Moments of Metalinguistic Awareness in a Kindergarten Class: Translanguaging for Simultaneous Biliterate Development

• In Event: 18.040 - Translanguaging Pedagogies Shaping Language Policy and Program Design Toward Educational Opportunity for Emergent Bilinguals

Abstract

Translanguaging in bilinguals has been described in oral language interactions (Garcia & Wei, 2014), as a practice that facilitates transformation of information (Williams, in García, 2009) and as a self-regulating mechanism in writing (Author 1, 2014). Creating pedagogical practices that make use of translanguaging has remained a relatively unexplored area but that promises to permeate the education of plurilingual learners. This presentation seeks to add to this body of growing knowledge by describing the role of translanguaging within the implementation of a simultaneous biliterate practice with young children developing reading and writing in French and German (Escamilla et al., 2013).

This study took place in a Kindergarten class with eighteen five year-olds in Alsace, France. The eighteen participants were in the early stages of developing simultaneous biliteracy in French and German, two languages that share alphabetic principles. This study employed cognates (words in two languages that share all or some print characteristics as well as a shared meaning), and identical and non-identical false cognates (words that share all or some print characteristics in both languages but not the same meaning). The words were presented as pairs. Some examples include the false cognate pair "bouche," meaning mouth in French; and "Buch," meaning book in German; the identical false cognate "minus," which in French means a small person and in German means minus; and the cognate "plat" in French and "Platte" in German meaning plate. The words were placed together as sets on the board and as the teacher pointed to each set, the students were able to establish interlinguistic comparisons based on the visual representation or words (or print awareness), analysis of their auditory characteristics (or phonological awareness), and their meaning (or semantic awareness). These three aspects are crucial in the early stages of reading development (August and Shanahan, 2006; Bialystok et al., 2010; Snow et al., 1999; Tazi, 2014).

The main focus of this presentation will center on the questions and collaborative discussions between the teacher and her students. Their insights demonstrate the students’ capacity to engage in metalinguistic discussions that centered on comparing and reflecting on how these carefully selected words look, sound and mean in French and German. This constitutes a simultaneous, early biliterate practice that was made possible by opening a translanguaging space where both languages can interact. As a result, it brought to the surface the linguist that lays dormant in every bilingual child, eager and curious to understand the oral and written characteristics of the languages they are in the process of learning.

Author

• Patricia Velasco, Queens College - CUNY