Becoming Bilingual Readers

Identity, Translanguaging, and Biographic Biliteracy Profiles

Bobbie Kabuto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000483468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Building on Bobbie Kabuto's groundbreaking 2010 book Becoming Biliterate, this book explores how identity impacts the development of bilingual readers and how reading practices are mediated by family and community contexts. Highlighting bilingual readers from Spanish, Greek, Japanese, and English language backgrounds, Kabuto offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of these readers' behaviors and identities through the original approach of Biographic Biliteracy Profiles.

The Profiles serve as a culturally relevant assessment tool for developing meaningful narratives and can reveal how bilingual readers make sense of texts in the context of their home and school environments. An ideal approach for unpacking the complexity of bilingual reading behaviors and how they change across time, the Profiles allow readers to explore what a bilingual reader's identity means to becoming biliterate; the roles of code-switching and translanguaging; the influences of readers' families and communities; and how they all interact and shape readers' identities, behaviors, and meaning-making.

Offering practical applications on observing and documenting bilingual readers, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students in courses on bilingualism, L2/ESL reading, and multilingualism.

1

Culturally Relevant Assessment Practices for Linguistically Diverse Readers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003045984-2

In the field of education, the term assessment does not always have the gentlest connotation. Most people will immediately associate it with high-stakes state testing, commercial standardized assessments, teacher accountability, grade-level standards, and yearly progress reports, all of which index some sort of constructed notion of success or failure. Regardless of research showing that standardized assessments are limited in capturing the breadth and richness of knowledge (National Research Council, 2001), they have in fact become a big business with for-profit corporations and publishers controlling the narrative around who is learning and who is not (Cody, 2014; Pierce & Ordoñez-Jasis, 2018). Creating a singular view of what and how students should learn in school and how educational institutions should assess that learning, the term can lead ultimately to dread and stress, especially for historically marginalized students of color (Willis, 2019).

Among the marginalized groups who have not always been treated well by educational assessment practices are linguistically diverse students. In this book, I will use the term linguistically diverse to discuss the general language diversity of and across groups of people. To talk more specifically about the individual readers in this book, I will use some form of the terms bilingualism and biliteracy because all the readers herein speak, read, and write in two named languages (i.e., Spanish, Greek, Japanese, and English).

Educational assessment practices of linguistically diverse students have historically been built on an ideology that privileges English over home or heritage languages (Sanchez et al., 2013). In K-12 settings, the pedagogical norm that still dominates today is one of language separation existing in models ranging from an English-only curriculum to organizing languages throughout the day by context (like home, school, or subject), by participants (like the English teacher or the Spanish teacher), and by materials (the English book or the Japanese book). Language separation purposely limits the ways that languages can be used in fluid and natural ways and perpetuates the belief among many in and out of education that the observable range of diverse language behaviors exhibited by bilingual and biliterate students are problems rather than resources (Macías, 2016). The argument goes something like this: languages need to be kept separate and differentiated, and language mixing is an indicator of confusion or a lack of knowledge. In other words, how else were linguistically diverse students expected to learn English if they were allowed to use their other language in learning and assessment? This line of thought insists that using English as the medium for instruction not only helps students learn English faster but it is also a tool for assimilation into US schooling and society.

Over time, depending on English to assess linguistically diverse students has devalued the range of diverse linguistic behaviors and practices within families and communities, thereby creating a disconnect between home and school. In their research with culturally and linguistically diverse families, Manyak and Dantas (2010) argued, “A number of research studies focused on families and schooling have demonstrated that educators may find themselves confused by families whose values and practices differ greatly from their own, and, at times, develop negative views about such families’ interest and support of their children’s schooling” (p. 3). Manyak and Dantas illustrated how teachers thought they should lower their academic expectations of linguistically diverse children in their classrooms because they felt that these children did not have quality, stimulating experiences or spoke another language at home.

Families are not immune to the disconnect and can engage in family language planning, defined as “a deliberate attempt at practicing a particular language use pattern and particular literacy practices within home domains and among family members” (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009, p. 352) that can support (or not support) linguistic diversity. When families see the value in linguistic diversity, they are more likely to provide resources and environments that will support their aspirations for their children (Curdt-Christiansen & La Morgia, 2018). Conversely, families who feel that their home languages have negative impacts on their children’s academic progress change how they support their children’s uses of their home languages (Curdt-Christiansen & La Morgia, 2018; Ren & Hu, 2013).

Of educational importance is how assessment practices that privilege and depend on the use of English create not just a deficit-oriented lens, ignoring the ways in which knowledge manifests itself in the breadth of literacy practices and events in which linguistically diverse students participate. The dependence on English has also produced a racially biased approach to assessment. Standardized tests contain cultural biases resulting in poor performance by linguistically diverse students (Artiles et al., 2002; Everett et al., 2013). For instance, New York State’s yearly English Language Arts exams are given to students in grades 3–6. Based on the 2019 NYS ELA exam results (https://data.nysed.gov/assessment38.php?subject=ELA&year=2019&state=yes), when results are disaggregated by ethnicity, 36% of Hispanic or Latino students were deemed proficient compared to 51% of White students and 67% of Asian or Pacific Islander students. These categories come directly from NYS ELA data reports. What is striking is that only 9% of English Language Learners were deemed proficient compared to non-English Language Learners. Students in other socially disadvantaged categories – economically disadvantaged, students in foster care, migrant populations, and the homeless – performed far worse than students in nonsocially disadvantaged categories. It is this type of data, in fact, that has led to students of color and linguistically diverse students being overly identified to special education and other remedial services and has created a narrative that blames and associates race with academic performance (Everett et al., 2013).

Standardized and high-stakes testing tells us less about what students have actually learned and more about the social inequities that exist in society. As a racially biased practice, standardized assessments reproduce “a prejudice against someone based on race, when those prejudices are reinforced by systems or power” (Oluo, 2019, p. 26). The dominance of standardized testing reproduces systemic inequalities that have serious implications for teacher ratings, funding, and school resources. Schools with particular populations of students who are deemed as underperforming may receive different types of curricular structures and are more closely monitored by the state than schools who are performing up to state expectations.

Similarly, the process of state testing is prejudicial against groups of students. Latinx and Black students are shown to consistently underperform when compared to White and Asian students. The overperforming of Asian and Pacific Islanders groups a broad range of the world’s population into a singular stereotype placing undue burdens and expectations on these individuals (Olou, p. 191). This “model minority myth” diminishes the variety of bias and racist practices they encounter both in and out of schools (Kim, 2020). While we have known, for many years, that standardized assessment practices reflect the social inequalities in society, educational systems do more of the same rather than break the cycle of educational inequality. This point has raised a call for alternative forms of culturally relevant assessment practices (Ascenzi-Moreno, 2018; Everett et al., 2013; Rueda & Windmueller, 2006).

Biographic Biliteracy Profiles as a Culturally Relevant Assessment Practice

Set against the backdrop of developing more culturally relevant and linguistically inclusive ways to assess diverse students, the Profiles are a means of providing an alternative perspective to the deficit-oriented lens about race and language perpetuated by standardized and commercial assessments. Culturally relevant assessments are based on the “cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant to and effective [for students]” (Gay, 2000, p. 29). They are tools for not just evaluating students but also positioning them as knowledgeable socially, culturally, and linguistically capable beings, as they draw from their range of linguistic knowledge and language resources to communicate what they know. A culturally relevant assessment process for reading, however, is more than documenting readers transacting with text. While standardized assessment practices are more about measuring one student relative to another, culturally relevant assessment practices document cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of bilingual students to understand how and what students know. These assessment practices draw from a collaborative process that engages students, teachers, families, and other stakeholders.

The Profiles are built from multiple data sources that include, but are not limited to, observations, interviews, reading records, work samples, and accompanying dialogue. The aim of the Profiles is to capture student diversity and the linguistic flexibility that is needed as readers transact with texts and develop biliterate identities. As Pierce and Ordoñez-Jasis (2018) found, while teachers work with a variety of data sources every day in their dayto-day interactions with students, in documenting what students know and providing them feedback to create an assessment loop, they do not always value this type of formative assessment process.

The Profiles are designed to place the student and language back into the center of the assessment process so that it is a collaborative, reflective, and inquiry-based process. As I will explain in the next section, the Profiles originated from a larger study, Revaluing Readers and Families, that engaged family members in reading practices and events in strategic ways to build an environment around reading as a reflective process so that parents learn about not only their children as readers but also the reading process.

Focusing on collective expertise, it took parents and their children working together, reflecting on miscues, responding to text, and asking questions to create a shared goal of supporting their children as readers. As we did, we engaged in in-the-moment assessment, which refers to spontaneous evaluation and feedback provided to bilingual readers in order to move them forward in their thinking. The in-the-moment assessment requires considering and strategically responding to information to scaffold learners.

As Vanlommel and Schildkamp (2019) describe, data can have different meanings to different people. The types of data we collect and the information to which we respond reflect beliefs about teaching and learning (Harmey, 2021; Pierce & Ordoñez-Jasis, 2018; Vanlommel & Schildkamp, 2019). As such, we have the power to shift beliefs and perspectives, and this point is critical to advocate for linguistic diversity by placing assessment in a translanguaging space. It is for this reason that this book is not a how-to book but rather one that provides theoretical dialogues to challenge unexamined assumptions about bilingual reading behaviors, bilingual readers, and linguistically diverse families and how we know what these readers know.

As a culturally relevant assessment tool, the Profiles invite different perspectives and deprivatize the practice of assessment so that new ways of knowing are captured and actualized in the assessment process (Pierce & Ordoñez-Jasis, 2018). Encouraging new voices in the assessment process, particularly for linguistically diverse students, provides insights into the sense-making ways that draw on historical, social, and cultural knowledge. The use of culturally relevant assessment tools like the Profiles is a necessary step in advocating for antiracist assessment practices by situating learning experiences, literacy manifestations, and reading behaviors within an asset-oriented narrative.

Constructing Biographic Biliteracy Profiles

Biographic Biliteracy Profiles provide a common template for discussing the biliteracy configurations of the children and their families through a culturally responsive assessment lens. While Taylor (in Kabuto, 2017) used Biographic Literacy Profiles for exploring classroom activities and observations, the Profiles used herein contain data collected outside the classroom and in the context of the home and family. I draw on a combination of data that includes revisiting data from my study of Emma’s process of becoming biliterate and Revaluing Readers and Families.

Emma participated in a variety of social practices that invoked both languages inside and outside of the home. Children play with friends; they may go to preschool or gym classes. Each...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures/Tables
• Acknowledgments
• (Re)Introduction to Becoming Biliterate
• 1 Culturally Relevant Assessment Practices for Linguistically Diverse Readers
• 2 Laying the Groundwork for Biographic Biliteracy Profiles
• 3 Profiles of Reading in a Translanguaging Context
• 4 Profiles of Code-Switching in a Translanguaging Context
• 5 Profiles of Bilingual Reading Identities and Abilities
• 6 Biographic Biliteracy Profiles: Implications for Creating Culturally Relevant Assessment Practices
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Index