Biliteracy of African American and Latinx Kindergarten Students in a Dual-Language Program: Understanding Students’ Translanguaging Practices Across Informal Assessments

Abstract

This article uses a translanguaging framework, together with critical case sampling and qualitative analysis, to explore how six students approached literacy in an integrated dual-language (DL) program in a low-income, working-class, predominantly African American school. Students’ translanguaging practices encompassed a broad repertoire of features that included home language, academic language, metalinguistic awareness, and lived experiences across home, school, and community contexts—many of which likely to go unexamined with traditional standardized testing. Educators working with minoritized DL students are encouraged to adopt a translanguaging lens when assessing students’ bilingualism and biliteracy to more fully capture students’ linguistic repertoire.

Using the translanguaging space to facilitate poetic representation of language and identity

“…Vygotsky (1962) poses that being able to name a phenomenon brings it into being and helps with sense-making. When the developmental trajectories of emerging multilinguals inform the pedagogical stance (Bauer et al, 2020), the symbolic action of acknowledging their languages can be made even if students are not proficient in the languages. It is important to create a third space (Lotherington, 2013) in which this can be achieved.…”

“…As contemporary poetry experiments with fluid language practices and values the tensions between different ways of representing meanings, it similarly creates space for multilinguals to showcase the complex negotiating strategies they use when writing and interpreting texts (Canagarajah, 2013). Poetry allows students to develop proficiencies as strategic users and negotiators of language (Canagarajah, 2013), selecting words, phrases and forms by which to express their ideas and emotions orally (Bauer, Colomer, & Wiemelt, 2020) and in writing. It is a form that lends itself to personal expression and nothing is more personal than choosing in what way you wish to express yourself (Halliday, 2004).…”

Rethinking “(Under) Performance” for Black English Speakers: Beyond Achievement to Opportunity

“…Affordances provided via opportunity gaps allow for addressing the literacy needs of Black youth and are particularly important given that these youth must often abandon the home cultures and identities in which their literacy and language practices are embedded and with which they are most familiar as they seek to adopt or reflect the literacies enacted by dominant populations in and beyond schools (Delpit, 1988; Street, 1995). These literacy and language practices, through which Black youth reflect their literacy assets as they engage in linguistic practices such as code-switching, code-meshing, and translanguaging (e.g., Bauer, Colomer, & Wiemelt, 2018; Wheeler & Swords, 2006; Young, 2007) find little to no avenue for expression on measures of standardized literacy. Through code-switching, Black students have been encouraged to engage in contrastive analysis where they identified differences in grammar between how they use language at school and in the home so they can determine which language style to enact based on where they are, the audience they are addressing, and the purpose for which they are communicating (Wheeler & Swords, 2006).…”

“…Code-meshing allowed these youth to extend vocabulary on a national scale, expand the rhetorical styles available for use, enhance their peers’ capacity for understanding linguistic difference, and reflect their “multidialectal” nature (Young, 2007, p. 65). More recent advances that extend beyond code-switching and code-meshing have acknowledged translanguaging (García & Lin, 2016) in the literacy practices of Black students who draw simultaneously from their home and academic language practices, reflecting metalinguistic awareness across home, school, and community (Bauer et al, 2018).…”

“…Yet, literacy assessments such as PISA are not designed to capture such linguistic or literate complexity nor do they seem capable of reflecting how Black students leverage their multidialectism and multilingualism (Bauer et al, 2018; Smith, 2016; Smith et al, 2018). Moreover, the normative standards by which such assessments are governed tend to be more aligned with those of the dominant culture that implicitly and inadvertently reinforces an autonomous model of literacy in schools (Brooks, 2016; Mitchell, 2013; Smith et al, 2018).…”