story by Claire Miller
Many students in Jessica Kamphaus’s fourth grade classroom can speak and/or write in more than one language, and she supports her linguistically diverse students by fostering a classroom community where her students’ languages are valued.
They have the opportunity to write bi/multilingually for multilingual audiences and compose multimodal products that include their drawings, voice recordings, images and photographs.
Assistant Professor Cori Salmerón and Jessica Kamphaus co-authored an article in Language Arts about Kamphaus’s translanguaging teaching practices and how they help students learn important writing skills.
Dr. Salmerón spent 16 weeks observing Kamphaus’s classroom during her literacy lessons, took pictures of students’ writing, interviewed Kamphaus and her students and attended weekly grade level meetings.
Kamphaus, a teacher who speaks English and is learning Spanish, read books to students written in multiple languages, asked her students to reflect on their personal writing and language practices, and made it clear that one language isn’t more valuable than any other.
“By positioning the students as linguists who study ‘standard English’ as one of many types of English, Kamphaus dispelled the myth that there is a single way to speak a language,” they wrote. “This opened up space in her classroom for bi/multilingualism to be seen as the norm and a legitimate part of school.”
She also taught her students to think about the audiences they’re writing to and explained that authors can choose to use more than one language in their writing to better reach their audience(s).
Kamphaus spoke with other fourth grade teachers, her school’s librarian and educators she connected with through social media about developing translanguaging assignments and addressing challenges that come up when teaching.
Developing translanguaging teaching practices – and finding a community of educators doing the same work – can help educators create learning spaces where multilingual students’ writing can flourish.
“Educators working collectively have the power to reframe how language is viewed in schools and sustain bi/multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires,” Salmerón and Kamphaus wrote.