Biliteracy and Translanguaging in Dual-Language Bilingual Education

Using translanguaging as a resource has the potential to transform biliteracy instruction in dual-language bilingual education (DLBE). In a flexible model of biliteracy, the students’ full repertoire of resources is used to interact with texts that are written in different named languages as they think discuss, interact with, and produce written texts (García O. Bilingual education in the 21st century: a global perspective. Malden/Oxford, Wiley/Blackwell, 2009). In this article, we provide an example of this flexible model of biliteracy from a case study involving a third-grade dual-language bilingual teacher. The teacher designed a translanguaging space to create more holistic ways of doing biliteracy that allowed students to use their full linguistic repertoire for literacy performances. To do this, the teacher’s stance about keeping the two languages in her DLBE class separate first had to change. She started consciously integrating what students were learning to do during English literacy and social studies instruction into her Spanish literacy instruction. She then designed a translanguaging instructional and assessment space she called Los círculos. In that space bilingual students take what they have learned across other content areas in instructional spaces dedicated to English and Spanish and do biliteracy juntos.