‘ Dime De Que Se Trató /Tell me what it was about’: Exploring emergent bilinguals’ linguistic resources in reading assessments with parent participation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and holistic approaches to reading and critical approaches to family literacy, the analysis centres on assessment sessions with two mother–child dyads whose children attended school in a relatively new migration setting. Primary data were drawn from four reading assessment sessions and audio-recordings over a 7-month period with each child, individual interviews and home visits with mothers, and field notes from research team members. The analysis examined linguistic patterns related to second-language approximations and code-switching in miscues and oral retellings. The analysis also includes coding of strategies and resources children used in their English and Spanish retelling of the same text, using their home language to retell the texts to their mothers. Findings illustrate that while children’s miscues may be shaped by their developing control of syntactic structures and new vocabulary, they draw from multiple language resources in English retellings, conveying their complex understandings of texts. We also found that the children negotiated translating and retelling for their parents in different ways, shaped by their family literacy practices. These involved co-construction of stories, a focus on accuracy and the paraphrasing and embellishing of stories and dialogue. Insights from this study highlight the complexity of pooled language resources in young children’s repertoires. Findings also document the situated nature of oral retelling at home, when parents engage children in the sharing and translating of English books in ways that align with existing roles, practices and goals. Implications for equitable literacy assessment in new migration contexts are discussed.