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

Symposium (2 hours + 15 minutes)

multiple

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion
Co-Official/Regional Language Immersion
Two-Way Bilingual Immersion
One-Way Developmental Bilingual Education
Indigenous Language Immersion

Elementary (K-5)
Middle School/Junior High
High School

In this symposium, four speakers from different language immersion contexts will explore translanguaging pedagogies. Each will explain their conceptualization of translanguaging, whether/how it translates into pedagogical practice, and potential benefits and pitfalls that may attend translanguaging practices in the classroom contexts that they represent.

In this symposium, four speakers from different language immersion contexts will explore translanguaging pedagogies. Each will explain their conceptualization of translanguaging, whether/how it translates into pedagogical practice, and potential benefits and pitfalls that may attend translanguaging practices in the classroom contexts that they represent.

The Role of Context in Translanguaging

Symposium Organized by

Deborah Palmer, University of Colorado-Boulder and

Susan Ballinger, McGill University

In the past decade, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field of language education regarding our understanding of how bilinguals use their languages to learn both content and new language practices. While the prevailing mentality among immersion and content-based language educators prior to this shift was that learners’ languages should be kept strictly separated in order to fully develop each language system, researchers now increasingly call for pedagogical practices that bridge learners’ languages, encouraging learners to draw on all their language practices as they strive to develop cognitive, linguistic, and academic skills. These practices are often collectively labeled ‘translanguaging.’

Nevertheless, translanguaging remains controversial, both as a term and in practice. First, we struggle to define and understand translanguaging in a consistent manner, leading to confusion over what can and cannot be labeled translanguaging. Some note the lack of research supporting claims for the benefits of translanguaging, as well as the lack of information regarding how to translate it into concrete teaching methods. They argue that we need to better understand how to strike a balance between systematically using students’ primary language as a resource, and maintaining ample opportunities for target language input and practice.

Others argue that interpretations of translanguaging must be context-specific: practices that are beneficial in one context may be inappropriate and even harmful in others. In this symposium, four speakers from different language immersion contexts will explore translanguaging pedagogies. Each will explain their conceptualization of translanguaging, whether/how it translates into pedagogical practice, and potential benefits and pitfalls that may attend translanguaging practices in the classroom contexts that they represent. 

The Potential of Translanguaging to Reveal Young Bilinguals’ Developing Narrative Competence and Bilingual Identities: Doing “Being Bilingual” in a Preschool Spanish/English Dual Language Bilingual Education Program

Mileidis Gort, University of Colorado-Boulder

Drawing on qualitative analyses of preschool-age, emergent bilinguals’ story retelling, this presentation will highlight the potential of translanguaging – or the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire – to reveal young children’s language and literacy learning and to perform their developing bilingual identities. The analysis focuses on the post-read aloud story retellings of three preschool-age, US-born emergent bilinguals of Latino heritage who represent varying, but typical, bilingual experiences of children in this multilingual, US southeastern urban area. Participants drew on a variety of representational systems (e.g., illustrations, text, gestures) and their emerging bilingual competence to retell book-based stories, and evidenced their conceptualization of the retell task as well as their developing narrative and oral storytelling competence. Children’s translanguaging practices revealed their dynamic linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge, scaffolded their formalized language performances and experimentation with academic discourse and new language forms, and reflected the language norms and practices of their linguistically and culturally diverse community. Such analyses of emergent bilingual children’s languaging practices provide insight into the complex dynamics involved in doing “being bilingual” in a preschool Spanish/English dual language bilingual education program.

Translanguaging in the Heritage Language Context

Tina Hickey, University College Dublin

This contribution will consider the impact of translanguaging in heritage language settings in particular, where a majority language such as English and a threatened minority language such as Welsh or Irish co-exist. While acknowledging the potential benefits of translanguaging for some learners in these settings, there is also the possibility that it may have unintended consequences for others. Research showing the need to consider a range of child, school and societal factors will be discussed. Child-level factors include pupils’ age, language proficiency, language learning motivations and preferences, and family language proficiency; school-level factors include the language balance among pupils, the curriculum goals, and the language aims of the school; while relevant societal factors include the status of each language and general attitudes to them. Consideration will be given to identifying ways in which heritage language settings could implement translanguaging practices that reap benefits while still remaining sensitive to such factors. 

Translanguaging as Resource in a Dual Language Bilingual Education Context

Susana Ibarra Johnson, University of New Mexico

Integrating the rich ways that bilingual students do literacy in their everyday lives to scaffold and support student learning is essential in this session. Translanguaging has the potential to improve biliteracy instruction, relationships with students and students’ own comprehension and engagement by taking up a translanguaging stance, design, and moves. This session presents how a bilingual teacher and her students use translanguaging as a resource for thinking, remembering, and discussing by sembrando juntos [planting together] seeds of biliteracy learning with bilingual texts. The Cuentame Algo activity shared in this session demonstrates how students use translanguaging to make meaning of bilingual texts by using their dynamic language practices with those used in school?juntos?to leverage deep understandings. Taking up a translanguaging stance can potentially provide bilingual students a space in which they can draw upon their growing knowledge of the functions, intentions, and power of written and spoken language.  

Challenging the Use of English as an Essential Scaffold in French Immersion

Roy Lyster, McGill University

French immersion in Canada has striven to create classroom settings that maximize students’ exposure to French L2 and opportunities to use it in communities that are otherwise predominantly English-speaking. In spite of these efforts, it has been well documented that French immersion students use English increasingly as they progress through the program, expressing dissatisfaction and hesitation concerning their use of the L2 and reaching a plateau in their French L2 development around the same as their use of English L1 increases.

This paper will argue that more use of English in French immersion will lead neither to greater fluency in French nor more confidence in using it. I will take the position that the use of English L1 by French immersion students is a result of the socio-political context in which they live—where English, with its increasingly global status, is dominant and considered sufficient. The driving question will be: What scaffolding techniques are more likely than English L1 to support continued development of both L2 proficiency and content knowledge?