Garcia
I definitely have seen a lot of Garcia in my service learning classroom. Translanguaging has become
a new concept for me that I have graciously accepted. Being able to walk into my classroom and
see that the students do not have to repress their home language is refreshing. Growing up for three
years in the Dominican Republic, I know how it feels to not feel completely connected to those
around you, because they do not share the culture that you grew up with, and often times people will
not accept it.
Watching my kindergarten friends freely communicate with each other in Spanish is not only good
for the ones that understand Spanish, but it is also good for the students around them to be exposed to
languages and cultures that are different from their own.
"I use my entire language repertoire...", "English and Spanish for a bilingual person is not separate,
but a unitary linguistic system...", "translanguaging returns power to the speaker [not the to the language]".
A multilingual child uses all of their languages all of the time. There is no need to select a dominant
language but rather to understand when it would be useful to use a certain language. When
translanguaging is not taken into account, it takes away from the students that might need
tanslanguaging to do well. My classroom teacher does verbal assessments of a students progress. I
witnessed her ask him questions and both languages, which levels the playing field so to speak, and
allows the child to use more than 50% of their language repertoire.
I definitely was left wondering how to incorporate translanguaging into my future classroom.
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