Teachers from kindergarten through high school work increasingly with students for whom English is a second or additional language. When it comes to learning, these students have all of the same needs as any other student but they must also learn English in both its spoken and written forms. Teaching English learning students, or ELs, has often been the responsibility of ESL (English as a second language) teachers or bilingual teachers. Even so, general education classroom teachers almost always see ELs for substantial parts of the school day, especially as their English language proficiency increases.

Do you work with students who speak other languages? In the United States, many teachers want to know “How can I make use of my students’ linguistic resources when I am unfamiliar with their languages?” New research and thinking about this question has resulted in a body of work that falls under the label of translanguaging. The foundational principle is that everything people know about language, regardless of how many they might speak, are part of only one language system. An important idea behind translanguaging is that the need to communicate pushes people to send and receive messages using all of the resources at their disposal (see García and Kleifgen, 2010).

García and Wei (2014) argue that teachers need not be bilingual to make use of translanguaging approaches to language and literacy learning. Canagarajah (2013) argues that what matters most is for teachers to help “students critically reflect on their choices through peer critique and intensive feedback.” For example, one of my doctoral students, Mark Pacheco (2015), has shown how a teacher who speaks only English worked with two Arabic-English speaking students who didn’t quite understand the difference between a pumpkin that was muddy and a pumpkin that was filled with mud. The students translated their understanding into Arabic and then explained their work. The teacher provided more information in English and the students revised their Arabic. Their negotiated understanding resulted in students’ increased knowledge of English and better comprehension.

Other important examples of translanguaging teaching can be found in the work of Jim Cummins (2007), who suggests that bilingual students use both their languages to write what he calls identity texts. Cummins shows that students with very limited knowledge of English meaningfully engaged in writing in both English and their first language. Borrero (2011) designed a program in which students were taught how to translate school documents for their parents. As a result, these students made gains in their English reading comprehension. My colleagues and I (Jiménez et al., 2015) have showed that middle-school students who translated carefully selected portions of English language text gained deeper understandings of their first language and English. This understanding, called metalinguistic awareness, has been linked to higher levels of reading comprehension.

Finally, we are finding that local teachers in the Nashville, TN, area have lots of ideas concerning how to better incorporate their students’ languages into their literacy instruction. One teacher shared a questionnaire he created in which he asked high school students to identify one part of an English language text that they found particularly difficult to translate. He also asked them to explain how they translated that part of the text. Students’ comments on these two items have helped us to better understand what happens when they translanguage. Second- and third-grade teachers have explained to us how translanguaging activities can be incorporated into their daily schedules as part of literacy instruction.

Robert Jiménez received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a faculty member at the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches courses in research methods, second language literacy, and issues related to the education of Latino/Latina students in the Peabody School at Vanderbilt University.

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