Translanguaging Pedagogy to Support Bi/Multilingual Students' Language Learning in Social Studies: “How We Communicate Everything”

Introduction

Wide spread migration creates shifts in both global demographics and local United States classrooms so there are increasingly more students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in U.S. schools (Suarez-Orozco & Michikyan, 2016). However, a majority of U.S. teachers are typically monolingual (Goodwin, 2017) and may be less prepared to address marginalized students’ cultural and linguistic practices (Pappamiheil & Lynn, 2014) affecting the sociocultural components of teaching and learning. Scholars of critical language education have continued to call upon teachers to adopt pedagogical practices that fully support students’ diverse linguistic and cultural practices in support of their academic learning and lived experiences (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Paris & Alim, 2014). This chapter seeks to add to existing studies focusing on linguistically and culturally responsive teaching (Lucas & Villegas, 2013) by centering approaches teachers can use to support emergent bi/multilingual students’ content language development (Arkoudis, 2005; Bunch 2013; de Mejia & Helot, 2015; Janzen 2008; Schleppegrell, 2013). More specifically, this chapter provides evidence for how teachers and researchers might operationalize concepts that align with Lucas, Villegas, and Freedson-Gonzalez’s (2008) “essential understandings of second language learning” (p. 363), by providing instruction that draws students’ attention to the linguistic form and function of academic language while creating a safe and welcoming classroom environment to promote students’ additional language use. One potential pedagogical approach to support such instruction, translanguaging, is gaining increasing research attention (Poza, 2017). Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to identify how tenets of translanguaging pedagogy (Garcia, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017) might be used to support “linguistically responsive” instruction (Lucas & Villegas, 2010, p. 311) within the context of the social studies. Given that the disciplines of the social studies draw upon cultural practices and include complex academic language demands (Levstik, 2008; National Council for the Social Studies, 2013), additional insights for how teachers support linguistically and culturally diverse students to successfully navigate academic language in this content area are needed, especially as the role of language teaching and learning has been less examined in the social studies (Yoder & Kibler, 2016).