10 Tips for Teaching and Using Multimodal Activities with Multilingual Writers

This month we are publishing Digital Multimodal Composing by Matt Kessler. In this post, the author gives us some advice for leveraging multimodal writing activities to teach multilingual students and learners of additional languages. 

With continued advancements in digital technologies, the practice of being a language teacher and a language learner has fundamentally changed. In particular, in both academic and professional settings, students are now expected to be able to produce digital genres such as social media posts, slideshow presentations, infographics, portfolios, digital posters, and more. Notably, such digital genres require the use of multiple modes beyond text, including the purposeful use of images, colors, graphs, and audio. To better prepare students to succeed in this digitized world, here are 10 tips teachers might consider for leveraging multimodal writing activities with both language learners and multilingual students:

1. Be aware that multimodality – which refers to the simultaneous use of multiple meaning-making resources such as text, images, sound, and gestures – is an important and common practice in today’s world.
2. Don’t avoid multimodal activities in your classroom by focusing only on traditional literacy skills such as reading and writing.
3. Recognize that pushing students to develop multiliteracy skills is not only crucial for their future success, but also for their current success.
4. View multimodal activities as a means of translanguaging, or the systematic use of two or more languages so that students can both understand and be understood.
5. Learn what your students’ needs are in terms of the digital genres that they will need to produce in the future.
6. Consider teaching those genres that many students will likely encounter such as slideshow presentations, infographics, and digital posters.
7. Take the time to train your students on how to use the tools or platforms they will need in order to successfully complete the activity.
8. Set clear expectations about the specific modes (e.g. text, images) that students need to use when creating their assignments.
9. Experiment with different activities, and consider implementing those activities in-class, out-of-class, or a combination of the two to meet your needs and the time you have available.
10. Help spur students’ motivation to invest in the activity and to perform well by making their final work publicly available (e.g. a blog available to the broader public).

Matt Kessler, University of South Florida

kesslerm@usf.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao.

How can Transcultural Pedagogies Support Learning in Superdiverse Classrooms?

This month we published Transcultural Pedagogies for Multilingual Classrooms edited by Rahat Zaidi, Umit Boz and Eve Moreau. In this post Eve discusses how critical multilingual and transcultural pedagogies are used to address the superdiversity in classrooms today.

Teaching in superdiverse classrooms might be trumpeted as one of the great educational challenges of our times. How students straddle distinct cultural and linguistic worlds to make meaning of curricular content has never been more intricate and complex. With technological innovations and the rapid emergence of accessible media content, teachers and learners can, in a sheer instant, connect with people and places who are far beyond the local providing them with a scope of the world that is unlike anything that has existed in education before. And yet, in our current social climate, the divisions that are constructed along stiff identity markers are reinforcing beliefs about separateness among people and fueling discriminatory and violent behaviors in schools and beyond. New ways to address interconnectedness amongst students’ complex networks of difference has become imperative.

Transcultural Pedagogies for Multilingual Classrooms: Responding to Changing Realities in Theory and Practice is a timely, cutting-edge collection of research studies from across the globe from some of the top scholars in multilingual and transcultural education. It explores the ways in which transcultural pedagogies can support learning and literacies in critical, creative and socially just ways. By exploring the value of affirming cultural and linguistic fluidity in classroom teaching, the researchers describe hopeful practices that harness the diversities of students as a rich resource for learning and interrelating.

Each chapter provides a different and innovative perspective with respect to reimagining language and literacy pedagogies in conjunction with students’ diverse literacies and resources. Presenting a collection of classroom and community-based research, the book addresses the intersections of plurilingualism, identity and transcultural awareness in various contexts, including schools, universities, as well as local and Indigenous communities. These settings have been deliberately chosen to profile the range of research in the field, showcasing transcultural, plurilingual, translanguaging and community-engaged pedagogies, among others.

Eve Moreau

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Languaging Myths and Realities by Qianqian Zhang-Wu.

How Can We Meet the Language Learning Needs of Refugees?

We will soon be publishing Meeting the Needs of Reunited Refugee Families by Sarah Cox. In this post Sarah introduces her book.

This book explores the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees. Both policy and academic literature recognise the benefits of multilingual approaches to language learning, however language classes are often based on monolingual pedagogies which centre on the need to use the target language as much as possible.

The book explores the language learning needs of a small group of refugee women and their children who had recently arrived in Scotland through family reunion. The book is based on a 5-month teaching study, using critical participatory action research to develop a multilingual approach, which combined translanguaging principles (where people use all their linguistic resources to learn) with decolonising methodology. The book is set within the context of arrival in the host community which is often a period of disorientation and profound change.

To draw the recommendations for multilingual approaches into teaching practice, rather than teaching and researching solely in English, I became a learner of the participants’ languages (Tigrinya, Tamil, Farsi and Arabic) to explore how teachers and researchers might use a multilingual approach even when they don’t speak the same languages as their learners/research participants. The translanguaging ‘stance’ we adopted meant embracing an openness to other languages and using them as much as possible in the research. In the book I talk about how this approach can be part of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which complements the principle of two-way, mutual integration laid out in Scotland’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.

The book centres on three key findings:

1. The first is that decolonial, collaborative learner/teacher relationships bring particular benefits in terms of empowerment and confidence-building for refugee women during the initial stages of refugee arrival. These relationships were enhanced by the shift of power created by the teacher participating as a learner and by researching and teaching multilingually.
2. The second is the importance of the physical environment and the connections people have with their new physical surroundings as they develop a sense of belonging. In the book I draw on ecological approaches to language education and human geography to illustrate language learning as orientation to a new physical environment in a human and embodied way.
3. Thirdly I explore the ‘languaging’ within ‘translanguaging’ as a two-way dialogical process which valorises the full linguistic repertoire and encourages learners and teachers to draw on all their linguistic resources to learn. I consider ways that learners’ home languages can be harnessed in the classroom and detail our experiences of using translanguaging pedagogy. We found multilingual strategies brought particular benefits at the very beginning of learning English so soon after arrival.

The book illustrates how policy, practice and theory might be brought closer together as part of a decolonial approach to language teaching that shifts the balance of power in the classroom, repositions the roles of teacher / researcher and learner / participant and addresses inequality between languages by reducing the dominance of English. The themes of mutual integration and language learning as solidarity are at the heart of the book.

I hope the book will be relevant for anyone interested in ESOL, refugee integration, language teaching, language policy or researching multilingually.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Decolonising Multilingualism by Alison Phipps.

Teacher–Researcher Collaboration as a Pathway for Sustaining Translanguaging Pedagogies in K-12 Classrooms

This month we published (Re)imagining Translanguaging Pedagogies through Teacher–Researcher Collaboration edited by Leah Shepard-Carey and Zhongfeng Tian. In this post the editors explain how the book came about.

We identify as language educators and teacher educators with deep commitments to classroom practice, and have further centered our research endeavors in classroom contexts with different stakeholders (teachers, administrators, students, families, etc). Translanguaging pedagogies have been documented increasingly in a variety of classroom contexts, and have shown how honoring and integrating multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires can transform learning (e.g. Cioè‐Peña, 2022; CUNY-NYSIEB, 2021; Ossa Para & Proctor, 2021; Rajendram, 2021; de los Rios & Seltzer, 2017; Tian 2022). As a pedagogical framework, educators should take up ideological stances that value multilingualism, engage in intentional translanguaging pedagogical designs, and shift to meet the needs of learners in the classroom (García et al., 2017).

Adapting this pedagogical framework to co-stances, co-designs, and co-shifts (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020), this edited volume emphasizes the potential of teacher–researcher collaboration as one avenue towards expanding the use of translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms. In 2018, we met on a panel at TESOL International’s annual conference and discovered that we were not only doing similar work on translanguaging pedagogies, but also shared a passion for collaborating with educators. Through discussion about our experiences, we observed how translanguaging pedagogies not only required critical and asset-based stances of multilingualism, but required educators (and researchers) to actively address systemic language ideologies and curricular barriers, among various other obstacles. Understanding the challenges of integrating translanguaging into school and classroom culture, we saw a gap in the literature of detailed accounts of how teachers and researchers could work together to design and carry out translanguaging pedagogies and address these challenges. As such, with our adapted framework as a guiding post, we ventured to explore the complex processes of collaborative partnerships in the context of translanguaging pedagogies.

This volume has been over three years in the making, which included the COVID-19 pandemic with both of us finishing dissertations and transitioning into faculty positions. Hence, we are so glad to be able to finally share this work with our communities. This volume aimed to showcase teacher–researcher collaboration from a variety of primary and secondary (K-12) classroom contexts. This included various content areas and program designs such as STEM, newcomer English-medium classrooms, dual immersion and bilingual education, world language, literacy, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). We also sought to incorporate international perspectives, with chapters from Australia, Austria, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan and the United States. Each of the chapters in this volume position teacher–researcher collaboration and classroom engagement as part of a larger approach to sustaining translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms and resisting the research-practice divide in education. The cover art, by the very talented Martha Samaniego Calderón, serves as a representation of these complex collaborative processes, illustrating how various members share and negotiate unique and invaluable knowledge and experience, which moves towards collaborative and transformative translanguaging praxis.

We are immensely grateful for the contributions in this volume, the scholars who have inspired this work (Ofelia García, Susana Ibarra Johnson, Kate Seltzer, CUNY-NYSIEB team and many more!). We believe that researchers, educators, and teacher educators will benefit from this work. We hope that, as one of the reviewers, Peter Sayer said, “[this] volume will serve as an important mentor text for researchers and practitioners who want to co-design and carry out collaborative translanguaging-focused projects in classrooms.”

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca in the Plurilingual Classroom by Anna Mendoza.

How to Combine Translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca for more Inclusive Classrooms

This month we are publishing Translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca in the Plurilingual Classroom by Anna Mendoza. In this post the author introduces us to the book.

In linguistically diverse K-12 classrooms in the US and other countries where English is a lingua franca, teachers want to encourage students to make meaning using their whole language repertoires (i.e. to translanguage as plurilinguals), but then ask: “What happens when some students use their language(s), but other students don’t understand? And what if I don’t understand what the students are saying? Wouldn’t it be fairest and most inclusive to just use English?” These good intentions can reproduce the invisibility/inaudibility of other languages at school.

In my book about two high school English classrooms in Hawai’i where students could speak (but did not always speak during class) Cantonese, Cebuano, Chuukese, Ilokano, Ilonggo, Mandarin, Marshallese, Pidgin (Hawai’i Creole), Samoan, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and possibly other languages, I examine what it would take to create a classroom where multilingual communication and lingua franca English can be combined to maximize equity, inclusion, and learning opportunities.

These goals require empathy work on the part of every class participant. Even three students with the same national origin can have vastly different individual language and literacy repertoires, and they could be as vulnerable to each other’s judgment as the judgment of peers of another national origin (perhaps even more so). For some students, English is the language in which they are least confident to speak, as people may judge their English as “nonstandard” rather than according to lingua franca norms. In other cases, it’s accents in “home” languages which cause anxiety, as they may be the accents of heritage speakers or dialectal users. Other students may feel vulnerable due to their lack of knowledge of informal, peer group codes. Others may feel anxious about their performance in school-based literacies, which transcend specific languages.

How can the teacher not only get students to make meaning and articulate their thought-struggles by bringing all their linguistic and cultural knowledge to bear… but ensure that when they do so, it happens in ways that don’t intimidate others, and instead invite others to do the same? My book moves discussions about two topics—translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)—beyond individual interpersonal dynamics (agency, creativity) to collective responsibility, beyond group rights to heterogeneity within groups and the mutual interdependence of groups and individuals as they shape each other’s educational wellbeing: day in, day out.

Dr. Anna Mendoza

annamend@illinois.edu

https://annamend.com

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging edited by BethAnne Paulsrud, Zhongfeng Tian and Jeanette Toth.

The Lifelong Translanguaging Journey of Multilingual Families

We recently published Multimodal Communication in Young Multilingual Children by Jieun Kiaer. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book. 

I first had the idea to write this book when my daughter Sarah was born. I went back to work after 6 months of maternity leave. Then, I commuted from London to Oxford for many years, often staying away overnight whilst Sarah remained at home with her dad. In the early years of her life, Sarah was mostly looked after by a Korean carer, Mrs. Jung, so she learnt to speak Korean first. Meanwhile, my husband, Ian, could only speak English. Thus, on those evenings when my husband took care of Sarah, communication between them was tricky. They could make it work through body language, but sometimes my husband would call me so that I could translate for them. The same thing happened with my youngest daughter, Jessie, although Sarah was around to help too. This process sparked my intrigue. I found that our family was always able to communicate, despite verbal language barriers. This book is a testament to how we managed to communicate in an enriched, rather than impoverished, manner – much to my surprise!

Often parents feel “pressured to teach their children”, but I quickly learned that it is the other way around: parents learn so much from children too! Even now that my children are teenagers, I see how we flourish as a multilingual family through our interactions at the breakfast and dinner table. Each family builds their own unique language, through daily interaction. This language is tailor-made, reflecting a family’s beliefs and identity. In the book, I explain my family’s and other Korean English families’ language making process from the perspective of translanguaging. In doing so, I demonstrate that mixing one’s linguistic repertoires in a multilingual family is not an imperfect or transitional act. Instead, it is optimising one’s linguistic resources to be most effective, be that for transmitting information, creating humour, or building solidarity. Such practices arise from the diverse linguistic and cultural contexts that multilingual families traverse daily.

My family is in Korea, but thanks to technology, they have also played a big role in the lives of my children. I still remember the days when I used to rack up a huge phone bill to make international calls to Korea when I first came to the UK. Thankfully, I did not have to do the same so that my daughters could talk with their family in Korea. Now we can FaceTime or WhatsApp call for free! Throughout the book, I highlight how technology is so important to multicultural families.

This book mainly deals with data that I collected from my family for over a decade, although it also includes interviews from a Korean community in North London. You will see the importance of community and necessity of maintaining and sharing language and culture no matter where you are based.

Overall, I hope to show that language learning is beyond words. Non-verbal expressions and cultural understanding are just as, if not more, crucial than words. There are no teachers or students in any multilingual family, all members learn together. The journey never ends, no matter how old your children are. Multilingual families embark on a lifelong translanguaging journey.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao.

Translanguaging and Decoloniality

This month we published Translanguaging, Coloniality and Decolonial Cracks by Robyn Tyler. In this post the author explores the link between translanguaging and decolonisation.

‘Translanguaging’ and ‘decoloniality’ are both hot topics in applied linguistics research currently. In my book I explore the connections between these ideas by presenting a concrete case of bilingual learning focused on a class of black South African high school students.

The temptation for scholars pursuing social justice can be to see all instances of the inclusion of marginalised languages in education as decolonial. Certainly, African languages have been systematically denigrated and excluded from formal education in South Africa since colonial and Apartheid times. To find their flourishing within the cracks in the coloniality of schooling – as I did at Success High in Cape Town – is certainly worth celebrating.

But African languages (isiXhosa in this case) are used in very complex ways in this context. Their use is constrained by racist and colonial language ideologies. They are used sparingly to allow more time for developing English proficiency. They are enriched by multimodality and multilingualism beyond the ‘home language’. They are contested and adapted through deft identity work.

The Success High case fleshes out the role of language in decolonising schooling in the South. Translanguaging, trans-semiotizing and identity meshing are some of the processes described in the rich meaning-making of the students and their teachers. The data captures teenagers grappling with chemical reactions, engaging with a white teacher-student-researcher and maintaining their good social standing.

Textured episodes of young people learning and growing are presented in a variety of modes, including cartoons, in Translanguaging, Coloniality and Decolonial Cracks: Bilingual Science Learning in South Africa.

Robyn Tyler, University of the Western Cape, rrtyler@uwc.ac.za

For more information about this book, please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Relanguaging Language from a South African Township School by Lara-Stephanie Krause.

What Counts as Literacy Learning for Emergent Bilinguals in the 21st Century?

This month we published Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao. In this post the editors explain what a multimodal approach to literacy learning involves.

We are excited about our new publication, Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals: Beyond Print-Centric Practices. This edited volume features research intended to expand multimodal literacy teaching practices in ways that support emergent bilinguals in a variety of early childhood contexts including preschool environments, kindergartens, elementary classrooms, and out-of-school community locations. The chapters include perspectives from areas of the United States where students are relegated to English-only policies and practices, as well as studies from China, London, Brazil and Norway. Each chapter provides background information about the study and concludes with specific implications for teaching and learning practices which is sure to push you into new ways of thinking and alternative ways to support emergent bilinguals. This book provides culturally sustaining pedagogical possibilities for using multimodal approaches to teach literacy with young children learning multiple languages. You can expect to see emergent bilinguals framed from an assets-based perspective that celebrates their rich cultural and linguistic heritages. A translanguaging approach (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017) guides the authors’ thinking about the complex ways in which young emergent bilinguals use languages in addition to other semiotic resources in order to speak, act, know, and do in manners unique to each learner.

Multimodality is at the heart of all of the chapters. A multimodal approach to literacy learning is based on:

• Social semiotics where meaning-making is the result of social interactions (Kress, 2010);
• Communication encompassing more than language or print (speech and written words); language is partial;
• Utilization of multiple modes with a mode being a set of organized resources of various forms such as images, gestures, oral language, etc;
• Active sign makers (emergent bilinguals) selecting modes and choosing available resources to create meaning based on their way of understanding the world;
  • For example, a child may use Legos (form) to enact a visual retelling of a story.
• Construction of a coherent and cohesive ensemble or product drawing from multiple modes.

Using multimodality as a lens for teaching emergent bilinguals allows us to offer additional opportunities to make and share meaning. In many learning spaces, these opportunities are limited to oral and written language even though emergent bilinguals may utilize other semiotic resources in environments where English is the predominant or only language. Small changes in teaching practices can provide more equitable and accessible learning spaces. For example, a teacher may offer students an option to draw in response to a read aloud as opposed to answering questions on a worksheet. The drawing could be analyzed for meaning in terms of salience of features like the main characters as well the use of color to determine how the characters were feeling. We invite you to read this new publication in order to broaden your notions of what counts as literacy learning for emergent bilinguals in the 21st century.

Sally Brown and Ling Hao

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingual Literacy edited by Esther Odilia Breuer, Eva Lindgren, Anat Stavans and Elke Van Steendam.

Linking Translanguaging and Translation

This month we published Translanguaging in Translation by Eriko Sato. In this post the author explains why she chose to study translation in relation to translanguaging. 

In this book I wanted to show the long-term, often invisible contributions of translanguaging to the development of our languages and societies through the analysis of translated texts. Why translated texts? Think about who the translators are and what they do. Translators are bilinguals who stand right at the boundary between two languages and cultures to help two groups of people understand each other. Their criticality and creativity as bilinguals are crucial for overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers to convey their own interpretation of a text to a new audience. Accordingly, the traces of translanguaging in translation can give us insight into bilinguals’ pivotal language practices. Translated texts can indeed serve as valuable primary data for applied linguists who study translanguaging, language contact, and historical development of languages that reflect surrounding sociocultural contexts.

I examined Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and English texts with focus on script types, onomatopoeias, pronouns, names, metaphors, puns and other context-sensitive linguistic elements. The analysis shows that translators’ translanguaging is often ideologically driven and motivated by implicit agendas such as:

• to respect/adopt the culture of the source text (ST);
• to achieve intercultural communication, rather than cross-cultural communication;
• to create new concepts, sensitivities and rhetorical tools;
• to resist the dominant socio-political power of the culture of the target text (TT);
• to manipulate the perception of historical events.

Translators push or pull linguistic boundaries as needed, and their translanguaging actions consequently shape and reshape our languages, both vocabulary and grammar, and our societies and cultures.

My study sheds light on the problems caused by monolingualizing forces in translation and brings a new dimension to the field of applied linguistics, in particular, sociolinguistics. It is very rare to find features of the source language (SL) in English translations published in Anglophone societies to the extent that translations appear as originals as claimed by Lawrence Venuti. However, SL words and morphemes are scattered across pages in English translations published in highly multilingual societies such as India. Translation practices indeed mirror each society’s dominant attitude toward multilingualism.

The implication of my study extends to language teaching. Translation activities and the use of languages other than the target language (TL) have been unfairly banned or highly discouraged in many language classrooms over decades. The monolingualizing language teaching is effective in forcing  novice language learners to utter words and phrases in the TL but is not effective in fostering their competence in intercultural communication. Language learners, especially novice learners, need to use their “full” linguistic repertoire to approach unfamiliar words and unknown cultural concepts, compare them with those in their own culture, connect them to other subjects that are relevant to them, and start engaging in the community of TL speakers, and communicate with them based on their renewed identity. Translanguaging liberates language learners and emerging bilinguals from linguistic intimidation and allows them to engage in meaningful intercultural communication, the ultimate goal of language learning.

Eriko Sato
Stony Brook University
eriko.sato@stonybrook.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might like Translanguaging as Transformation edited by Emilee Moore, Jessica Bradley and James Simpson.

Remaking Multilingualism: A Tribute to Ofelia García

This month we published Remaking Multilingualism edited by Bahar Otcu-Grillman and Maryam Borjian – a book honouring the research and influence of Ofelia García. In this post the editors highlight some of the tributes made by contributors to the volume.

Multilingualism, bilingual education and how it is implemented in schools have often been controversial topics debated by politicians, academics, and educators in the United States and throughout the world. Among many scholars in the field, Professor Emerita Ofelia García has been a leader for 40 years, advocating for bilingualism, multilingualism and true bilingual education, not only for language minorities, but for all, and not only locally, but globally. An essential part of ‘dynamic bilingualism’ introduced by García, translanguaging stands out as a promising approach for the education of emergent bilinguals and constitutes people’s complex language practices in multilingual speech communities.

Remaking Multilingualism: A Translanguaging Approach is a tribute volume celebrating Ofelia García and her lifetime commitment to multilingualism and bilingual education within translanguaging perspectives via the eyes of her colleagues, former students, and friends. Through its collective chapters, the volume covers translanguaging in both its senses, as a discursive practice and as a pedagogical approach. It takes the reader beyond named languages and named nation-states to place the emphasis on us, human beings, the speakers of different languages and the residents of different parts of the world.

Dedicated to Ofelia García for her lifetime commitment to the cause of bilingual education, multilingualism and educational linguistics, the volume includes many tribute statements. Here are some excerpts from the book:

“Ofelia’s name is practically synonymous with translanguaging, that run-away concept that has captured the imagination of so many in the field of bilingual education. This is as it should be – a reflection of both Ofelia’s long and deep scholarship in bilingual education policy and practice and the creativity and imagination she brings to it.”
Nancy Hornberger

“Ofelia continues to challenge me on how to go beyond dichotomies such as research/practice, descriptive/political, or pedagogies/policies, and make more holistic contributions to our field.”
Suresh Canagarajah

“Ofelia García remains steadfast in her lifelong commitment to bilingual education. She refers to the systemic inequalities brought about by the hegemony of English, ‘whiteness’ and colonialism. From her early work she has been, and remains, inspirational in her ability to narrow the gap between theory and practice, engage with practitioners to improve the educational outcomes of students and take on powerful institutions which endorse harmful monolingual ideologies and exclude the everyday practices of bilingual learners. She is fearless in her ability to face resistance, speaking truth to power whenever and wherever she is able. Hers is a recognition that practice must lead theory, and not the other way round. Translanguaging is not merely a description of interactional contact, but an ideological orientation to communication and difference. In her warm, inclusive and engaging manner Ofelia García has reshaped the landscape of bilingual education, second language teaching and learning and education pedagogies more widely. We owe her a huge debt of gratitude.”
Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge

“Ofelia García’s enormous gifts of intellectuality, brilliance of thought coupled with her profound love for humanity are not the only characteristics of her academic endeavors that have awed and inspired many over the past several decades. Her immeasurable humility, warmth of character, abundant love and her sheltering personality have made her a true mentor, colleague and friend to many.”
Maryam Borjian

“Ofelia’s advocacy is above everything else. Her lifetime work on bilingual education and multilingualism, initially with Professor Fishman, and her translanguaging approach later, have provided the advocacy for those who speak minority languages and the guidance for educators and policymakers who regulate the minorities’ education. I am thankful to her for everything she did for me and others, for every idea she nurtured and pursued and for everyone she inspired to change the world.”
Bahar Otcu-Grillman

“This chapter foregrounds the perspectives of bilingual Latinx adolescent youth in reimagining school and classroom-level language allocation policy in ways that center the language practices and lived realities of youth. At the core, this approach is grounded in Dr. Ofelia García’s conception of translanguaging and dynamic bilingualism (2009), and our shared belief that children’s and communities’ language practices must be at the center of pedagogical and policy decisions. Using García’s theory of dynamic bilingualism, I outline four lessons from youth based on their reported language use and perspectives on bilingualism and translanguaging, then consider the implications of these lessons for language allocation policy, suggesting an approach to language policy that is grounded in both dynamic bilingualism and youth’s lived realities. Just as Dr. García conceived of translanguaging by studying the language practices of communities, the best way to serve multilingual youth is by listening to youth themselves, and letting their perspectives, experiences and language practices guide the creation of more equitable language policy.”
Sarah Hesson

“Both authors are former students of Ofelia Garcia and were also part of the CUNY-NYSIEB team.  Our approach to working with teachers of emergent bilinguals was rooted in the translanguaging pedagogy that evolved from Ofelia Garcia’s work. Over the years, Ofelia fostered spaces for collaboration that engaged educators in reimagining their schools and classrooms. Our work and the work of the teachers that we feature in this chapter are examples of how she inspired educators to open a space in which they could carefully analyze how learning was attuned to emergent bilinguals’ identities and socio-emotional development.”
Ivana Espinet and Karen Zaino

“If the term mentor entails being a counsellor with wisdom and experience, a generous and inspirational collaborator, and a loyal and empathetic friend, then Ofelia García is mentor par excellence.”
Jo Anne Kleifgen

For more information about this book, please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners by Jim Cummins.