The Translanguaging Pedagogies Continuum

Translanguaging pedagogy is an approach to educational equity that harnesses multilingual learners’ communicative repertoires (e.g., home languages, non-standard varieties, and gestures) by strategically incorporating them in the classroom to ensure students’ active participation and meaningful learning. This paper proposes a research-informed continuum that captures a range of possibilities for integrating translanguaging in language and literacy instruction. This continuum provides insight into how educators may make socially just instructional and curricular decisions that are based on recognizing multilingual students' languages, cultures, and ways of knowing as valuable assets in the classroom.

Marginalization Through Curricularization of Language Teaching: Creating and Exposing Deficits in an Adult Language and Literacy Program

Research supports the premise that adult language and literacy instruction should build on prior linguistic knowledge and the lived experiences of the students. Despite these widely held tenets, classroom practices often do not reflect these ideals, instead providing learning opportunities that are decontextualized and isolated from the students’ lives. Drawing on 18 months of qualitative data and based on principles of participatory action research, this ethnographic case study of a peer-taught, prison-based, adult language and literacy program, situated in a state-run, medium security prison in the Midwest of the United States, focuses on the role language ideologies played in shaping classroom practices and the marginalization of both students and instructors. This study found that language ideologies contributed to a curricularized approach to language and literacy instruction focused on teaching discrete linguistic features and lexical items. This curricularization of language positioned students as linguistically deficient and shaped deficit perspectives of the students in the classroom. Additionally, the curricularized approach in conjunction with racialized understandings of “native speakerism” marginalized instructors through influencing who was perceived as a viable language model in the classroom. These findings emphasize the need to move away from reified understandings of language and build on the situated ways students use language. Additionally, moving toward a curriculum focused on situated language practices provides opportunities for students and instructors to critically examine issues of power and privilege related to language.

Effects of Read It Again! In Early Childhood Special Education Classrooms as Compared to Regular Shared Book Reading

Read It Again! PreK (RIA) is a whole-class, teacher-implemented intervention that embeds explicit language and literacy instruction within the context of shared book reading and has prior evidence of supporting the language and literacy skills of preschool children. We conducted a conceptual replication to test its efficacy when implemented in early childhood special education classrooms relative to regular shared book reading. The randomized controlled trial involved 109 teachers and 726 children (341 with disabilities and 385 peers). Compared to the rigorous counterfactual condition, RIA significantly increased teachers’ provision of explicit instruction targeting phonological awareness, print knowledge, narrative, and vocabulary during shared book readings but had limited impact on children’s language and literacy skills. Findings underscore the need to conduct replication studies to identify interventions that realize effects for specific populations of interest, such as children with disabilities served in early childhood special education classrooms.

Preparing Teachers to Serve English Learners With Language- and/or Literacy-Related Difficulties and Disabilities

Competencies needed by teachers who provide language and literacy instruction to English learners (ELs), including bilingual education, English as a second language, general education, and special education teachers, are outlined. The competencies suggest a shared knowledge base all teachers of ELs must have to provide linguistically and culturally responsive instruction and intervention that is differentiated to meet students’ language-, literacy-, and/or disability-related needs. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in teacher preparation.