Transmodalising pedagogy: Developing STEM disciplinary literacy for young emergent bilingual learners

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how transmodalising pedagogy contributes to equitable STEM literacy education for emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Attending to the urgent call for serving linguistically and culturally diverse learners in STEM classrooms and informed by the supporting theories and practices of transmodalising pedagogy, this paper provides a repertoire of transmodalising pedagogy to support elementary school EBLs’ STEM disciplinary content and literacy learning. Particularly, this paper shares two elementary teachers’ lessons in mathematics and science classrooms to showcase how transmodalising disciplinary literacy instruction for young EBLs can afford equitable access to STEM curriculum while engaging EBLs in disciplinary discourse practices.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This paper uses both “English learners (ELs)” and “Emergent bilingual learners (EBLs)” mainly to refer to students from families of non-English speaking backgrounds and developing at least two languages at the same time. The less asset-oriented term “ELs” is used for the specific context where students are officially labeled as ELs through English language proficiency assessment system. Otherwise, EBLs are consistently used to recognize students’ bilingual potentials.

2. The transcribed excepts in the finding section is a streamlined version of the transcripts for readability to highlight the teachers’ transmodalising moments.