A teacher's inquiry into bringing in biliteracy into a fifth-grade English-only classroom

Document Type

Article

Version Deposited

None (link only)

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Publication Title

Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research

DOI

10.4148/2470-6353.1009

Abstract

This teacher inquiry project explored how I, a non-Spanish speaking teacher at the time, implemented critical, bilingual pedagogies to foster biliteracy development among my fifth-grade students. One, the project showed that students could further their biliteracy by incorporating their funds of knowledge through a family stories writing project. Two, many students were anxious about reading in Spanish, and dual poetry alleviated this due to its compactness and linguistic scaffolding. Finally, the project showed the continual issues of unequal power relations concerning bilingualism and biliteracy in US classrooms by showing how I failed to include languages other than Spanish in this project and how I succumbed to school pressures of high-stakes testing, often abandoning a critical, bilingual pedagogy in the process.

Comments

Networks is an open access journal published by Kansas State University using Digital Commons.

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