaches to Critical Engagement With Children's and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Critical literacies have been considered to be too difficult for emergent bilingual learners due to their age and “limited language proficiency.” In a 5th grade L2/bilingual classroom, a Chinese literacy teacher uses children’s literature to move L2 literacy learning to the ideological dimension. Employing a critical collaborative inquiry of teaching and learning as texts and drawing on the theoretical concepts of translanguaging and critical literacies, the study examines the lesson transcripts of classroom interactions to investigate how dialogue facilitates critical work. The findings show that translanguaging provides intertextual support for critical literacies practice. More significantly, such work offers opportunities to critically engage L2 learners in disrupting power relations as they learn about the past, present and place.

Authors

• Marsha Liaw, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Maria José Botelho, University of Massachusetts Amherst