Affordances, translanguaging and the international preservice teacher

ABSTRACT

Pedagogical translanguaging (TL) represents a contemporary and valuable instructional approach for bi/multilingual students. Researchers have identified the instructional practices and their affordances among bi/multilingual teachers who share a home language with their students, the dominant language used in the students’ home or community, and those who do not. However, research set in the United States into bilingual, international preservice teachers (PSTs) has not been forthcoming. This article reports on findings from two PSTs enrolled in a university practicum teaching course. One PST shares a home language, Spanish, with her students while the other, who is an international multilingual PST, does not. The aim of this research was to deepen an understanding of how each describes the affordances connected to pedagogical TL in their 15-week university practicum course and the connected practicum teaching experience. Data collection included interviews and weekly written assignments from the university course. Drawing on multi-case study design, findings revealed the ways that a linguistic repertoire, which included the ability to use Spanish, was instrumental in how they described the affordances related to pedagogical TL both in their classroom and in the connected practicum teaching site. Implications for teacher educators in multilingual education are given.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• preservice teachers
• safe space

Introduction

In teacher education research, translanguaging (TL) is examined as both a theory and a body of instructional practices. As a theory of bilingualism, TL is situated within the larger movement often referred to as the multilingual turn in language learning initially described by May (2014). TL, like the multilingual turn, is built upon the argument that language use emerges from a “unitary linguistic system” rather than separate systems (Otheguy et al., 2015). As such, a TL view of language use dismisses a monoglossic view of bilingual speakers as individuals whose language use represents an imperfect approximation of the “educated” native speaker. Rather, it draws from a heteroglossic orientation in which bi/multinguals, not monolinguals, become the reference point in describing bi/multilingual language use. When multilingual speakers engage in TL, they draw on their diverse linguistic repertoires in flexible, varied and dynamic ways to construct meaning (e.g. Canagarajah, 2011; Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; García & Wei, 2015; Leung, 2015).

In the classroom, pedagogical TL is often used to identify the instructional practices associated with TL (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020). Consistent with the broader theory driving TL (Otheguy et al., 2015), pedagogical TL practices reject the separation of language use in the classroom and advocate for instructional practices which acknowledge the full use of the linguistic repertoire (Shi & Rolstad, 2022). Researchers in the United States have documented its potential to increase academic literacy in English (Martínez, 2010, Sayer, 2012) and academic achievement (Hornberger & Link, 2012) as well as support a positive bi/multilingual identity (Creese & Blackledge, 2010). Bi/multilingual teachers who share a home language with their students draw on the affordances of bilingual texts (e.g. Daly, 2018, Kim & Song, 2019) translation (e.g. Pontier & Gort, 2016) and modelling the use of the home language (e.g. Kim & Song, 2019, Osorio, 2020) to engage students in TL. Home language refers to the dominant language that is used in a student’s home and community. Research into bi/multilingual teachers who do not share a home language with their students documents how imagery, gesture and movement in concert with TL builds early literacy skills (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018, Pacheco & Miller, 2015) and facilitates TL and content area knowledge (e.g. Blair, Haneda, & Bose, 2018, Pacheco, Kang, & Hurd, 2019, Zapata & Laman, 2016).

In international contexts, pedagogical TL is explored in connection to the larger issues of English medium instruction (EMI) (Muguruza et al., 2020), colonialism in African countries (Bunyi & Schroeder, 2017), the rights of indigenous and minoritized populations (Leonet, Cenoz, & Gorter, 2017) and ways in which TL can be used to advance students’ academic skills in English (Gynne, 2019, Iversen, 2019a, 2019a). Specific findings demonstrate ways in which pedagogical TL can allow students access to their linguistic repertoires through the of visual supports (Prasetya, 2021), digital software for translation (Iversen, 2019a, 2019b), word banks, translations, multilingual writing (e.g. Duarte, 2018; Krulatz & Iversen, 2019; Ollerhead, 2018) and teachers acting as co-learners in the home language with their students (Shi & Rolstad, 2022).

However, while there is a growing body of research into the pedagogical TL practices among teachers who do not share a home language with their students (Hansen-Thomas, Stewart, Flint, & Dollar, 2020; Iversen 2019b) research into pedagogical TL of international bi/multilingual preservice teachers (PSTs) in American classrooms has not been forthcoming. The gap in the research is surprising in light of the fact that international teachers represent 16% of the 8.1 million teachers in the U.S (Furuya, Nooraddini, Wang, & Waslin, 2019). Little is known about how the experiences and educational backgrounds of international bi/multilingual PSTs might inform research into pedagogical TL in the United States when contrasted with PSTs who do speak their students’ home language. In response, this study reports on findings from two PSTs enrolled in a university practicum teaching course. One PST shares a home language with her students while the other, who is an international multilingual PST, does not. The aim of this research is to deepen an understanding of how each describes the affordances connected to pedagogical TL in their university course and practicum teaching site given their different linguistic repertoires, which included the ability to use Spanish. The two research questions (RQs) below address this aim.

RQ 1: How did a bilingual PST and a multilingual international PST describe the instructional affordances related to TL and/or pedagogical TL within their university practicum coursework in light of their own linguistic repertoires?

RQ 2: When given the opportunity to teach and observe instruction in their practicum class, how did a bilingual PST and an international bilingual PST describe the instructional affordances related to pedagogical TL in light of their own linguistic repertoires?

Theoretical framework

The theoretical framework for this research is driven by Van Lier’s (2000, 2017) concept of affordance in relationship to the connections between the linguistic repertoire and pedagogical TL. Pedagogical TL is aimed at developing proficiency in two or more languages and content area knowledge (Cenoz, 2022). It is often described as “planned by the teacher inside the classroom and can refer to the use of different languages for input and output or to other planned strategies based on the use of students” (Cenoz, 2017, p. 194). The emphasis on planned activities is key, as Cenoz (2009) is referring to TL that is part of classroom instruction. TL that occurs as part of social life is often referred to as spontaneous TL where the lines or boundaries between languages are not soft or undefined (Cenoz, 2017, 2022). Pedagogical TL represents instructional activities designed by teachers in classrooms and for students. While opportunities for spontaneous TL may occur as part of a lesson that resemble social discourse, the focus remains on achieving selected academic goals set in the classroom (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020, 2022).

Linguistic repertoire represents an important theoretical anchor of research into pedagogical TL (e.g. Iversen, 2019a, Leonet, Cenoz, & Gorter, 2017). It, linguistic repertoire, refers to the collection of languages, dialects, registers and/or styles utilised across different communicative acts (Busch, 2015). Also recognised within the discussion of the linguistic repertoire are the semiotic resources available to the learner. These include linguistic, prosodic, interactional, nonverbal, graphic pictorial, auditory and artifactual (objects) (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). A speaker’s linguistic repertoire may include languages that an individual has acquired in school, growing up or independently, but it is not equated with proficiency in a given language. Rather, it more closely represents an inventory of the communicative tools available to a speaker, given a selected language or languages. Finally, how speakers draw on their linguistic repertoires varies with the setting. A maths teacher, for instance, may only use her Spanish in the classroom to translate key mathematical terms in spite of the fact that she is capable of teaching an entire lesson in Spanish. Later, she may draw on her linguistic repertoire in Spanish to discuss the events of the day in Spanish with her Spanish-speaking friend. In each setting, she employs different communicative resources depending upon the communicative goals.

Within the classroom, teachers can draw on either their linguistic repertoires or that of their students to create affordances for learning. According to Van Lier (2000), affordances are the “relations of possibility between animals and their environment” (p. 17). The premise of Van Lier’s (2000) construct is that the environment is full of potential for meaning and represents an affordance when learners recognise and act upon it. Within the discussion of pedagogical TL, Cenoz (2022) define how use of the whole linguistic repertoire is realised in pedagogical TL as the use of “two or more languages in the same class to carry out different activities” (p. 30). Early work by Williams (2002) labels pedagogical TL as using one language for reading or listening and another for writing or speaking. Since then, researchers have found that teachers who share a home language with their students can facilitate pedagogical TL, or more broadly only TL, through translation of content (Pontier & Gort, 2016), the use of digital software (Iversen. 2019 ba) or modelling and the use of the home language (e.g. Kim & Song, 2019, Osorio, 2020). Similarly, teachers who do not share a home language with their students can facilitate pedagogical TL through the use of imagery, gesture and movement to build early literacy skills (Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015) and content area knowledge (Blair, Haneda, & Bose, 2018, Pacheco, Kang, & Hurd, 2019; Zapata & Laman, 2016). In both cases, the teachers provide affordances in the classroom environment that bi/multilingual students can act on.

Literature review

While there is an emerging but limited body of research into the use of pedagogical TL among inservice teachers in international contexts who do not share a home language with their students (e.g. Hansen-Thomas, Stewart, Flint, & Dollar, 2020), pedagogical TL has not been given the same attention in the classroom-based research conducted in U.S. classrooms. This is in spite of the shared goal of advancing students’ content area knowledge across the content areas in research conducted abroad (e.g. Cenoz, 2017, 2020) and the U.S. where classroom-based research explores how affordances are realised among teachers and PSTs who share a home language with their students (e.g. Hansen-Thomas, Stewart, Flint, & Dollar, 2020) and those who do not (e.g. Blair, Haneda, & Bose, 2018; Deroo & Ponzio, 2019; Rowe, 2020; Zapata & Laman, 2016). The following is an exploration of the connections which inform pedagogical TL and its affordances in light of the differing linguistic repertoire teachers and students bring to the classroom. Two bodies of research which are most relevant to this study are examined, research from the U.S. which highlights PSTs and inservice teachers who share a home language with their students and research on pedagogical TL from abroad among bi/multilingual PSTs.

TL-based research abroad

With regards to international bi/multilingual PSTs, research has not been forthcoming of their teaching experiences in the U.S. in spite of their growing presence in U.S. classrooms (Furuya, Nooraddini, Wang, & Waslin, 2019). Among PSTs who share a home language with their students and are studying and teaching in their homes abroad, research is extensive with much attention paid to explorations of the connections across language policy, classroom practice (e.g. Iversen, 2019a, pp. 2020; Storeheil & Iversen 2023) and teachers’ TL stance (e.g. Menken & Sánchez, 2019; Shi & Rolstad, 2020). Findings are often interpreted or framed within a social justice perspective, documenting ways in which pedagogical TL allows students to fully draw on their multilingual linguistic repertoires and thus improve their academic skills (See Cenoz (2017) for a detailed accounting of the connection between pedagogical TL and bi/multilingual repertoire in the European context).

While the above research is set abroad and so its application to the findings in this study is limited, Iversen’s (2019a) research on the use of spontaneous TL among Norwegian PSTs is informative. Spontaneous TL mimics encounters in social life where the “boundaries between languages are fluid and constantly shifting” (Cenoz, 2022, p. 904). Iversen (2019a) found that bi/multilingual PSTs were reluctant to engage in pedagogical TL, relying more on the use of Norwegian and spontaneous TL in their field placements. While Iversen (2019a) found that the PSTs were still able to draw on the full breadth of their own linguistic repertoires through use of visual supports, groupwork, translation and other techniques and thus potentially improve academic skills of their students, he still called for pedagogical TL in the classroom. According to Iversen (2019a), pedagogical TL represented the best alternative to spontaneous TL, as it provides a disciplined and intentional approach to lesson development, instruction and the creation of curriculum. This allows students to draw on linguistic repertoires and make academic gains across the content areas.

TL-based research in the U.S

In the U.S., research into pedagogical TL among teachers whose linguistic repertoire does not include the home languages of their students is often set within programmes where English medium instruction (EMI) is the norm (e.g. Blair, Haneda, & Bose, 2018; Deroo & Ponzio, 2019; Rowe, 2020; Zapata & Laman, 2016). One trend in the research suggests that teachers who do not share their students’ home language rely more heavily on strategies that are consistent with spontaneous TL (e.g. Hansen-Thomas, Stewart, Flint, & Dollar, 2020). Examples from the research include the use of imagery, gesture and movement in concert with TL to build early literacy skills (Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015), inviting parents and using multilingual literature to build community connections (Osorio, 2020), content area knowledge (Blair, Haneda, & Bose, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015; Zapata & Laman, 2016) as well as metacognitive knowledge in relationship to the students bi/multilingual linguistic repertoire and social background (Deroo & Ponzio, 2019).

Among bi/multilingual teachers whose repertoire includes their students’ home language, the use of TL, its affordances and its potential to draw on the student’s linguistic repertoire are a recurrent theme in the research (Garcia, Johnson, Seltzer, & Valdés, 2023; García et al., 2021; Menken & Sánchez, 2019) Specific findings demonstrate that use of TL builds metalinguistic awareness through vocabulary work connected to discussions of language (García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017) and translation (Pontier & Gort, 2016). Moreover, through modelling the use of the home language (e.g. Kim & Song, 2019; Osorio, 2020) and exploration of multilingual texts (e.g. Daly, 2018; Kim & Song, 2019), teachers signal that they value their students’ home language (Daly, 2018) and cultures (García & Kleifgen, 2019).

Among both groups of teachers, TL represents a contested space (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Martinez et al., 2015) which, according to de Los Ríos et al. (2019), is transgressive of curricular and instructional expectations. PSTs still learning about TL wondered about the role of the home language in classrooms (Martinez-Roldan, 2015) and were uncertain how curriculum and testing could be initiated in more than one language given time limitations in the classroom (Deroo & Ponzio, 2019). Straszer, Rosén, and Wedin (2020) noted that while physical space in the classroom is contested, the presence of texts, posters, signs and maps in the students’ home language in the classroom has the potential to act as an affordance for TL.

Missing from these two bodies of research are the unique linguistic repertoires that of international bi/multilingual PSTs can make to the exploration of the affordances driving TL. They represent an important presence in the education of the growing number of bi/multilinguals in the U.S (Furuya, Nooraddini, Wang, & Waslin, 2019) and bring a unique linguistic repertoire that is not addressed in the either body of research explored above. This gap in the research is addressed within the theoretical underpinnings of Van Lier’s (2000) construct of affordance.

Context

Setting

This study was set in a western university in the U.S. with approximately 22,000 students. The university has worked closely with the Adams school district, the practicum teaching site, on the curriculum for the courses. For instance, between 2001 and 2016, two federal grants were awarded to the university which funded coursework for approximately 400 inservice teachers and PSTs to offset tuition for coursework on teaching bi/multilingual students. The participants are part of a programme which provides initial licensure for preservice elementary teachers. When PSTs complete the coursework, they are licenced to work as specialists in the instruction of bi/multilingual students. The four courses lead to the English language learner endorsement and include elementary teaching methods for multilingual learners, second language development, assessing multilingual learners and practicum teaching for multilingual learners. The fourth class is the data collection site for this study.

The school district was organised around a push-in philosophy of instruction for bi/multilingual students. Within a push-in model of instruction, the language of instruction is English, but the students’ home language can be used in instruction as a means of helping them to understand the content (Beecher & Bell, 2017). Bi/multilingual students spend the day in a classroom with their English-speaking classmates in the Adams school district. Instruction is given in English, but teachers are encouraged to use the students’ home language when possible and appropriate. Because the federal government requires schools to provide targeted instruction for bi/multilingual students (Beecher & Bell, 2017), a teacher who holds an English language learner endorsement may visit the class two to three times a week to provide extra instruction for the bi/multilingual students. As such, push-in instruction broadly represents a form of EMI.

The university course

The purpose of the 16-week online and asynchronous university course was to prepare PSTs to teach bi/multilingual elementary students. The course is online and includes 20 hours of supervised practicum teaching. In the practicum component, the PSTs lead small group instruction with bi/multilingual students, tutor students individually and observe their supervising teacher. The complementary online component includes weekly assignments which were split between written assignments and chat board posts. The Appendix has a listing of the assigned readings and assignments for each week.

Methods

Researcher positionality

I am an associate professor at a university in the western U.S., which was also the location for this research. My academic training includes degrees in applied linguistics, English and education. Because I completed my graduate work in 2000, my coursework was rooted in a cognitive view of language. I studied two languages in the U.S. within foreign language programmes before moving abroad to study Japanese and teach English. The experience of living and teaching in Japan gave me insights into an understanding of the force of EMI instruction in positioning bilingual speakers in the United States. In some ways, I feel that I have been a part of the multilingual turn that May (2014) discussed as I researched this practicum course. In this research, I hope to capture the transition – the multilingual turn – that the PSTs in this research articulate in their university class and practicum teaching.

Study design

This study used a multiple-case study design. Yin (2017) explains that a multiple-case study uses two or more cases, referred to as focal participants in this study, to explore a selected phenomenon. Multiple-case study research should report a summary of individual cases and derive conclusions that are based upon those findings, but a subunit of analysis may be added. Subunits of data analysis are collected to contextualise findings around the phenomenon of interest. This can include document collection within organisations or interviews with other individuals which can inform and highlight the phenomenon under study.

As such, following a review of the collection and analysis, this study reports on two “cases”, referred to as focal participants. Data from nine additional PSTs represents a subunit of analysis to contextualise findings from the focal participants. Despite the potential to explore findings from subunits of study, Yin (2017) cautions that attention must remain on the focal participants. As such, data from the nine additional PSTs is limited to their coursework and used with the intention of contextualising findings collected from the focal participants. The findings cannot be generalised to the larger population of PSTs either in the U.S. or abroad.

Finally, while the use of only two participants in this study is consistent with a multiple case-study design, there are also implications which limit the generalisability of the findings. Consistent with Yin’s (2017) discussion on the limits of multiple case studies, the qualitative nature of the findings prohibits statistical generalisation. Analytic generalisation is used instead to generalise from a particular set of findings to a larger theory or body of research rather than a particular population. With regards to this research, findings from the two focal PSTs can be generalised to inform the larger body of research into TL-based instruction. Further, the findings are gathered from self-report data and could not be triangulated via observation of the PSTs’ instruction in the practicum classrooms. To account for this, classroom assignments and lessons were collected in an effort to bolster the voracity of the findings.

Participants

Research was conducted with permission from the university institutional review board and followed all requirements established for informed consent. All participants were provided with a written consent form which guaranteed anonymity, and the names of participants and places are pseudonyms. Eleven PSTs engaged in informed consent and participated in the study. All were seniors in their programme majoring in elementary education. The PSTs’ placements and the ages of their students is provided below. The specific percentage of English learners at each school cannot be given in order to protect the privacy of the children, but broad data about the demographics can be shared. The average percentage of bi/multilingual children in the classes was 20% with a mean of 23%, which is slightly higher than the 15% total population of bi/multilingual students that Adams school district reports. The highest percentage of children in one class is 37%. All of the schools were Kindergarten through sixth grade.

Focal participants

The selection and recruitment of the focal participants was guided by purposeful sampling (Patton, 2015). Specifically, they were chosen for the contrasting linguistic repertoires that they brought to the study. This allowed for a comparison of their differing linguistic repertoires across comparable settings, the university course and the practicum teaching site. The PSTs were placed in comparable sites. Both were placed in third-grade classrooms in the same school district and worked with comparable numbers of bi/multilingual students. Additionally, their supervising teachers had similar competencies in Spanish. Both were able to use simple content vocabulary in Spanish to assist the bi/multilingual learners but not teach a class in Spanish.

Tanya and Kendra, however, brought different linguistic repertoires. Kendra was a bilingual PST who spoke Spanish and English and thus shared the same home language, Spanish, with her students. She felt comfortable with the small group of Spanish speakers she taught, as she was able to teach lessons entirely in Spanish. Tanya was an international multilingual PST who spoke German, Dutch and English. Her small group of bi/multilingual students spoke Spanish, and one spoke French. Both PSTs were responsible for tutoring bi/multilingual students and working with them in reading groups. Typically, the reading group lessons involved reading the students a short story and/or working on something specific that supervising teacher had taught to the class. These lessons lasted approximately 20 minutes. Information about the PSTs and their placements is included in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants and Placements.

Names (Pseudonyms)	Age/Grade of students
Tanya (Focal Participant)	8–9/3^rd
Kendra (Focal Participant)	8–9/3^rd
Kerri	5–6/Kindergarten
John/Jeb	11–12/6^th
Rose	7–8/2^nd
Terri/Jimmy	6–7/1^st
Linda	9–10/4^th
Anthony/Jose	9–10/4^th
Jackie	8–9/3^rd
Hannah	6–7/1^st
Amanda/Melanie	6–7/1^st

Participant and placement data.

Data collection

Data collection lasted began in 2022 and included data from classroom assignments and interviews. Seventeen PSTs were enrolled in the class, but 11 agreed to participate in the research. Data collection for all PSTs included six written assignments in response to various readings, two 45-minute lesson plans and a five to seven-page final reflection (see Appendix). Data collection for Tanya and Kendra, the focal participants, also included four interviews conducted on Zoom. The remaining nine PSTs did not participate in Zoom interviews.

Classroom data collected from the nine PSTs was positioned as a subunit of analysis and used to contextualise and highlight findings from the focal participants. As an example, classroom data gathered from Rose and Linda was presented in the findings on the affordances in the university classroom setting. The purpose of their contributions was as a point of contrast in exploring data from Kendra and Tanya. Classroom data collected from the focal participants was used for a different purpose. It was used in preparation for the interviews. Yin (2017) explains that using multiple sources of data to inform interview questions adds to the construct validity by triangulating sources and ensures a productive interview.

Four interviews were conducted with the focal participants. Each interview was conducted via Zoom, lasted approximately one hour and was transcribed with Zoom. The purpose of the first interview, completed in the fourth week of the course, was to explore the PSTs’ linguistic histories. Questions centred on their experiences growing up using English and their home languages and additional languages in social and academic settings. In the eighth week of the course, the interviews were set to coincide with the week’s reading on TL. Interview questions examined the PSTs’ initial reactions to learning about TL and their expectations for how TL might be used in their upcoming practicum. The third interview was in the 15th week of the course and explored their observations about TL in the practicum classroom and the connections they drew with their personal experiences using TL.

The final interviews were conducted approximately three months after the practicum course had ended. The purpose of the interviews was to explore the intersection of TL-based instruction and affordances in relationship to their university coursework and the use of TL and pedagogical TL in their practicum teaching. Follow-up interactions with both participants through email and text messages, referred to as personal communication, allowed the focal participants to confirm the accuracy of the findings from this research. This is consistent with Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) description of trustworthiness.

Data analysis

Interview transcripts from the focal participants were used in data analysis. Following Braun and Clarke (2006), the data analysis drew on thematic analysis. A thematic analysis is driven by a systematic analysis and identification of recurring themes in the data. Themes capture the essential understandings generated from a data set. The analysis proceeded through the six stages described by Nowell, Norris, White, and Moules (2017). These included familiarising yourself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for initial themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes and producing the report.

Initially, transcripts for interviews were read carefully and entered into Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) Miner, a commercial programme used for qualitative data analysis. A line-by-line analysis of the data allowed for the creation of 12 codes. Attride-Stirling (2001) describes codes as labels for data which allow the researcher to isolate and identify recurring pieces of data. A semantic interpretation of the data was used, which, according to Braun and Clarke (2006), restricts interpretation of data to a literal level. This provided a consistent means of identification and interpretation of the data which prevented researcher bias.

Consistent with Braun and Clarke (2006), codes from stage two were used to generate, identify and review themes in stages three and four. In stage three, research by Van Lier (2000, 2017) informed the development of codes such as affordances while Wei’s (2011) work informed the development of codes such as linguistic repertoire and TL. These codes were key in forming two themes in stage three: linguistic repertoire as potential and the value of the linguistic repertoire. Braun and Clarke (2006) describe a theme as “a patterned response or meaning” (p. 82) which addresses the research question. In stages four and five, analytical memo writing, as described by Charmaz (2017), helped to clarify the themes in relationship to the data. The “linguistic repertoire as potential” organised analysis of RQ1. Theme two, “the value of the linguistic repertoire” addressed RQ2.

Findings

Affordances in the university classroom setting

This section explores week four written assignments in which the PSTs identified their choices for pedagogical TL and described what potential affordances for TL their selected technique holds. While all of the PSTs participated in this data collection, findings focus on how material selection by Kendra and Tanya was shaped by communicative resources of their linguistic repertoires and the affordances connected to the potential for pedagogical TL that the materials held. The theme which guided data analysis within this section was “linguistic repertoire as potential”. Potential is key, as it characterises the ways in which they teased out the relationship between their linguistic repertoire and the materials they discussed.

Kendra’s choice was to involve parents in the classroom through multilingual storybooks. She described how she would like to leverage the communicative resources of her linguistic repertoire in Spanish to invite bilingual parents, community members and families to her class to tutor her bi/multilingual students. Creating a multilingual classroom, according to Kendra, held affordances which would enhance learning for the students by “awakening them to language diversity and build … opportunities for emergent bilinguals to … explain what they know” (Personal Communication, 10 August 2023) in Spanish and English. Her plans were consistent with contemporary research on the connections between parents and multilingual literacy (e.g. García & Kleifgen, 2019). Parents’ bi/multilingual repertoire represented an affordance (Daly, 2018) that could be a conduit for building bi/multilingual literacy. As students and parents worked together, students could draw on the full breadth of the bi/multilingual repertoire (Kim & Song, 2019).

In data from other PSTs in the class, Linda and Rose chose the use of multilingual stories. While this would suggest a more advanced level of proficiency for the teacher, they hoped to leverage the use of imagery, gesture and simple translation to facilitate TL. In contrast with Kendra, Linda would give directions in Spanish to her students combined with translating simple vocabulary, rather than engaging in longer written and spoken discourse that inviting parents to class and tutoring students would suggest. She gave the following example of how she interacts with bi/multilingual students, “I use lots of … hand gestures and say things like, “Por favour, please my friends, my amigos at blue table, azul table, sientense, sit in your chairs please” (Written assignment, week four). Rose would also engage the students in discussions using bilingual texts in the “language they felt most comfortable with” (Written assignment, week four). She wrote, “Keeping in mind that there might be students not yet proficient in reading, the texts can be read aloud in both languages as students follow along with both texts … I found you can have volunteers create a translation of texts” (Written assignment, week four).

The quote details how Rose believed the bilingual text would represent an affordance towards TL pedagogy when paired with involving the bi/multilingual students in the activity. After realising that the text might be too advanced for her bi/multilingual students, she reasoned that she could leverage her students’ Spanish skill by asking volunteers to read the text. This is not only a recognition of the affordances that bilingual texts offer teachers who do not speak the students’ home language, it also speaks to how she would deploy her communicative resources in Spanish as well as those of her student volunteers to facilitate TL.

Tanya also anticipated drawing on bilingual texts (e.g. Daly, 2018; Kim & Song, 2019) and the use of imagery and gesture as affordances to TL (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015). She chose the use of heritage newspapers from Pacheco and Miller (2015) who described leveraging the visual cues in multilingual newspapers. Examples included the positioning of the title, headings, the author’s name and captions that accompany pictures. Tanya hoped that these “would make the content much easier to understand” (Written assignment, week four) but did not detail how she might guide the lesson as the students used their home languages.

Affordances in the practicum classroom setting

The findings below are set within the push-in/EMI setting of Adams school district where Kendra and Tanya observed and taught bi/multilingual students individually and in small groups. The theme which guided analysis of the data was “the value of the linguistic repertoire”. The theme is used to capture how both saw value in their efforts to engage in TL yet struggled with the ways in which the push-in/EMI context could be implemented. Findings explore how the affordances to pedagogical TL they identified and documented were shaped by the different linguistic repertoires each brought to their very similar practicum settings.

Kendra

Affordances in the practicum classroom

Consistent with Straszer, Rosén, and Wedin (2020), Kendra identified a number of affordances in the physical environment such as bilingual signs, storybooks and other media as indicators of a heteroglossic instructional space appropriate for pedagogical TL (García & Wei, 2015). Below, Kendra offers her initial observations of how the classroom space celebrated the linguistic repertoires that bi/multilingual students brought to the class.

In interviews three and four, Kendra explained her observations of the classroom environment and identified a number of affordances that she felt would promote pedagogical TL instruction. Kendra’s first impression was that the classroom environment “was a welcome space where … [students] can get some support” (Interview 3: Time: 02:43–03:06) and become a part of the class and the school. Multilingual books written in Spanish and English lined the bookshelves. They were colourful texts that could be used with the language arts curriculum written in Spanish and English, and, she felt, invited children to imagine themselves as bilinguals. The Wit and Wisdom language arts text (Great Minds, 2023) was used in the classroom. While the Wit and Wisdom does not have specific adaptations for pedagogical TL, the supervising instructor had collected a number of multilingual storybooks that were written in English that would complement the lessons.

In interview three, Kendra described the instructional practices her supervising teacher used which she (Kendra) felt valued the students’ home language and offered affordances to pedagogical TL. Examples included the use of multicultural storybooks along with online websites to translate between Spanish and English as a source for valuing the bi/multilingual students’ language. She learned to pronounce the children’s names in Spanish accurately, and she encouraged the other children to do the same. During whole class instruction, she used Spanish words to reference common items as well as gestures and imagery to facilitate instruction. Instruction was also supplemented by games, songs, visuals and other activities that allowed students to integrate movement into learning. Finally, when the bilingual teachers came to class and sat next to the students to help translate, she waited patiently as they spoke to the children in Spanish. She learned how to give directions in Spanish when the bi/multilingual students began to work in their small groups, repeating the directions several times when necessary.

The data below explores the affordances related to pedagogical TL that Kendra noted as emerging from her instruction in her practicum classroom. Kendra began working with students after approximately three weeks of observation. Her instructional practices drew on the communicative resources from her linguistic repertoire as a Spanish speaker and approximated those seen in research on bilingual texts (e.g. Daly, 2018; Kim & Song, 2019), translation (e.g. Pontier & Gort, 2016) and creating opportunities for bi/multilingual students to draw on the full breadth of their linguistic repertoires and identities as bi/multilingual speakers (e.g. Creese & Blackledge, 2010). However, unlike her observations of her supervising teacher and the descriptions of the classroom in the first three weeks, her identification and analysis of the affordances connected to TL after beginning her practicum teaching were coloured by her awareness of how efforts to implement pedagogical TL also took place within a monoglossic and contested space (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Martínez-Roldán, 2015). The ways in which the tension between her aspirations to engage the students in pedagogical TL and the realities of the monoglossic space that pervade EMI classrooms are explored below.

In the following example, Kendra details a lesson that she taught to her small reading group. She planned the lesson as part of the connected coursework and submitted the lesson plan online. In interview four, she discussed the lesson in relationship to the affordances she believed her instruction offered for pedagogical TL. The objective of the lesson was for the students to identify characters, elements of the plot and ask questions about unknown words from Biblioburro: Una Historia real de Colombia (Winter, 2010). The lesson was written in Spanish and English, along with lists of questions and vocabulary words also written in Spanish and English. Kendra opened the lesson by asking the students what they like about going to the library. The students were quiet, but then she asked them about what if a donkey could be a library. They perked up.

Kendra moved between Spanish and English while they responded. The children chimed in with burro, and Kendra began to read the story. Next, she engaged in translation for the students, with biblioburro and biblioteca and other words from the text in Spanish and English at the board. She continued reading the book in Spanish, stopping intermittently to review a word or an event in the story. Here, she stops to confirm their interest in books and speaks to them in Spanish.

Kendra: En un pueblito de Colombia vive un hombre ama los libros. (In a small town in Colombia lives a man who loves books.) How many of you love books?

Class: We do!” (Interview 4: Time: 040:50–041:00)

The students’ response affirmed their shared pride in speaking Spanish. It was a confirmation of their identity as bi/multilingual speakers consistent with contemporary research (e.g. García, 2009; Leung, 2015) and represented an affordance consistent with pedagogical TL. Her comment, “It [speaking Spanish] makes a huge difference…It gives them purpose and makes them feel like they are advancing. It’s ok that I spend time using both languages” (Interview 4: Time: 03:00—04:00) is reflective of the established body of research which connects pedagogical TL to social, emotional and academic gains (e.g. Duarte, 2018; Iversen, 2019a; Ollerhead, 2018). The lesson ended with Kendra reading the next four pages, stopping at key points to translate.

How she drew on the communicative resources of her linguistic repertoire in Spanish also extended to using Spanish to socialise with the students and parents. She explained, “When they [the students] would come in from recess…I would … ask them things about their friends and recess” (Interview 3. Time: 020:00–021:00). She spoke in Spanish with the parents as well and helped the supervising teacher write letters in Spanish to them. She explained, “I try to connect it all like the big picture for them, and let them know that all of these adults, your teacher, your aid me, you know your mom and dad” (Interview 4: Time: 00:57:57–058:15). The above can be interpreted as an effort to bring family and the community to the classroom and celebrate the spontaneous TL which takes place in social life and family described in work by García-Mateus and Palmer (2017).

In interview four, Kendra identified how the ways in which she employed the communicative resources in Spanish were complicated by the pressures of push-in/EMI instruction. The multilingual books that she read to the students were for beginning readers rather than at grade level and would not advance students into higher levels of literacy. For instance, Biblioburro: Una Historia real de Colombia (Winter, 2010) is suited for children who are much younger, but storybooks in Spanish appropriate for third-graders were not available.

She also spoke to broader issues which connected the push-in/EMI instructional setting to the limited opportunities for the kind of planned and intentional instruction pedagogical TL calls for. For instance, testing in Spanish was not a part of the language arts curriculum, and time to work with the bi/multilingual students was limited. Bi/multilingual students were largely taught in small groups after lessons with the whole class, but, because the students ranged in literacy levels in Spanish and English, it would often require 15 or 20 minutes of the supervising teacher’s time to work with them. The supervising teacher could translate simple directions, use some basic vocabulary and hold a simple conversation in Spanish, but she could not teach in Spanish. As such, more complex lessons which required translation and would advance instruction towards the use of pedagogical TL had to be taught by bilingual instructors. They, however, had a large caseload of students and could only provide about 15 to 20 minutes of instruction a few times a week. In the end, Kendra doubted whether there was an appetite for a pedagogical TL in the classroom and questioned the value of her linguistic repertoire within a push-in/EMI setting.

Tanya

Affordances in the practicum classroom

Like Kendra, Tanya identified elements in the physical classroom which she felt represented affordances to pedagogical TL. These included bilingual signs, bilingual posters and other bilingual media. Additionally, digital tools, such as Google Translate, provided quick translations for the supervising teacher during instruction. Also, like Kendra, Tanya’s observations are a reference to work by Straszer, Rosén, and Wedin (2020) and the use of visual imagery in the classroom as an affordance to pedagogical TL. Rowe (2020) wrote more narrowly and examined how digital tools such Google Translate can act as an affordance for teachers who hope to engage in TL with their students or encourage them to engage in TL. While these affordances spoke to a celebration of the heteroglossic space described in work Straszer, Rosén, and Wedin (2020), Tanya also faced the dilemma of how to implement pedagogical TL when she did not share a home language with her students. Before exploring how she negotiated that tension in her instruction, a description of the affordances to pedagogical TL the classroom offered as well as the supervising teachers’ modelling of instruction is presented below.

Like Kendra, Tanya identified a number of affordances in the classroom setting which were conducive to pedagogical TL. In interview two, Tanya described the classroom environment as a place that demonstrated the supervising teacher’s efforts to make the students feel understood and welcome. She noted that the door, the bathroom, the sink, the whiteboard and many of the other items and places in the room were labelled in Spanish and English. Additionally, a poster hung on the wall with greetings in multiple languages such as Spanish, Chinese, English. Another poster showed the students how to count from one to 10 in Spanish. Pictures of different countries and world maps also hung on the wall. Multilingual and multicultural books were on the shelves that the teacher frequently read to the students.

In interviews three and four, Tanya related the affordances to TL she observed her supervising teacher engaged in. These often took the form of short exchanges between the supervising teacher and the students. For instance, she encouraged the students to greet her in one of the languages on the poster in the mornings. In maths lessons, using Spanish for counting or while explaining a problem was common. As an example, Tanya observed her asking, “What is quattro times quattro?” or “Is that right, Si or No?” The students would respond in Spanish.

Finally, the use of digital tools to translate between Spanish and English was also a recurring practice. If the supervising teacher sensed that the students did not understand something in the lesson and felt that it hinged on a vocabulary word during a lesson, she might quickly take out her phone and use it to translate for the students.

Practicum Instruction

What follows is an accounting of the ways in which Tanya wrestled with the questions about what place her instruction might occupy in a classroom full of students with whom she did not share a home language. Complicating her thinking was the fact that while the classroom posters, books and images celebrated a heteroglossic perspective, it was still an EMI setting in which bi/multilingual curriculum and testing so closely associated with pedagogical TL were absent. The data below explore the connections Tanya made in her instruction with the reading group between the affordances to pedagogical TL and her linguistic repertoire as a international bi/multilingual PST. Tanya identified instructional practices such as imagery, gesture and movement to build literacy in her instruction found in research among teachers who do not speak their students’ home language (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015), but she did not engage the bi/multilingual students in pedagogical TL. The data below explores the important role her linguistic repertoire played in informing her explanation for this finding.

In interview four, Tanya details lesson plan two in which she taught to the small reading group as an example. Tanya detailed her thinking as she read from her lesson. Specifically, the lesson asked students to identify elements in a descriptive essay on flowers such as the title, the topic sentence and supporting details. She explained that she opened the lesson with an image of some common flowers in the local area and asked students to pick out ones they may have seen. She sat with the students at a small table, described each picture and pointed to each flower to indicate which one she was referring to as she spoke. The lesson next referenced work by Pacheco and Miller (2015) in that it asked students to identify different parts of the text that they would be reading. These included the title and the caption under the images. While this allowed students to use their visual skills as part of making meaning in the same way the Pacheco and Miller (2015), p. did, she did not present texts that were also written in Spanish or invite Spanish speakers to engage in the text using Spanish by, for instance, identifying images in the text using Spanish. Rather, she led the students through identifying the different components of the text, absent an experience for translanguaging or pedagogical TL.

Her omission of the multiple texts in Spanish or other languages and not inviting Spanish speakers to engage in the text in Spanish reflects the conflicted position she held on the affordances of TL in relationship to her linguistic repertoire and the use of the students’ home language. She described affordances to TL in her instruction that would facilitate instruction through imagery that can be placed in the research (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018; Pacheco & Miller, 2015), but did engage the students in some of the practices associated with pedagogical TL described in Cenoz and Gorter (2020) in spite of the opportunities to use parallel texts (e.g. Pacheco & Miller, 2015) visuals or digital tools for translation (e.g. Rowe, 2020). She explained this disconnect in interview four, connecting the use of Spanish to TL, “I cannot speak Spanish to them, and I see the difference between me and the Spanish teacher [bilingual teacher] … I can’t connect with the students like a Spanish speaker” (Interview 4; Time: 053:25—054:14).

When asked if she tried to form other similar kinds of bonds with her students, she referenced multiple incidents with students that relied on the linguistic repertoire and communicative resources in English and not Spanish. The interactions were centred on discussions of life in the U.S. as a student and an immigrant. For instance, Tico was a Spanish speaker who was having a difficult time adjusting to his new home in the U.S. They discussed homesickness, learning English and going to a school where you cannot speak your home language. In another example, she recalled a time when she first arrived to class, introduced herself and showed a map of Holland. She talked about why she has an accent and described her home. She explained that these incidents, however, did not include TL, nor was there any expectation on the part of the students of engaging in TL (Interview 2).

Her thoughts about the role of her linguistic repertoire might occupy in her class also held a number of questions for her. She wondered, for instance, at a practical level, how TL, be it pedagogical or spontaneous, might be implemented in the classroom, particularly by international bi/multilingual PSTs. In interview one, she questioned how instructors who do not know the students’ home language could help and communicate with their students. While she was flattering of her supervising teacher, she commented, “The teacher only took a little Spanish in high school so doesn’t really speak it” (Interview 2: Time: 22:15–22:30). She wondered why the bilingual teacher spent so little time with the students when they are the ones who need their help. Her thoughts open a discussion on the nature of pedagogical TL and are echoed in Martínez-Roldán (2015), the conflicted space that TL occupies in classrooms and the unclear policies about how the home language is used.

Discussion

While there is a growing body of research into the pedagogical TL practices among teachers who do not share a home language with their students (e.g. Hansen-Thomas, Stewart, Flint, & Dollar, 2020; Iversen, 2019a), there is a gap in the research into pedagogical TL among international bi/multilingual PSTs in U.S. classrooms is still limited. Based on the above examination of the affordances that an international bi/multilingual PST and a bilingual PST attached to pedagogical TL instruction given their different linguistic repertoires, findings from this study address the gap in the research on pedagogical TL in the U.S. Specifically, the findings below suggest that while the PSTs aspired to engage their students in pedagogical TL prior to beginning their fieldwork, they encountered challenges within their respective EMI settings they were placed in. Following a note on the limits of this research and its applicability to other settings, findings from this research are discussed which document how the PSTs’ link their choice of materials from their university coursework link to pedagogical TL. These findings address RQ 1. Second and addressing RQ2, findings suggest that the affordances they attached to their instructional choices and pedagogical TL were shaped by the EMI environments as well as their individual linguistic repertoires.

As mentioned above, a limit of these findings is that the researcher did not conduct observations of the PSTs or interview the teachers at the practicum sites. That said, the findings are limited to the PSTs’ written accounts and data from their interviews about their experiences observing and conducting instruction in their classes. In an effort to ensure the fidelity of this data, the PSTs were asked to report on lessons that they had planned as part of the university course requirements. For instance, Kendra reported on her experiences teaching in both lessons, and Tanya similarly gave an accounting of her experiences teaching lesson plan two. Following Yin’s (2017) examination of case-study methods, the generalisability of the findings and their applicability should therefore be restricted as informative to research on the phenomenon of pedagogical TL rather than to the larger population of PSTs.

With reference to RQ1, the first finding highlights ways in which the PSTs made decisions about their choice of TL-based materials. As such, it adds to specific research on pedagogical TL conducted in the U.S (e.g. Kim & Song, 2019; Pacheco & Miller, 2015) and reveals how instructional choices about the use of pedagogical TL are driven by varied linguistic repertoires in connection with the affordances the materials provide. Findings suggest that Kendra identified affordances that were more closely linked to the planned and systematic instruction associated and pedagogical and less so with spontaneous TL (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020) than Tanya. Data from pedagogical TL is more pertinent to RQ2. However, as an example of the latter, Kendra linked her linguistic repertoire as a Spanish speaker to the affordances of multilingual storybooks (e.g. Kim & Song, 2019) when she described her plans to invite parents to the classroom. Her choice is indicative of the spontaneous TL described in Cenoz and Gorter (202) and the effort to celebrate the ways in which TL is used in family and social life discussed in García-Mateus and Palmer (2017).

While Spanish was not a part of Tanya’s linguistic repertoire, she chose multilingual newspapers (e.g. Pacheco & Miller, 2015) in her university coursework. This was interpreted as a partial effort to address the use of pedagogical TL in the classroom. In particular, her plans to use the visual cues that the position of information in a text found in Pacheco and Miller (2015), such as the title or the author’s name provide as an affordance, is important. Specifically, this finding suggests an effort on her part towards the intentional planning intrinsic to pedagogical TL as described in Cenoz (2022). However, it should also be noted that she did not follow up with plans for using texts which included Spanish and English. Omitting this opportunity for students to use two languages suggests a reluctance on her part to engage in pedagogical TL, a finding that is explored in Iversen (2019a) and which was later manifested in her practicum classroom.

With respect to RQ2, findings suggest that the instructional practices of both PSTs were shaped by their EMI environments as well their unique linguistic repertoires. For both, the bilingual books, posters, use of technology and the bilingual labels for many of the common items in their practicum classrooms all spoke to the celebration of a heteroglossic environment (García & Wei, 2015) but stopped short of the resources needed to engage in the kind of carefully focused instruction pedagogical TL calls for (Cenoz, 2022). Specifically, missing in both classrooms were many of the same elements identified in Cenoz (2022) which function as precursors to pedagogical TL. These included bi/multilingual curricula at the students’ current grade levels, bi/multilingual testing and instructional planning focused on providing planned experiences to advance academic skills and knowledge.

Nevertheless, both PSTs questioned what role the home language of the students should occupy in the classroom (Martínez-Roldán, 2015) and expressed ambivalence about how curriculum and testing could be initiated in more than one language (Deroo & Ponzio, 2019) within an EMI setting. Kendra’s linguistic repertoire afforded opportunities for her to engage in pedagogical TL which included careful planning of specific opportunities for translation (García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017), word study (Pontier & Gort, 2016) and the use of multilingual literature (e.g. Daly, 2018; Kim & Song, 2019). While these are key elements of pedagogical TL (e.g. Duarte, 2018; Krulatz & Iversen 2019; Ollerhead, 2018), their potential to build academic skills as well as enhance social and emotional growth was diminished by the fact that texts were not matched to the students’ grade levels.

Tanya similarly worked within an EMI setting and brought a very different linguistic repertoire. Given the fact that she did not share the home language of her students, she drew on the use of visuals and imagery (e.g. Bussert-Webb, Masso, & Lewis, 2018, Pacheco & Miller, 2015) in her instruction, but she did not engage in the planned instruction and use of bi/multilingual materials needed to enact pedagogical TL (Cenoz, 2022). One explanation for this comes from Iversen (2019a) research which suggested that the PSTs’ reluctance to engage in pedagogical TL might be due to the fact that their supervising teachers did not model the use of pedagogical TL. Findings from this study confirm that the environment, in this case EMI, was a contributing factor in how the PSTs enacted instruction. However, the findings also open a larger discussion on the place of international bi/multilingual PSTs who do not share a home language with their students and are teaching in U.S. schools.

Future research which examines the international bi/multilingual PSTs in U.S. schools might build upon the findings from this research by including careful field observations of international bi/multilingual PSTs in U.S. schools. Opportunities are many and might include exploring the ways in which pedagogical TL is conducted in light of the broader contemporary TL research into ideology and TL stance (e.g. Deroo & Ponzio, 2019), identity (e.g. García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017) classrooms as a heteroglossic space (e.g. García & Wei, 2015) and ways in which multilinguals draw on their linguistic repertories to construct meaning through TL (e.g. Canagarajah, 2011; Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; García & Wei, 2015; Leung, 2015). Ultimately, this would open a discussion on linguistic repertoire, bi/multilingual international PSTs and TL which might reimagine the place of international bi/multilingual PSTs in U.S. education.

Disclosure statement

I have no known conflicts of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rod E. Case

Rod E. Case is an associate professor of TESOL at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research interests are in second language acquisition and technology.

Appendix

Course Schedule

Table

Weeks	Assignment	Type of assignment	Topic
1	Syllabus Review	NA	NA
2 and 3	Students write reactions Lippi-Green, Barrett, Cramer, and McGowan (2012) and de Jong (2013). They reflect on teaching and personal experiences related to language ideology.	Post to a chat board. Write approximately one page. Respond to a classmates’ response.	Language ideology and discourse
4	Students read Celic and Seltzer (2011) and chose a translanguaging strategy they hope to employ in their teaching.	Post to a chat board. Write approximately one page. Respond to a classmates’ response.	Strategies in translanguaging
5 and 6	Students read Uccelli and Phillips Galloway (2016). Discuss case studies of academic language and literacy	Post to a chat board. Write approximately one page. Respond to a classmates’ response.	Academic language
7 and 8	Collect multiple artefacts which demonstrate a student’s learning. Discuss how these are connected to assessment and/or instruction. Students are given multiple options for completing this assignment.	Written assignment which is accompanied by data collection of student work.	Analysis of learning.
7 and 8 (cont.)	Students reflect on their efforts at translanguaging in the classroom.	Post to a chat board. Write approximately one page. Respond to a classmates’ response.	Translanguaging
9	Spring break
10	Respond to a case study about a multilingual student.	Written assignment	The English only movement and multilingual students
11	Students compare and contrast readings by Keiffer and Thompson (2017) and Polat et al. (2016).	Post to a chat board. Write approximately one page. Respond to a classmates’ response.	Assessment
12 and 13	Writing lesson plans and conducting a lesson	Written assignment and practice teaching	Lesson planning
14 and 15	Written reflection of teaching experience	Written essay.	Reflection on teaching.