Emergent Bilinguals in Rural Schools

Abstract

This chapter explores rural teacher attitudes towards emergent bilinguals at the secondary level before, during, and after translanguaging professional development. Within the current political climate, accountability measures and assessment training affect teacher perceptions of second language acquisition and add to the deficit perspective. Juxtaposed with the accountability climate are the benefits of rurality and teachers who value the funds of knowledge these linguistically and culturally diverse students possess. Through a mixed methods study using qualitative and quantitative survey data, the authors examined the effects of translanguaging pedagogy on an English-only school district. The translanguaging strategies used in English language arts and reading classrooms showed potential to improve standardized English assessment scores by shifting the monolingual ideology of the teacher participants to a multilingual stance. The results of this study could revise current perceptions and pedagogy for emergent bilinguals.