“Wait! I don’t get it! Can we translate?”: Explicit collaborative translation to support emergent bilinguals’ reading comprehension in the intermediate grades

ABSTRACT

Throughout our targeted approach of explicit collaborative translation during small-group reading instruction in a bilingual education classroom, fourth grade emergent bilinguals employed the strategy to comprehend narrative text in a range of ways, similar to middle school students in reading instruction research. As students acknowledged the usefulness of their translation skills in constructing meaning with text, they also demonstrated increased initiative to engage in reading across classroom literacy events. Findings from this exploratory inquiry, including initial evidence of students’ developing bilingual identities of competence, suggest further research is warranted on explicit collaborative translation as part of a growing corpus of evidence-based translingual practices in bilingual classrooms.

Acknowledgments

We extend our sincere appreciation to Dr. James Cummins for his informative and encouraging comments on an earlier version of this article. We are also very grateful for the reviewers’ helpful suggestions to improve our manuscript. Any errors located within the text, however, are solely our own.

Notes

1. As part of Nadeen’s work as a bilingual teacher educator, researcher, and bilingual school board member, she has occasion to regularly interact with bilingual teachers and administrators at many Spanish-English bilingual schools both in the U.S. and internationally. She has yet to come across any school site personnel who openly endorse translation instructional activities, despite a more open attitude toward translation in the research arena. Bilingual teachers’ and administrators’ wariness of translation usually rests upon their concern that translation will lead to less time for students to hear and interact in the language with lesser status, in this case, Spanish. Another argument raised against translation is violation of the percentage of time allocated to instruction in a single language.

2. To ensure that our readers are familiar with the use of the term “Direct Method” in instructed second language research, as opposed to the general educational term of direct instruction, we provide this succinct definition from Ellis and Shintani (2014): “A language teaching method which stipulates that only the target language is used in the classroom, the meaning of a sentence is demonstrated through actions and objects, speaking is prioritized, and grammar is taught only inductively” (p. 336).

3. Our reporting of STAR reading comprehension scores is not an endorsement of their use. There are other reading assessments in English and Spanish such as the Reading Miscue Inventory (Goodman et al., 2005) and the Developmental Reading Assessment/Evaluación de la Lectura (Beaver & Carter, 2019; Ruiz & Cuesta, 2019) that provide teachers with more useful information for reading instruction. The school where our inquiry took place had adopted the STAR assessment as a classroom-based assessment of reading progress, and we primarily used STAR scores as one of several ways to identify the focal students who could potentially benefit from our instructional approach, and as supplemental data to qualitative changes in students’ narrative reading comprehension strategies and skills.