Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

English, Japanese

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Pre-K

How do children start translanguaging to become bilingual?  The paper investigates the onset of translanguaging abilities of two Japanese children in an American dual immersion preschool.  Through translanguaging, the children gradually expanded their capabilities to use the new language as resources, alongside their translanguaging space from exclusion to inclusion.

While there have been a variety of studies about the phenomena of people translanguaging when they are already bilinguals, either fluent or limited in their abilities, there is not enough research about the onset of translanguaging ability. For better understanding of the early translanguaging stages in the transition from monolingual to bilingual in the school setting, it is important to know how children actually start using the new language as resources to participate in the new language community.

This paper investigated (i) how classroom ecology drives children to start using their new language, (ii) if and how translanguaging by teachers and peers promote children’s translanguaging behaviors, and (iii) if and how translanguaging as a practice leads to the acquisition of the new language.

This is a longitudinal, ethnographic multi-case study of two Japanese children in an American double immersion preschool.  The classroom was analyzed from ecological perspectives, and all the translanguaging activities were audio-recorded and coded to be categorized into code-switching, translation, linguistic scaffolding such as recasts, or language brokering.  The choice of languages the Japanese children made and their English utterances were followed to see if there was any developmental change in both forms and functions.

It is found that, in a double immersion preschool, the translanguaging practice by the teachers created translanguaging space for the children and let them recognize that they can choose which language to use when and how.  Translanguaging provided the opportunities for the children to grow from monolingual to bilingual, and accordingly, enabled them to widen the membership of their speech community.  The study indicates some pedagogical suggestions, together with some future research issues such as translanguaging as a means of membership exclusion and the non-verbal responses as a pre-translanguaging stage.