Plurilingual Learners and Schooling

Hawkins, Margaret R.

doi:10.1002/9781119421702.ch2

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In second language and bilingual language development, similar debates have pitted individual structural theories against theories that forefront the social context of language learning (Firth and Wagner, 1997;Firth and Wagner, 2007;Lantolf and Thorne, 2006;Atkinson, 2011;Dixon et al, 2012). Hawkins (2019) outlines the fundamental shift associated with a sociocultural approach to language: From a sociocultural perspective, language does not stand alone; a language cannot be conceived as a codified set of structures, grammars, and lexical items. Rather, languages shift and change across context, users, places, and time .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite decades of efforts, deficit narratives regarding language development and use by children and students from historically marginalized backgrounds remain persistent in the United States. Examining selective literature, we discuss the ideologies that undergird two deficit narratives: the notion that some children have a “word gap” when compared to their White middle-class peers, and students must develop “academic language” to engage in rigorous content learning. The “word gap” concept came from a study wherein a group of young children in low-income families heard fewer words than those in middle-class families. It assumes that language can only be acquired in one way—vocabulary exchange from one parent to one child—and ignores decades of research on diverse pathways for language development. We highlight an alternative perspective that language development builds on children’s experience with cultural practices and the harm on minoritized children by privileging a specific form of vocabulary acquisition. The second deficit narrative concerns “academic language,” a concept championed by scholars aiming to address educational inequity. The construct runs the risk of undervaluing the potential of students from historically marginalized backgrounds to engage in learning using language that is “informal,” nonconventional, or “non-native like.” It also is sometimes used as a rationale to relegate students to special programs isolated from more rigorous academic discourse, thus ironically removing them from opportunities to develop the academic registers they are deemed to be missing. We explore alternative frameworks that shift the focus from linguistic features of academic talk and texts as prerequisites for academic work to the broad range of linguistic resources that students employ for academic purposes in the classroom. Finally, we turn to a positive approach to youths’ language development and use: translanguaging by multilingual learners and their teachers. Translanguaging demonstrates the power of a resource-oriented perspective that values students’ rich communicative repertoires and actively seeks to disrupt language hierarchies. We argue that this approach, however, must be considered in relation to the broader social context to meet its transformative aims. Together, our analysis suggests counter-possibilities to dismantle deficit-oriented narratives and points to promising directions for research and practices to reduce inequity in education.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts

Aragón,

Corella,

Lang

2024

Reading Research Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance‐taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co‐construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense‐making in literacy activities.

show abstract

When a monolingual science teacher and multilingual girls engage in science sensemaking through translanguaging: A pedagogical practice, disciplinary tool, and dignity‐affirming stance

Kayumova,

Harper,

Moniz‐Stronach

2024

J Res Sci Teach

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Multilingual youth, from nondominant communities, are often denied critical opportunities for engagement in robust sensemaking due to deficit‐based perspectives and linguistic hierarchies. To advance equity, it is important to recognize all youth as epistemic agents and facilitate opportunities to take on intellectual positions. Drawing on translanguaging theory and critical sociocultural learning perspectives, we examine how a monolingual science teacher employed translanguaging as a dignity‐affirming stance, pedagogical practice, and disciplinary tool, providing multilingual girls with intellectual positions to engage in robust sensemaking. Using video‐interactional analysis, we explore a case of sophisticated sensemaking orchestrated by the teacher's discursive and embodied moves, following the girls' translanguaging practices and disciplinary ideas. Our findings demonstrate how a teacher's translanguaging stance, enacted as a pedagogical practice and disciplinary tool, supported him in developing interpretive power, revealing the multilingual girls' social, cognitive, and communicative brilliances.

show abstract

Plurilingual Learners and Schooling

Cited by 4 publications

References 37 publications

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts

When a monolingual science teacher and multilingual girls engage in science sensemaking through translanguaging: A pedagogical practice, disciplinary tool, and dignity‐affirming stance

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About