" En Español es Distinto"

Abstract

English immersion education policies in the United States deprive immigrant-origin bilingual students from using their home languages to learn. However, a growing body of research emphasizes the importance of promoting heteroglossic classroom language practices to enhance bilingual students’ learning. Drawing on translanguaging pedagogy (García, 2009; Lewis, Baker & Jones, 2010), this study explored the flexible use of English and Spanish in bilingual students’ language and literacy development. To achieve this, translanguaging instructional strategies were infused into an English language and literacy curriculum to investigate how a group of third grade bilingual students, with varied proficiencies in English and Spanish, used their entire linguistic repertoire to engage in the literacy practices proposed in the curriculum. These literacy practices encompassed reading and discussing culturally-relevant texts, and participating in explicit text-based language instruction in the areas of semantics, morphology, and syntax. Conversation and discourse analysis techniques were used to analyze the lesson videos, and to understand the role of translanguaging in participants’ interactions, and in their discourse about semantics, morphology, and syntax. Findings regarding the role of translanguaging in participants’ interactions, indicate that they strategically and pragmatically used their languages to ensure their meaningful engagement in these lessons, and to perform their bilingual identities. In terms of the role of translanguaging in participants’ discourse about the linguistic constructs targeted in the reading curriculum, results indicate that bilingual language instruction engaged students in cross-linguistic analyses that enhanced their linguistic awareness. Based on these findings, a model for translanguaging pedagogy in language and literacy instruction is proposed, and implications for translanguaging theory, pedagogy, social justice, and future research are discussed.