Scholarly Works

Elaine C. Allard, Ruby Schlaker & Katherine Phillips. (Forthcoming 2020).  “They Call it Promesa Love”: Translanguaging & Authentic Cariño across Linguistic Repertoires, Issues in Teacher Education.

This article explores how teachers who do not speak or understand their students’ first languages nevertheless use translanguaging strategies to create warm relationships, support academic progress, and challenge inequality within their ESL and ELL Content classrooms at a large, urban high school. Drawing on field notes and interviews from a collaborative educational ethnography, the authors illustrate five key practices teachers can draw upon to create authentic cariño (Curry, 2016) in their classrooms. Offering recommendations for classroom practice, program-level policies, and pre-service education, the article contributes to scholarship on the promises of translanguaging and the key importance of authentic care in educating immigrant and emergent bilingual students.

Elaine C. Allard, Sarah Apt & Isabel Sacks. (2019). Language Policy and Practice in Almost-Bilingual Classrooms, International Multilingual Research Journal, 13:2, 73-87, DOI: 10.1080/19313152.2018.1563425

This study explores language policies in “almost-bilingual” classrooms, in which most, but not all, students share a home language. Teachers who are bilingual face a dilemma in these settings. Should they draw on shared linguistic expertise to benefit the majority while excluding a few, or should they forego significant benefits for most in the interest of equity? This qualitative study examines the classroom language policies and practices of one English-as-a second-language (ESL) teacher at a majority-Latino high school. Drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, and systematic teacher reflection, the authors identify a collection of multilingual practices across ESL and sheltered content courses: translated texts, “translanguaging from the students up,” and concurrent translation. They discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these policies for Spanish speakers and “singletons”-- students with no same-language peers-- to offer pedagogical and policy insights for meeting the diverse and sometimes-conflicting needs of students in multilingual classrooms.

MTRC Philly | Swarthmore College

2020