Research
Translanguaging and Culturally Relevant Pedagogies in Teaching Mathematical Concepts
This study investigates how an urban 9th-grade Chinese bilingual algebra teacher's translanguaging and culturally relevant pedagogy fostered conceptual learning in mathematics for secondary bilingual students. Results revealed that mathematical concepts could be discussed explored and reasoned by tapping into students’ multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal repertoires and their prior schooling and cognitive resources. The bilingual mathematics teacher’s in-depth understanding of the students’ home language and culture, and previous literacy education experiences are key to motivating, engaging, and sustaining the students’ learning of mathematics. Equally important is the teacher’s willingness to use the students’ culturally familiar knowledge and the multimodal resource to create translanguaging opportunities to advance their learning of language and mathematics. The interplay of languages, literacy practices, and mathematical thinking and reasoning is a powerful tool for bilingual students to learn both languages and subject matter knowledge.
Empowering Bilingual ELLs in Social Studies: Translanguaging and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in action
This study uses the qualitative case study method to examine how an urban 9th-grade Spanish bilingual global history teacher's implementation of culturally relevant and translanguaging pedagogies to teach social studies to his secondary bilingual ELLs (English Language Learners). The results show that the bilingual social studies teacher's in-depth understanding of the students' home language and culture, as well as their previous literacy education experiences, is key to motivating, engaging, and sustaining the students' learning of social studies. Equally important is the teacher's willingness to utilize the students' culturally familiar knowledge and multilingual and multimodal resources to create translanguaging opportunities that advance their social studies learning. The findings argue for training social studies teachers to use culturally relevant and translanguaging pedagogies in social studies instruction to bilingual ELLs.
Using Culturally and Linguistic Responsive and Translanguaging Pedagogy to Teach Science
ore and more students in today’s secondary subject matter classrooms in America are bilingual ELLs (English language learners), a fast-growing student population in the U.S. public schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). In New York City, about 50% of the total public-school students speak a language other than English at home and one out of every six secondary school students are an ELL (New York City Department of Education, 2019). Those ELLs are served by the three language programs: TBE (Transitional Bilingual Education program, mostly for middle and high school students), DL (Dual Language Program, mostly for elementary and middle school students), ENL (English as a new language program, formerly ESL, for almost all ELLs). In this article, I focus on bilingual subject matter instruction for high school students in the TBE program. Every day, the secondary ELLs in the TBE program attend subject matter classes taught by bilingual subject matter teachers using the bilingual education pedagogy. According to the guidelines shown on the website of New York City Department of Education
