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Latino English Language Learning Analysis

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The population of ELLs is rapidly expanding across the United States; it is projected that one in every four students in the U.S. will speak English as a second language by 2025 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). For at least 30 years, ELLs’ achievement in science, language, and literacy has lagged behind that of native English speakers. They are also less likely to pursue advanced degrees in science. (Shaw, 2014, p. 622) According to the U.S. Department of Education (2010), when looking specifically at Latino English language learners, it is found that they are less likely to complete high school and attend college compared to their White non-Latino peers. A variety of factors affect Latino ELLs’ academic achievement, including acculturation issues, …show more content…

Although the term translanguaging has been coined in the last decade, the language phenomenon that it is based on has been recorded as far back to pre-colonial times. It is based on the natural occurrence within language learners known as code-switching. de la Luz (2012) explains that in monolingual contexts, code-switching is often considered a linguistic deficit. “In bilingual contexts, however, students use both languages to make sense of assignments and as normal practice with little awareness of linguistic shifts; at other times, students purposely shift languages to showcase their billiteracy competence.” Researchers in multilingual European contexts have coined translanguaging and transliteracy as new terms for this type of biliteracy. They view these practices as normal communication modes of bilinguals who make no attempt to separate languages according to their function and context. (p. …show more content…

The term stresses the flexible and meaningful actions through which bilinguals select features in their linguistic repertoire in order to communicate appropriately. Translanguaging is more than code switching, which considers that the two languages are separate systems and are switched for communicative purposes. For Velasco and García (2013), translanguaging is not a mere strategy, but rather it becomes a “framework for conceptualizing the education of bilinguals as a democratic endeavor for social justice.” Teaching practices that jeopardize this reality essentially undermine the right to learn of language-minority children. (Velasco, 2014, p.

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