We live in an increasingly complex, multilingual society where young children from a variety of ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds work together to learn literacy in our classrooms. As we’ve written about before, there are many different Englishes (Fu et al., 2019). Our emergent bilingual students, in particular, will bring diverse English practices that include incorporation of L1 (first language) during predominantly English interactions.
In our classrooms, we have the opportunity capitalize on students’ diverse language backgrounds and encourage the use of multiple languages to make meaning during reading and writing. This is what translanguaging means. Sound a little complicated? It is. And yet, we have always had children in our early childhood classrooms who speak multiple languages and have had to translanguage for themselves when moving between English and their L1. Choosing to translanguage for literacy learning is a logical next step for encouraging cognitive processes that our emergent bilinguals must already rely upon to participate in the classroom.
Here’s how it might look:
Ms. Harlowe is a kindergarten teacher in a rural Title I school. Her students are half monolingual English speakers (10 students) and half emergent bilinguals (11 students, called ELLs in the school). The emergent bilingual students all speak Spanish as their L1, and the majority only use Spanish at home.
To introduce color words, concepts of print, and rhyme, Ms. Harlowe is reading a well-loved classic – Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Martin, 1967). She’s chosen this book not only for its beautiful illustrations and lovely, accessible language for dialogic reading groups, but also because it is published in Spanish – Oso pardo, oso pardo, ¿qué ves ahí?
Ms. Harlowe and the ELL teacher, Mr. Flores, conduct co-taught read alouds using both books, and the children in the classroom are encouraged to chorally respond to color words, animals, and rhymes with both languages. They build a color word wall with both the English and Spanish words, as well as an animal word wall with the same. Though the predominant language of instruction is English, you will still hear the emergent bilingual students using Spanish to support their learning, and the monolingual English speaking students are also encouraged to learn new Spanish vocabulary.
As the students write in a class book later, making up their own animal/color combinations with sentence stems, Ms. Harlowe and Rico are writing together:
Ms. H: Rico, what animal did you pick?
Rico: Unicornio!
Ms. H: Unicornio? Cool, you picked a unicorn! I see the horn you’ve drawn right here! I love those rainbow swirls. What color is your unicornio?
Rico: He is blue.
Ms. H: Yep, I see that. Blue, azúl. This is so cool. Let’s get our color word cards and write blue and azúl on our paper to finish our sentence – I see a _____ unicorn looking at me! What are we going to write?
Together: I see a blue unicorn looking at me.
Want to read more?
Book: Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals: Inclusive Teaching in the Linguistically Diverse Classroom (Fu, Hadjioannou, & Zhou, 2019)
Article: Biliteracy of African American and Latinx Kindergarten Students in a Dual-Language Program: Understanding Students’ Translanguaging Practices Across Informal Assessments (Bauer, Colomer, & Wiemelt, 2020)
Happy reading,
Lauren
Dr. Lauren Breckenridge Padesky is a research scientist at the Indiana Institute on Disability & Community’s Early Childhood Center. She holds a PhD in Curriculum & Instruction – Literacy Education, and has formerly taught preschool through high school students to read and write in a variety of settings. Email her at lpadesky@iu.edu.
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