Translingual Home to School Connections: Including Students' Heritage Languages and Cultural Experiences in the Curriculum through Family eBooks

摘要

The dissertation is divided into seven chapters. In the first chapter, I outline the study objectives in relation to the current research on translingual instructional activities in English-dominant schools, describe how I will contribute to this growing body of work, and provide the research questions that guided the study. In Chapter 2, I discuss the theoretical framework for the study, showcase findings from a review of the translanguaging and home to school connections literature, and describe how I designed the study to provide needed insights on creating translingual curricular opportunities with teachers, students, and families. Chapter 3 details my research methods, and in it I describe the research design, study site, participants, rationale for my selections, and my researcher role and positionality in the classroom. I also provide details about the methods for data collection, data sources, and eBook activity framework. The chapter concludes with an outline the methods of data analysis for each research question and a discussion of study strengths and limitations. The subsequent three chapters detail study findings and are organized around research questions. In Chapter 4, I present findings on students' multimodal, translingual, family eBooks, and I describe how students represented their languages, families, and cultural experiences in eBooks. Chapter 5 details findings from in-depth analysis of six students' composing sessions, and in it I discuss participants' processes for composing translingual eBook messages. Chapter 6 presents a set of instructional features that supported translanguaging and sharing in the classroom. Finally, Chapter 7 contains an overview of the study's findings in relation to each research question, a discussion of this work's contributions, directions for future research, and implications for practice.