translanguaging

Example of responding

Ex1

The school where I did my student teaching last semester is a college preparatory high school in Detroit called Renaissance High School.  It did not have a program for bilingual students or an ESL program.  During my pre-student teaching at the bilingual school Academy of the Americas, most students’ home languages included Spanish and English.  The school is located in southwest Detroit.  Students’ language and literacy levels in Spanish and English vary, similar to Stephanie’s students in her high school social studies class as discussed in chapter 1 of The Translanguaging Classroom.  The Academy of the Americas provides students with rich opportunities to apply and learn in both Spanish and English across content areas. 

My areas of study are Spanish taught as a world language and English as a Second Language.  I am not currently working in a classroom, so I will use my experience from teaching Spanish 2 at the high school where I did my student teaching.  In our online teaching environment, students did have opportunities to use English (students’ dominant language) to help with learning Spanish.  The students in our Spanish 2 classes were black, and I noticed students use Black Vernacular English in class and also when writing me personally with questions.  As I think of translanguaging in this context, it would be neat to facilitate an activity in which students compare and contrast language varieties in Spanish with those of English.  In this way, students could notice similarities and differences between Black Vernacular English with another English variety and consider how these language structures and styles share similarities and/or differences with Spanish varieties.  This type of activity would serve to break language hierarchies in Spanish and English, invite students’ identities into their learning, and promote higher order thinking and reflection.