“Where the true power resides”: Student translanguaging and supportive teacher dispositions

ABSTRACT

Scholarship suggests that bilingual students’ translanguaging skills – their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies – should be leveraged as a valuable meaning-making resource and that translanguaging pedagogies can disrupt linguistic hierarchies and the ideologies of race, class, and nationhood that constitute them. Nevertheless, much of the scholarship in this area considers students’ language practices in unmonitored classroom moments, often in violation of curriculum language expectations for monolingual usage. This qualitative study draws upon 1 year of ethnographic observation and field notes, audio-recorded classroom interactions, and semi-structured interviews in a 5th grade dual immersion (DI) classroom to examine one teacher’s deliberate allowances for translanguaging despite administrative language separation requirements and the ambivalence they produced, and students’ subsequent meaning-making processes in class. This work highlights the particular dispositions and curriculum arrangements that teachers can rely upon to create a dynamic bilingual environment for students and offers insights into how teachers of emergent bilingual students should be prepared.

Notes

1. All place and people names are pseudonyms to ensure anonymity and confidentiality.

2. Students labeled English Learners could be redesignated as English Proficient through sufficient scores on tests of English Language Development and English Language Arts, grades, and teacher recommendation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stanford University Vice Provost for Graduate Education [Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship].