Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments

Looking closely at what happens when translanguaging is actively taken up to teach emergent bilingual students across different contexts, this book focuses on how it is already happening in classrooms as well as how it can be implemented as a pedagogical orientation. It extends theoretical understandings of the concept and highlights its promises and challenges. Using a Transformative Action Research design, six empirically grounded ethnographic case studies describe how translanguaging is used in lesson designs and in the spontaneous moves made by teachers and students during specific teaching moments. The cases shed light on two questions: How, when, and why is translanguaging taken up or resisted by students and teachers? What does its use mean for them? Although grounded in a U.S. context, and specifically in classrooms in New York State, Translanguaging with Multilingual Students links findings and theories to different global contexts to offer important lessons for educators worldwide.

Ofelia García is Professor in the Ph.D. programs of Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA.

Tatyana Kleyn is Associate Professor in the Bilingual Education and TESOL programs at the City College of New York, USA.