Emergent bilingual students’ translation practices during eBook composing

ABSTRACT

As culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms become increasingly common, research looking at ways teachers can support language and literacy practices of all students in these spaces is needed. Using qualitative methods, this project examined second-grade, multilingual students’ practices during a Writing Workshop activity that invited them to use both their heritage languages and English. Specifically, this study investigated the translation practices developed by students over the course of one school year as they translated for one another by adding heritage language audio recordings to eBooks. Across the year, students developed and used increasingly more sophisticated translation practices, including: (1) full text, (2) word-by-word, (3) phrase-by-phrase, and (4) stop/clarify. The study also explored how students positioned themselves and others as they engaged in these translation practices. Findings suggest that, as students requested translation and bid to act as translators, they interactionally positioned themselves and others as holding valuable linguistic resources.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term emergent bilingual describes a student who speaks another language in addition to English. This term focuses on the positive characteristics of becoming bilingual, rather than implying deficiencies based on English proficiency (O. García, 2009).

2. The number of translation requests is larger than the number of peer translation events analyzed in the first strand of analysis, because 1) translation requests were not always taken up and therefore did not always result in a translation interaction, and 2) when taken up, translation requests often resulted in peers translating book titles for one another, which were excluded from the first strand of analysis due to their brevity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lindsey W. Rowe

Lindsey W. Rowe is a graduate student in the Department of Teaching and Learning and The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the writing practices of emergent bilingual children.