Emergent Bilinguals, Translanguaging, and American Education

"Our students have the gift of bilingualism and their gifts are enriched when they can use all of their languages critically, intentionally, flexibly, and creatively." - Sara Vogel. 

In Aria, Richard Rodriguez recounts his experience as a multilingual learner during his early elementary school years. Considering the volatile nature of his experience as an English learner, Rodriguez argues that despite the discomfort of learning a new language and the ways it can erode existing bonds to one's own culture and native language, there is value and necessity in assimilation. Rodriguez writes, "there are two ways a person is individualized...while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality" (Rodriguez 39). For Rodriguez, language differs based on whether it is private or public, which in turn affects one's level of individuality in the public sense. According to Rodriguez, private language refers to the use of one's home language solely within the familial context. Contrastly, public language is the language that enables individuals to communicate and engage with the broader society. It is the language of schools, workplaces, and social interactions. For Rodriguez, one's success depends on one's fluency in the dominant language; perhaps this is why Rodriguez has found comfort in assimilation, as he no longer exists on the fringes of public society, unlike when he was an outsider to the English language. Perhaps it was his experience as an English language learner and the discomfort it brought in the educational setting that ultimately led him to argue against using one's home language as a tool, instead favoring the eradication method. According to Collier, this instantly places emergent bilinguals at risk of further struggling with literacy. 

In Teaching Multilingual Children, by Virginia Collier, Collier argues that "the 'most successful long-term academic achievement occurs where the students' primary language is the initial language of literacy,'" (Collier 233). This perspective is vastly different than the one exhibited by Rodriguez in his article. Unlike Rodriguez, Collier advocates for bilingualism among students by suggesting that educators focus on the long-term goal of a student being able to master more than one language, rather than forcing them to focus solely on learning the English language.

Collier outlines this with seven guidelines:

1. Be aware that children use first language acquisition strategies for learning or acquiring a second language (127).
2. Do not think of yourself as a remedial teacher expected to correct so-called "deficiencies" of your students.
3. Don't teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks to eliminate the first language.
4. Teach the standard form of English and students' home language together, along with an appreciation of dialect differences, to create an environment of language recognition in the classroom.
5. Do not forbid young students from code-switching in the classroom. Understand the functions that code switching serves.
6. Provide a literacy development curriculum that is specifically designed for English-language learners. 
7. Provide a balanced and integrated approach to the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

The videos from the CUNY New York Institute on Emergent Bilinguals, featuring Sara Vogel and the various educators she interviews, advocate for an educational experience similar to the one Collier advocates for when it comes to English language learners. In videos one through three, Vogel and various binilingual educators emphasize the importance of translanguaging. 

My biggest takeaway from each of these videos is that, regardless of whether one is monolingual or bilingual, as educators, the best thing we can do is be advocates for our emergent bilingual students as they work to learn English. By utilizing students' home languages as a tool in their learning and incorporating multicultural literature and discussions of students' diverse identities and home languages, we can foster a supportive sense of community. This approach enables us to become co-learners with our students, rather than acting as all-knowing authority figures. In considering the popularized approaches to multilingual education and the existing pedagogy, my school has opted for the transitional model over the maintenance or two-way enrichment methods. Using the transitional model, our MLL program, as we refer to it, consists only of two monolingual teachers working across grades K-9 who focus solely on getting students acquainted with the English language enough to participate in an integrated classroom setting of 30+ students where English is the only acknowledged language instructionally. The efficacy of this approach in terms of student mastery of academic literacy is minimal and fails to adequately prepare students for academic success. As I reflect on ways to support my emergent bilingual students more effectively next year, I've begun to explore strategies that move beyond the limitations of the transitional model and incorporate more inclusive and equitable practices. One idea is to implement a more flexible approach that incorporates translanguaging strategies and recognizes students' home languages as a valuable asset in the learning process. Rather than focusing solely on "transitioning" students into English, I want to create an environment where their full linguistic skills are valued and used as a resource for deeper learning.

Further Reading on Translanguaging from Sara Vogel and Ofelia García: