Facilitating culturally sustaining, functional literacy practices in a middle school ESOL reading program: a design-based research study

Enacting culturally sustaining immersion pedagogy through SFL and translanguaging design

“…This study described a French immersion teacher's enactment of his SFL knowledge base to translanguage in a culturally sustaining genre pedagogy in French immersion classroom. The findings build upon the prior work connecting SFL, translanguaging, and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Cavallaro & Sembiante, 2021; Harman & Khote, 2018; Harman, 2018; Mizell, 2021; Sembiante & Tian, 2021) as a means for the teaching and learning of language and content (Cavallaro & Sembiante, 2021; Harman & Khote, 2018; Harman, 2018; Mizell, 2021; Sembiante & Tian, 2021). While this study demonstrates the potential of the SFL knowledge base for translanguaging design in immersion education contexts, further research is needed to understand how students’ knowledges develop over time within such immersion education contexts, with a particular and intentional focus on the language development of African American learners and other historically marginalized students.…”

“…This contextualized view of language allowed him address content-language integration (e.g., Turkan et al, 2014) and position his students agentively in and through translanguaging design. The findings from this study suggest that for language immersion teachers, like teachers in other contexts, knowledge of content and language integration alone is not enough; rather this knowledge must be enacted in ways that are culturally sustaining (e.g., Cavallaro & Sembiante, 2021;Harman & Khote, 2018;Harman, 2018;Mizell, 2021;Sembiante & Tian, 2021) and consider students' racialized identities in the language classroom (Anya, 2017(Anya, , 2020. As Zheng (2019) described, immersion teachers need critical language awareness that develops their functional linguistic understanding and enables them and to scaffold content and language integration through culturally sustaining immersion pedagogies.…”

Bringing a Culturally Sustaining Lens to Reading Intervention

“…Although limited in number, descriptive studies have explored reading intervention instructional contexts with explicit twin goals of drawing on the linguistic and cultural resources of emergent bilinguals and building foundational literacy skills. In the design-based research by Cavallaro and Sembiante (2020) with middle school emergent bilinguals in an intensive reading support class, students engaged in translanguaging practices and built metalinguistic awareness through the genre of personal narrative. Within guided reading, Ascenzi-Moreno and Quiñones (2020) illustrated multiple approaches to drawing on the linguistic repertoires of emergent bilinguals to work on decoding, comprehension, and vocabulary.…”

Development Features of Students' Functional Literacy Through Texts in Foreign Language Lessons

“…According to Cavallaro & Sembiante, functional literacy is the ability of a person to use the knowledge acquired during his life to solve a wide range of life tasks in various spheres of human activity, communication and social relations [Cavallaro, C. J., & Sembiante, S. F., 2021]. Nowadays, society and the economy make a request for such specialists who want and can master new knowledge, apply it to new circumstances and solve emerging problems, that is, there is a demand for functionally competent specialists.…”