This articles gives three literacy activities for teachers working with emergent bilinguals. Leveraging students’ heritage languages in instruction holds rich opportunities for literacy achievement. Translanguaging pedagogies encourage emergent bilinguals to use the full range of their linguistic repertoires when making meaning in the classroom. We describe three snapshots of three different classroom activities that welcome, leverage, and develop students’ heritage languages in literacy instruction through translanguaging pedagogies. These activities include using text features with heritage language newspapers, summarizing when writing bilingual book reports, and using translating and home photos when creating eBooks. We conclude with implications for both student and teacher learning.
Encouraging children to use all the languages in their repertoire in written texts can lead to a classroom which is rich in language, culture and multiple perspectives that encourage both student and teacher learning.
PACHECO, M., MILLER, M. Making Meaning Through Translanguaging in the Literacy classroom. Reading Teacher. March 2016, Vol. 69, Issue 5, pp 533 0 537,