Personal Inquiry Project by Payton Belmonté

Pedagogical Methods

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 21:08:01 UTC

Translanguaging as pedagogy has four main goals: to support students academically, provide academic language practice opportunities, make space for multi-language ways of knowing, and support students’ social and emotional development as well as their identities.

Benefits - Pages 1-6

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 21:21:22 UTC

This research article discussed how majority of students scores improved when given translingual tasks, assessments, etc. She also noticed an increase in confidence, feelings of empowerment and more meaningful dialogue amongst themselves.

Importance Video - Start at 9:58

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 21:30:04 UTC

In the clip, Laura Price discusses the importance of translanguaging. She says that the integration of these home languages gives feelings of cultural pride and acceptance to these students by not alienating them when tasked with only speaking English. By bringing their knowledge in their home language, it supports to learning of a new language such as English and helps them to understand and develop language skills better in English as well as their home language. This also helps incorporate their families who may only speak their home language. This can help the student and teachers get more support as well as form better relationships.

How is it Used in the Classroom?

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 21:38:42 UTC

Teachers can do many activities to support translanguaging. This can include students being assigned work to do together in English but using their home language(s) to decode the problems/tasks and helping each other understand, responding in their home langauge, etc. Students can be put in groups to show the class how something taught in English can make sense in another language like Spanish by identifying similarities and differences between the two languages.

Native Language Benefits

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 23:41:30 UTC

“Using this strategy can help students:

Learn the content
Increase English proficiency
Maintain/improve their native languages
Improve cognition (e.g., delay the onset of dementia) and critical/comparative thinking skills
Increase access to content in other languages/from other cultures
Learn other languages/cultures
Transfer skills and knowledge from their native languages to facilitate English acquisition
Improve their social-emotional learning skills
Value their culture and heritage, which contributes to positive social-emotional well-being
Increase metalinguistic awareness”

Value of Home Language

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 23:43:42 UTC

“First, recent meta-analyses have shown that educational programs that systematically incorporate use of ELLs' home language result in levels of academic success, including achievement in literacy and other academic subjects, that are as high as and often better than that of ELLs in English-only programs”

“Second, in a study of ELLs in two-way immersion programs, Lindholm and Aclan (1991) found a significant positive relationship between individual student's level of bilingual proficiency and their achievement in math and reading in English.”

“bilingual children exhibit significant cognitive advantages in comparison to monolingual children (e.g., Bialystok 2006; Chin & Wigglesworth, 2007; Kovaacs & Mehler, 2009). These advantages have been demonstrated in executive controlprocesses related to selective attention and inhibition and monitoring of attention when, for example, children are engaged in problem solving.”

“children who are learning to read in a second language are able to transfer many skills and knowledge from their first language to facilitate their acquisition of reading skills in the second language. The best evidence of this comes from studies showing that students with strong reading skills in the home language also have strong reading skills in their second language”

Benefits of Multilingualism

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 23:49:21 UTC

The three benefits talked about in this blog post as about how multilingualism supports the mastering of content, encourages collaboration, and helps with communicating ideas.

Using the Learners’ Own Language

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 23:53:58 UTC

”Legitimize the use of the learners’ own language through, for example, offering it as a prominent option when demonstrating ways of presenting new language, or giving instructions. When presenting new language items, highlight the benefits in contrasting languages through the use of formulae such as ‘How would we say that in Spanish? How is it different to English?’.

Provide activities and options that constructively use the learners’ own language. These may include:

giving a list of any cognates and ‘teach’ them first, so that learners see how much they already know
using recasts (so when learners use their own language the teacher recasts it to the target language)
allowing the use of the learners’ own language when preparing for speaking tasks
using the first language as a resource to kickstart discussions
using literal translations (for comparative purposes)
analysing machine translations
setting up role plays that exploit interpreting and translation

3. Provide observation tasks that focus on the use of the learners’ own language.

4. Encourage post teaching reflection on both the learners’ use of their own language and the teacher’s use, focusing on issues such as the balance between the languages used in the lesson, whether the uses were constructive and what would have been the likely consequences of switching languages at any point and doing things differently.”

Incorporating Home Language - Video - 0:00-1:13

farkas59 — 2025-05-04 23:58:04 UTC

Creating anchor charts, “cheat sheets”, posters, etc that are not only in English, but the students’ home language(s) as well. Include visuals like diagrams, colors, symbols, drawings, etc to help them associate and visualize.

Incorporate Home Language - Video - 1:23-2:50

farkas59 — 2025-05-05 00:03:08 UTC

Incorporating home languages shows the students that their teachers are supportive of them as a whole, not just supportive of learning English but truly invested in them as a student.

Parents are extremely grateful

Home Language Maintenance

farkas59 — 2025-05-05 00:09:39 UTC

“ Second language development: A strong foundation in the home language facilitates the learning of a second language.
Social-emotional development: Children who see that their home language is valued build a positive and healthy self-identity and stronger sense of pride in their cultural and linguistic heritage.
Facilitates and deepens relationships: Professionals who ask families to only speak to their children in English should understand that family members who are not fluent in English cannot effectively engage and communicate with their children. More specifically:
- Children and parents who share the same language are able to interact with each other in more meaningful ways.
- Family and community members who only speak the home language (e.g., grandparents, friends, relatives in the home country) are able to contribute to the child’s cultural growth, increase their vocabulary and communication skills, and share valuable learning experiences.
Home-school collaboration: When schools communicate with families in the home language:
- Families can better support their children using the strategies and techniques that early childhood and special education professionals share with them.
- Families can share important information that can in turn be used to enhance their children’s learning.
Cognition: Bilingual students are generally flexible thinkers and problem solvers and have an easier time understanding math concepts and solving word problems.
Future employability: There is a growing need for individuals who are proficient in two or more languages in today’s world economy and socio-political climate.”