Learning the lessons.

Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct

The second edition of Rosina Lippi-Green's book, English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States, continues the conversation from her 1997 first edition regardin...

English with an accent: language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States

Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Ana Celia Zentella. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.323 pp.

Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York

Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what I call an integrated multilingual model of individual bilingualism, contrasted with the unitary model and dual competence model. I further distinguish grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like monolinguals, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar. I call the viewpoint developed here a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging

This article draws on qualitative data from two Spanish-English dual language elementary classrooms to explore how teachers in these classrooms made sense of the everyday practice of bilingualism. Methodologically, this study relied on participant observation, video recording, and semi-structured interviews. Conceptually, this article draws on the notion of translanguaging to describe how these teachers and their students moved fluidly across multiple languages and dialects in their everyday interactions. Drawing on language ideological inquiry, this article illustrates that these teachers’ perspectives on translanguaging sometimes echoed ideologies of linguistic purism that emphasize language separation, while also reflecting counterhegemonic ideologies that privilege Spanish and promote bilingualism. Teachers’ everyday language use and instructional practices both reflected and contrasted with their stated ideologies. It is argued that a more nuanced understanding of teachers’ complex language ideologie...

Unpacking Ideologies of Linguistic Purism: How Dual Language Teachers Make Sense of Everyday Translanguaging.

This paper examines student and teacher talk in a first grade classroom in a two-way immersion school in Central Texas. Drawing on audio and video data from a year-long study in a first grade two-w...

Pluralist discourses of bilingualism and translanguaging talk in classrooms

A substantial body of research has collectively concluded that encouraging students to draw flexibly on multiple aspects of their linguistic repertoires is positively associated with developing bilingualism, metalinguistic awareness, and academic skills. However, most bilingual education programs—including transitional and dual-language—limit, discourage, and/or stigmatize such practices. This study examines literature discussion in a fifth-grade bilingual education classroom, in which the teacher valued, supported, and facilitated hybrid language practices. The findings illuminate the ways in which the teacher and students flexibly used their linguistic and cultural resources to understand the text content and language.

Spaces for Dynamic Bilingualism in Read-Aloud Discussions: Developing and Strengthening Bilingual and Academic Skills

This study explored how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of bilingual Latina/o first-grade students. Drawing on translingual theories of literacy and scholarship describing the role of audience and audience awareness in skilled writing, this study qualitatively documented and analyzed students’ writing and talk about writing for a variety of audiences. Analysis suggests that children both addressed, or responded to, their intended readers and invoked particular kinds of audiences. Children’s audience awareness influenced their use of language (Spanish, English or both), as well as rhetorical strategies and design choices. This study expands theories of audience to include linguistically diverse settings, and contributes to scholarship on asset-based pedagogies for literacy teaching and learning.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1086296X16683420

Audience and young bilingual writers: Building on strengths

This article explores the interactional co-construction of identities among two first-grade students learning Spanish as a third language in a Spanish-English dual language classroom. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data, the article focuses on a single interaction between these two “Spanish learners” and two of their Spanish-speaking classmates that took place within the context of a classroom literacy event. Analysis involved examining the sequential organization of talk, as well as identifying the particular linguistic resources that speakers recruited in their conversational turns. Findings showcase the interactional mechanisms by which students’ identities were variously asserted, contested, and negotiated in everyday classroom talk. The article ends by offering implications and raising further questions with respect to the implementation of dual language education for multilingual students.

Leah Durán

Papers

Unpacking Ideologies of Linguistic Purism: How Dual Language Teachers Make Sense of Everyday Translanguaging.

Pluralist discourses of bilingualism and translanguaging talk in classrooms

Spaces for Dynamic Bilingualism in Read-Aloud Discussions: Developing and Strengthening Bilingual and Academic Skills

Audience and young bilingual writers: Building on strengths

Becoming “Spanish Learners”: Identity and Interaction Among Multilingual Children in a Spanish-English Dual Language Classroom