Flexible co-construction of meaning: facilitating emergent bi/multilingual children’s emergent exploratory talk in Spanish literature discussions

ABSTRACT

Emergent bi/multilingual children have historically been afforded few opportunities to engage dialogically with peers and teachers in posing authentic questions and co- constructing interpretations of texts as their reading instruction has traditionally been skills driven. Additionally, more recent scholarship has identified increased opportunities for participation and meaning-making when bi/multilingual children discuss literature within linguistically flexible discussion spaces. This case study examines teacher discourse and discussion facilitation that foreground children’s emerging exploratory talk and validate their bi/multilingual practices during literature discussions conducted in Spanish in a second-grade maintenance dual language bilingual education classroom within a public school in the Midwest United States. Analysis focuses on teacher and child interactions, including the teacher’s uptake of children’s ideas and authentic questions, shared authority among teacher and children, and the teacher’s use and modeling of bilingual practices, such as external code-switching when recounting brief stories, within the discussion space. Findings demonstrate how teacher facilitation and discourse patterns interact in ways that promote children’s emerging exploratory talk within a dialogically organized linguistically flexible discussion space.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergent bilinguals
• translanguaging
• exploratory talk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Teacher-facilitated discussions of children’s literature is a common instructional practice in public schools in the U.S. as they align with the National Common Core State Standards for speaking and listening (e.g., second grade: SL.2.1. Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 2 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.

https://www.corecommonstandards.com/second-grade-standards/english-language-arts-standards/second-grade-speaking-and-listening-standards/ and reading literature (e.g., second grade: RL.2.3 Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges

https://learning.ccsso.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ELA_Standards1.pdf).

² Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) is used to counter the “silencing of the word bilingual” that has occurred in the U.S (Flores & García, 2017, p. 26). and to challenge the “goals and structures” of DLE to employ a “bilingual orientation” that educates students bilingually rather than maintaining strict separation of state-sanctioned languages at all times (Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2018, pp. 40–41.

³ Multiple minoritized indicates that the children can be assigned more than one type of minority status, such as Latinx and emergent bi/multilingual children whose families come from working class backgrounds or as Hispanic, English learners (EL) who qualify for free or reduced lunch as designated by the school district.