Professional vision in the multilingual classroom

Abstract

Translanguaging pedagogies, in which multilingual students are encouraged to flexibly use all their language skills to engage in learning activities, can benefit students’ development of language and literacy skills. But how can teachers who do not speak students’ languages make sense of and respond to these interactions? This qualitative study centers a team of U.S. middle-grades language arts teachers adapting a translanguaging approach into their classrooms, and investigates how their individual trajectories of learning contributed to a collective professional vision for translanguaging pedagogy. Teacher professional vision describes how teachers learn to notice what students do, reason about the causes, and respond with goal-oriented action. Findings describe how the teachers developed new, shared practices around text selection, reading comprehension support, promoting student interaction and negotiation of textual meaning, and connecting translanguaging activity to learning objectives.