Listening to Latinx Students through Translanguaging

"Are you listening to me?” We often hear this question in classrooms where teachers are aiming to garner the students’ attention. Listening is also emphasized in the Speaking and Listening Common Core State Standards as well as in the Next Generation Learning Standards. It seems that the students are the ones expected to do all the listening while teachers do most of the talking.

Liberating Instruction: A Critical Bilingual Literacy Approach for Latinx Students

This article reviews Dr. Carla España and Dr. Luz Yadira Herrera’s En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices of Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Though a critical bilingual literacies approach, the language practices, experiences and cultural histories of Latinx students are centered for literacy instruction in grades 3-8. Before instruction begins, the authors support educational practitioners in creating equitable educational and language stances that hold students’ language practices in a strength perspective. Each chapter that follows details and explains a thematic unit of student that guides educators in creating lessons based on students’ experiences and are summarized within this review. Supports for incorporating translanguaging pedagogies are also provided. Guiding questions, bilingual texts, and alternative themes are included to fit the language model of any program serving multilingual Latinx learners. Suggestions for extending these units of study and practices into secondary classrooms and for other language and racial ethnic groups are also discussed.

“They Make Me Who I Am Today”: A Science Teacher’s Narrated Positioning, Agency, and Mediated Pedagogy with Multilingual Students

Informed by theorizing positioning and agency, this article presents a case study by examining a science teacher’s positioning acts and her agency development in a middle school in New York City. An analysis of this teacher’s teaching narratives reveals that when she positioned her emergent multilingual students as “whole people,” who had social, cultural, emotional, and linguistic needs, she utilized their lived experiences as inspirations and resources to modify and inform instruction. The mediated pedagogy, developed by considering her students’ complicated and frustrating realities outside of the classroom, made them feel greater self-worth and valued, and encouraged them to persevere in school. Findings suggest that this teachers’ positive positioning acts inspired by her multilingual students' lived experiences can trigger positive agency, which can become a direct driving force for pedagogical decisions and transformation. It also can contribute to emergent multilingual students' positive self-positioning and stimulate and develop their agency for active and engaged classroom participation and interaction.

Oral Vocabulary Instruction Practices of Teachers of Nonacademic Adult English Language Learners

The number of non-academic adults who need English as a second language (ESL) classes is ever increasing, yet little is known about the instructional practices used to teach this population of learners. The focus of this article is to describe an exploratory single case study of the instructional practices used by teachers in a nonacademic adult English as a second language (NAESL) program. Specifically, the study looked at vocabulary instruction teachers employed with beginner-level adult ESL students. The data was collected using questionnaires, classroom observations, and post-observation interviews with the teachers. The findings show that teachers used two categories of activities to teach vocabulary: oral vocabulary activities and written vocabulary activities. It is significant that not only did the participants use twice as many written vocabulary activities as oral vocabulary activities in their NAESL classrooms, but they did not identify written vocabulary activities and oral vocabulary activities as addressing different language skills. Considering the importance of listening and speaking as entry-level language skills, NAESL teachers need to become aware of the importance of the distinction between these two types of instructional activities and the need to focus more instructional time to building and strengthening listening and speaking as these basic, necessary communication skills.

Seeing in Writing: A Case Study of a Multilingual Graduate Writing Instructor’s Socialization through Multimodality

With growing numbers of multilinguals becoming writing instructors and scholars in the U.S. composition context, it is urgent to understand how multilingual graduate instructors of writing socialization processes are mediated by multimodal elements rather than just textual forms of language. This article reports on an ethnographically-oriented case study to respond to the following questions: (1) Does multimodality contribute to a multilingual graduate instructor’s socialization into writing and the teaching of writing? If yes, in what ways does multimodality interact with the writer’s language repertoire? (2) How does the multilingual graduate instructor’s multimodal writing and teaching of writing impact other academic practices? Through systematic thematic coding and multimodal textual analysis of questionnaires, a classroom observation, writing materials, and a semi-structured interview, the study reveals that the participant, a graduate teacher of writing, transitioned from isolation to socialization through multimodality while developing a gendered consciousness. In addition, her identity shifted in power hierarchies as socialization enabled researching and teaching through multimodal and multisensorial identity.