Translingual Practice, Strategic Participation, and Meaning-Making

Abstract

This case study examines one third-grade teacher’s strategic participation in translingual practice and the ways that this participation shaped emerging bilingual students’ meaningful engagements with texts. Using a transliteracies perspective, we describe instances of emergence and resonance as students and their teacher leveraged resources coded in English, Arabic, and Spanish to co-construct meaning. Analysis of small-group guided reading, buddy reading, and an interactive read-aloud detail how the teacher used entextualizing, envoicing, and recontextualizing strategies to support students’ participation. Analysis of postinstruction interviews describes how resources, expertise, and emotion resonated within each literacy event and across time for this teacher. We conclude with recommendations for including translingual pedagogies in similar classroom contexts, arguing for the importance of recognizing and developing teachers’ translingual competence, as well as their emerging multilingualism.