TITLE:  Toward a Liberatory Classroom Raciolinguistics: An Extensive Literature Review on Translanguaging in​ Middle School English Language Arts Classrooms

ABSTRACT:  As the proportion of linguistically diverse students in our schools continues to grow, it is imperative that educators leverage the strengths and center the needs of our increasingly multicultural and multilingual student populations. However, emergent multilingual students currently face White supremacist raciolinguistic (Rosa & Flores, 2017) climates in American schools, leading to lowered academic achievement and increased risk of drop out. Translanguaging (García & Levia, 2014) theory and pedagogies represent a compelling challenge to White supremacist raciolinguistic climates in schools. Individuals translanguage when they freely engage their full linguistic repertoires. For emergent multilinguals, this means drawing from their full range of languages and dialects, something they are rarely free to do in English-dominant school classrooms.

Seeking to create liberatory raciolinguistic environments in my classroom, I engaged in an extensive literature of translanguaging implementation in English-dominant urban middle schools. Twenty empirical studies were reviewed. I found that translanguaging pedagogies can address linguistically heterogeneous classrooms and be implemented by monolingual teachers. In addition, translanguaging pedagogies benefits from ethnographically-informed implementation and can create positive academic and sociocultural results. These findings suggest that translanguaging pedagogies can help create liberatory raciolinguistic classroom environments, especially through shifting the locus of language control toward students, creating opportunities for co-generation of knowledge, and encouraging critical raciolinguistic reflection.

COMPLETED:  December 2020