Pseudo-compliance or convergence?

This paper reports on a professional learning (PL) project conducted over one year at a senior secondary school in New Zealand. Subject teachers volunteered to work with one another and a facilitator to identify the linguistic demands of their subjects, adapt teaching materials, and try out teaching approaches congruent with research evidence about teaching emergent bilingual (EB) learners. This paper explores cases of subject-specific partnerships and how participants’ responses to the PL appeared to impact their existing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The PL sessions were facilitated through audio-recorded Zoom meetings. A thematic analysis was conducted, and the findings were analysed using an adaptation of Davison’s (2006) framework to map how participants engaged with the PL and collaborated with one another on new pedagogies. The study suggests that these teachers accommodated linguistic teaching approaches, but their adaptation to language PCK may have remained at a compliant level.

Role of Immigrant Parents' Attitudes and Practices in Emergent Bilingual Students' Language Use and Translanguaging Performance

Given the issue of heritage language (HL) development or attrition among children of immigrants in the U.S., this study examines Korean emergent bilingual students' HL use and translanguaging practices in an HL classroom. To extend our understanding of immigrant families' vital roles in their children's establishment of bilingualism, the study further explores the role of immigrant Korean families' language practices and attitudes towards their children's bilingualism. The chapter addresses the following research question: What was the relationship between the parents' attitudes toward bilingualism and their children's language use and translanguaging performance in an HL classroom? The findings show the emergent bilingual students' classroom language use, including their translanguaging performance and the immigrant parents' views and practices towards their children's development of bilingualism. The findings indicate that there is a close relationship between parents' attitudes and practices at home and the children's language use and development both in Korean and English.

Writing With Emergent Bilingual Students

The aim of this chapter is to provide teachers with an understanding of who emergent bilingual students are and how they can adapt their practices in order to use students' home language as a resource rather than as a deficit. The chapter will share findings from a study conducted with emergent bilingual students in a kindergarten writing workshop. It will also focus on how teachers can adopt an additive approach to language that expands children's linguistic, social, and cultural resources while supporting learning a new language as well and literacy development.

From story to book: Discourse analysis between teacher and student in the creation of a culturally relevant text

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children’s literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally relevant texts and used for beginning reading material in classrooms. To truly capture a student’s story, especially if the student is an emergent bilingual, a teacher must listen very closely and take care when adjusting the child’s story. Two Bakhtinian concepts support the careful examination of a teacher’s scribing of story in this study: chronotope, used here as the time-space sphere above the text, and revoicing, or the retelling of a child’s story that is paraphrased or altered. Findings show that gesture within the chronotope of the story is an especially generative tool for student storytelling and that teachers must reflect closely on intentional or unintentional reasons for revoicing a child’s story. Language experience approach holds possibilities for the creation of children’s culturally relevant texts. As such, it is important that teachers reflect on their language experience approach techniques so that the book remains true to the child’s story.