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Translanguaging: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators

This guide offers you practical assistance on how to use translanguaging to help facilitate more effective learning of content and language by bilingual students. But you might not have heard of translanguaging before, or you might not understand what it means, and how it differs from other pedagogical approaches for teaching bilingual students. This introduction to translanguaging will help you see that:

1. Translanguaging challenges monolingual assumptions that permeate current language education policy and instead treats bilingual discourse as the norm.

2. Translanguaging refers to pedagogical practices that use bilingualism as resource, rather than ignore it or perceive it as a problem.

3. Translanguaging goes beyond traditional notions of bilingualism and second language teaching and learning.

4. Translanguaging describes the practices of all students and educators who use bilingualism as a resource.

Resource author
Christina Celic, Kate Seltzer
Resource topics

Rooted in Strength: Using Translanguaging to Grow Multilingual Readers and Writers

Espinosa and Ascenzi-Moreno demonstrate how our emergent bilingual students who speak two or more languages in their daily lives- thrive when they are able to use translanguaging to tap the power of their entire linguistic and sociocultural repertoires. Additionally, the authors present rich and thoughtful literacy practices that propel emergent bilinguals into reading and writing success. The core of this approach is honoring and leveraging the language and cultural resources emergent bilinguals bring to school- and rooting instruction in their strengths. Knowing more than one language is, indeed, a gift to the classroom! Includes a foreword by Ofelia Garcia.

Resource author
Laura Ascezni-Moreno, Cecilia Espinoza

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language-speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life.

Resource author
April Baker-Bell
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