Identifying the assets of emergent bilingual middle school students’ writing: opportunities to validate students’ linguistic repertoires and identities

ABSTRACT

We highlight how the use of holistic biliteracy and translanguaging perspectives can be applied in the assessment of emergent bilingual middle school students’ writing to counter deficit views of their divergent repertoires. The study took place in a Mountain West middle school with a large Latinx population. We analyzed eleven emerging bilingual students’ (EBs) responses to a writing prompt in an English language arts class. Findings include EBs’ use of translanguaging [García, O. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell], or strategic languaging, in which the students used different codes/languages in their writing. Additionally, this study found that EBs might show different patterns of spelling development as they learn to access the different alphabetic patterns of their respective repertoires. Finally, the study highlights how EBs draw from diverse discourse patterns as they compose. The analysis revealed the cultural and linguistic knowledge(s) EBs bring to developing their writing, which are often not part of monolingual English writing rubrics. Thus, the implications suggest that teachers need to develop critical sociolinguistic responsive practices as the field seeks to equitably assess the writing of EBs. Moreover, we suggest that critical cultural and linguistic awareness is needed in order to nurture the identities and competencies of EBs.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• biliteracy
• translanguaging
• funds of knowledge
• language competence
• writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Emergent bilingual learner is a term we use, rather than English learner (EL), to refer to the bilingualism students possess. We borrow from García’s (2009) framework to denote the assets that bilinguals utilize in their everyday languaging, which allows them to be seen in their totality rather than just in relation to the amount of English proficiency they have attained.

2 We present the students writing directly from the data and chose not to include the designator ‘sic’ due to its deficit-based implication and to honor the students’ linguistic repertoires.

3 The use of codeswitching is used here to reflect the original use in Zentella’s work (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margarita Gómez

Margarita Gómez is an associate professor of literacy education at Loyola University Maryland where she teaches courses in second language literacy theory and assessment, principles and practices of teaching writing, and processes and acquisition of literacy. Her research aims to better understand how classroom contexts play a critical role for culturally and linguistically diverse learners' writing development. Dr. Gómez has published multiple articles and book chapters in scholarly journals such as Journal of Writing and Pedagogy, Bilingual Research Journal, Elementary School Journal, Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, and Reading Research Quarterly.

Mark A. Lewis

Mark Lewis is associate professor of literacy education and his research interests include examining and critiquing representations of adolescence and youth in young adult and adult literature, defining the multifaceted literary competence of secondary students, and identifying effective ways to support linguistically diverse learners. Dr. Lewis has over 25 publications, including multiple book chapters and in scholarly journals such as English Education, Middle Grades Research Journal, Study & Scrutiny, Journal of Literacy Research, and Reading Research Quarterly.