Learning the lessons.

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of “reading wars.” Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert (vol 19, pg 5, 2018)

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

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On ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research

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.

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

Many students of color who are also identified as “struggling” readers are likely to have negative experiences in school. In this article, I discuss the findings of a case study examining how reade...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1086296X17751824

Holding Space for Literate Identity Co-Construction:

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.

Michiko Hikida

Papers

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

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

Holding Space for Literate Identity Co-Construction:

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

Contesting Science That Silences: Amplifying Equity, Agency, and Design Research in Literacy Teacher Preparation