Marked and unmarked translanguaging in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered English classrooms

Translanguaging has gained prominence as a way to understand multilingual practices and draw on these in additional language teaching, but questions remain regarding its application in various educational contexts. This study investigates the significance of translanguaging across instructional settings by comparing discourses of markedness in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered classes taught by the same teacher, where both linguistically majoritized and minoritized students were learning English as an additional language. Data are drawn from four months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a Norwegian upper secondary school and include field notes, video and screen recordings, texts, language portraits, and teacher and student interviews. I found that translanguaging was marked in two largely separate ways: (1) bilingual English-Norwegian practices were more frequently marked in accelerated and mainstream settings, in relation to students’ perceived English proficiency level; whereas (2) translanguaging drawing on minoritized languages was more consistently marked in all three settings as a deviation from majority linguistic practices, thus distinguishing majoritized (English-Norwegian) from minoritized translanguaging. Implications include the importance of analyzing translanguaging in relation to locally salient discourses and contextualizing pedagogical interventions in larger struggles for justice.

Monolingual Language Ideologies and the Massachusetts Sheltered English Immersion Endorsement Initiative: A Critical Policy Analysis

With U.S. classrooms increasingly characterized by linguistic diversity, policies mandating teacher training around English learning have proliferated. Recent federal oversight prompted Massachusetts to implement an initiative to endorse its 70,000+ teachers in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI). While policy research has productively emphasized teachers as policy interpreters within such initiatives, almost no research exists on the role teacher educators play in the policy interpretive process. Therefore, this study documents how teacher educators across Massachusetts interpreted and operationalized the SEI endorsement policy. Drawing on document and interview analysis, findings highlight key experiences, contextual factors, and ideological dispositions that informed participants’ policy interpretations. Instructors navigated tensions between their own goals to affirm linguistic diversity and the monolingual orientations produced through the state’s recently overturned English-only policy. These findings demonstrate the affordances of examining the role of language ideologies in policy interpretation, with implications for large-scale language policy initiatives and educational policy interpretation more broadly.

Intersections of Language, Content, and Multimodalities: Instructional Conversations in Mrs. B’s Sheltered English Biology Classroom

The challenges inherent in mastering academic content in a new language are many. When it comes to learning science in U.S. high schools, English learners (ELs) confront these on a daily basis. In an effort to document expert language/content instructional strategies, we analyze Mrs. B’s sheltered high school biology class, made up of ELs from around the world and representing varying stages of emerging bilingualism. The aim of this 2-year case study was to detail effective teaching patterns in a high-functioning multicultural science class—a class where the myriad linguistic, cultural, and affective needs of students are expertly met—and to subsequently suggest a model for understanding and undertaking powerful language and content learning supported by multimodal referents. From a rich data set comprising class recordings, interviews, reflections from Mrs. B, course documents, student work, and survey responses emerged a model of the language/content multimodal interface for teaching ELs.

Teaching For Justice: Introducing Translanguaging in an Undergraduate TESOL Course

This study investigates how introducing translanguaging as a way to affirm language and culture impacted students’ understandings of learning and teaching in a TESOL certificate course offered at a university in the northeast of the United States. As researchers, teachers, and students committed to justice, we explored the impact of introducing translanguaging in a course that was originally designed as a Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) course through collaborative, qualitative approaches of thematic analysis and macro- and micro-level analyses of power based on our unique individual experiences in the classroom. We found across our analysis that introducing translanguaging provided opportunities to shift assumptions and that, overall, students demonstrated critical sociocultural understandings of language that are foundational in teaching for justice. Ultimately, while we recognize the need for more explicit discussion about the purpose and pedagogy of translanguaging, the shifts towards teaching and embracing multilingual and multicultural realities through translanguaging which the study identified can contribute to the field of language education by demonstrating how teachers might open up possibilities in teaching for justice.

“It’s Not Really My Job”: A Mixed Methods Framework for Language Ideologies, Monolingualism, and Teaching Emergent Bilingual Learners

Teacher education has redoubled efforts to prepare a predominantly monolingual teaching force for linguistic diversity in U.S. schools. Some jurisdictions are requiring specific teacher preparation, such as mandated Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) endorsement in Massachusetts, the context of this study. Previous research has explored the intersections of language ideologies and practice through such coursework. However, few studies have accounted for the underlying monolingual ideologies that inform U.S education. Therefore, this study employs a mixed methods approach to analyze language ideologies among 127 preservice and beginning teachers engaged in SEI methods coursework. Drawing on written reflections, survey data, and reported practices, this study offers a framework for exploring teacher language ideologies. This framework highlights a trajectory of lived ontologies, pedagogical orientations, and key contextual “filters” that may distort language ideologies in practice. The framework is operationalized through an analysis of monolingual ideologies across educational policy, practice, and teacher preparation.