Caring across linguistic difference: translanguaging pedagogies for low-overlap interactions

Abstract

Incorporating students’ home languages into the classroom is one powerful way to welcome and show immigrant students care. But what if teachers can’t speak these languages? Sharing findings from a collaborative educational ethnography in a large urban ESL program in the U.S., this article offers a framework that new and practicing teachers can use to create warm relationships, support academic progress, and challenge inequality within their classrooms, even when their own linguistic repertoires overlap little with those of their students.

Keywords:

• Emergent bilingual
• ESL
• secondary education
• translanguaging
• care
• repertoire
• immigrant students

Disclosure statement

We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. All names of people and places are pseudonyms, with the exception of Philadelphia and some of the teachers mentioned by name in the article.

Notes

1 In the 2018-19 academic year, Promesa students were 59% Hispanic, 35% Black, 4% Asian, 1.6% “two or more races.” 99.5% of Promesa’s community is free lunch eligible (NCES 2018-19).

2 In addition to the co-authors, who contributed to data analysis, literature review, and writing for the present paper, other undergraduate research personnel between 2015-2020 have included Isabel Sacks, Jonathan Hamel Sellman, Jasmine Betancourt, Sydnie Schwarz, Gabriel Brossy de Dios, Dana Homer, and Ruth Elias, many of whom are now practicing teachers.

3 We recognize that many scholars now use the term translanguaging to refer to inter- and intra-sentential use of features of two or more named languages long referred to as code-switching, rejecting the latter term because it implies the existence of two discrete codes rather than an integrated system (Garcia & Wei, 2014). Given that our purpose here is to delineate specific linguistic strategies used in distinct interactional contexts, however, we use code-switching to describe the fluid, oral use of English and Spanish by students and teachers in high-overlap interactions. We use translanguaging as a broader, umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of communicative and pedagogical strategies, including code switching, co-languaging, and other translingual modes of communication (Mazak 2017). While these communicative practices are not new, translanguaging theory helps us to understand these practices as “dynamic and functionally integrated” in ways that prior conceptualizations did not capture (Lewis, Jones, and Baker 2012, p. 655).

4 Excerpts in this paragraph translated from Spanish.

Additional information

Funding

Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.