Beginning Bilingual Teachers' Understanding and Use of Translanguaging as a Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogy

• In Event: Enacting Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Pedagogy for Multilingual Learners: Investigating Novice Teachers’ Practices

Abstract

Objectives

Translanguaging as a theoretical framework and pedagogical tool has informed issues in bilingual education and teacher education. This manuscript draws on translanguaging theory and research to consider how an understanding of translanguaging can impact and potentially transform teacher candidates’ beliefs about their own multilingual skills and practices, and how they position the linguistic skills and practices of their future emergent bilingual students. Following two cohorts of Spanish-English bilingual teacher candidates entering their first year of teaching in bilingual elementary settings in California, this manuscript reports on how they make sense of translanguaging theory and connect it to their classroom practice.

Theoretical Framework

This manuscript draws on translanguaging as both a theory of dynamic bilingualism (García, 2013; García & Wei, 2014) and pedagogical tool to be leveraged for academic learning (Creese, & Blackledge, 2010), specifically as an instructional and assessment framework (García et al., 2016). Translanguaging offers educators a framing of multilingual flexibility (i.e., moving across and within languages fluidly) as the communicative norm for multilingual communities, rather than a symptom of underdeveloped linguistic skills.

Method and data sources

This 3-year qualitative study included two consecutive cohorts of pre-service bilingual teachers that each took a yearlong biliteracy course at a California university with the author, and then participated in follow-up interviews during their first year teaching. In an effort to model and reinforce dynamic bilingual language practices (Palmer et al., 2014) a pro-translanguaging course policy was included in the syllabus and the course content included the integration of articles on translanguaging in both Spanish and English, critical classroom discussions on the topic, and a reflection paper where teacher candidates documented their understanding of the topic. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed, and read initially for topics and themes, and then coded by repetitive themes (Saldaña, 2009) with a focus on translanguaging and dynamic bilingualism.

Findings

Preliminary findings indicate that novice teachers need continuous support to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions essential in engaging with translanguaging as both a theoretical framework and pedagogical tool, particularly if they are having difficulty viewing their own bilingualism as a resource. Linguistic flexibility was a common translanguaging stance among the bilingual educators, but several indicated that school-level constraints impacted their ability to provide translanguaging spaces in their bilingual classrooms, especially within schools that adopted a strict separation of languages.

Significance

Translanguaging theory can be a transformative agent in developing teacher candidates’ pedagogical stance and classroom practices towards multilingualism as a resource. The linguistic imagination of both teacher and students is critical to fully embrace dynamic bilingualism, yet teachers need a solid understanding of alternatives to the normalized monolingual practices of mainstream classrooms, especially if they experienced subtractive schooling practices during their K-12 education. Teacher educators play a critical role in introducing teacher candidates to the potential of translanguaging as a culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012; Valdés, 2016) for both bilingual academic instruction and learning, although continuous coaching or professional development on the issue is needed the first few years of teaching.

Author

• Sera Jean Hernandez, San Diego State University