Spanglish as Literacy Tool: Toward an Understanding of the Potential Role of Spanish-English Code-Switching in the Development of Academic Literacy
By R. A. Martínez. Research in the Teaching of English, 2010
219 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.
Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d82bf068ad439aae886401e737b0742a048d37d
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Citations in the corpus
- Looking closely and listening carefully: A sociocultural approach to understanding the complexity of Latina/o/x students’ everyday language (2020, background): “of extending some of the literacy skills embedded and displayed in kids’ everyday translanguaging while also helping them to cultivate related metalinguistic awareness (Martínez, 2010).”
- Navigating Hybridized Language Learning Spaces Through Translanguaging Pedagogy: Dual Language Preschool Teachers’ Languaging Practices in Support of Emergent Bilingual Children’s Performance of Academic Discourse (2015, background): “By enacting a flexible bilingualism and implementing a coordinated bilingual pedagogy, the teachers in this classroom set up a collaborative space for dynamic bilingualism and meaning making in which they modeled and legitimized a wide range of linguistic resources for thinking, communicating, and c”
- Across Languages, Modes, and Identities: Bilingual Adolescents’ Multimodal Codemeshing in the Literacy Classroom (2015, background): “Recent work on code-switching (Martínez, 2010), language brokering (Coyoca & Lee, 2009), and translation (Jiménez et al., 2015) all suggest these practices’ potential for making meaning in classrooms when English is not “bracketed off,” and teachers encourage the strategic use of multiple…”
- Code-Switching Patterns in the Writing-Related Talk of Young Emergent Bilinguals (2012, background): “…learners naturally explore the connections between their two developing languages and practice code switching in their interactions with other bilinguals as a normal part of membership in their linguistic communities (Freeman, 2000; Gort, 2006, 2008; Hornberger, 2005; Martinez, 2010; Pérez, 2004).”
- A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging (2017, unknown): “…2011; Soltero-González, 2009; SolteroGonzález & Butvilofsky, 2015; Soltero-González et al., 2016), and codeswitching (Cook, 2001; Fuller, 2009, 2010; Gort, 2012; Martı́nez, 2010; Moschkovich, 2007; Nava, 2009; Palmer, 2009; Reyes, 2004; Shin, 2005), following the foundational work of…”