Although a variety of research has investigated the use and benefits of home language in school settings, research on using translation to support school learning is scarce. With the goal of designing a differentiated and culturally relevant strategy that supports the reading of bilingual students, we worked with seventh-grade students in pull-out settings. After reading narrative texts, we invited students to collaboratively translate and evaluate thematically connected excerpts. Using distributed cognition and distributed expertise as a theoretical perspective, this qualitative case study shows that collaborative translation made student expertise visible and mediated the way that students participated and negotiated meaning.

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Recognizing the role of collaboration and multilingual literacy as 21st-century skills, the authors used design research methods to present, analyze, and refine a strategic reading approach for bilingual students. The collaborative translation strategy involves students reading an academic text, translating key passages, and evaluating these translations. Student discussions that ensued provided a rich context to support a thoughtful connection to textual concepts. The authors also discuss the development and refinement of domain-specific instructional theory that informs collaborative translation. Findings suggest the strategy holds promise for increasing student engagement and providing a central instructional role for heritage languages.

This chapter suggests a social constructivist model for engaging students in digital texts and composition. Partial results are shared from a three-year project, Virtual Vacations, which focused on creating digital texts from virtual experiences exploring different geographic settings in a mixed age elementary group. Three participants in this case study provide evidence of students' strategic knowledge pertaining to the use of digital tools for literacy tasks. The authors provide suggestions for teachers of digital natives such as this one: teachers need to scaffold instruction to balance the duality between digital tasks and literacy skills.