Social Functions of Students’ Translingual Composing in an English-Medium, Second-Grade Classroom

Abstract

While translingual and translanguaging orientations have been posited as supportive for emergent bilingual children in schools, limited research explores how children in English-medium spaces enact translingual composing practices. Drawing on theorizations of translingual composing as an interactional process, this paper analyzes data from a year-long, qualitative study. It explores how children in a second-grade classroom in an English-medium school composed when invited to use multiple language resources during Writing Workshop. Specially, it examines two questions: (1) What translingual composing practices did children employ? and (2) How did children's use of translingual composing function socially? Descriptive analyses of students’ writing show that, across the year, children created increasingly sophisticated translingual texts. Inductive analyses of events involving these texts identified six social functions that children interactionally constructed for their translingual writing: (1) responding to the teacher, (2) addressing bilingual audiences, (3) gaining peers’ attention, (4) teaching others a language beyond English, (5) positioning oneself as a language learner, and (6) positioning oneself as bilingual. These patterns illustrate the composing-oriented, peer-oriented, and identity-oriented work children enacted, in-the-moment, through their talk about translingual texts. Translingual texts became the occasion for new sorts of interactions that opened space for students to negotiate ideologies and positionings that valued the use of multiple named languages in the classroom writing space.