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International Journal of Bilingual

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Translanguaging and transnational

literacies in multilingual classrooms: a
biliteracy lens
a

Nancy H. Hornberger & Holly Link

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania,

Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6216, USA
Published online: 27 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Nancy H. Hornberger & Holly Link (2012): Translanguaging and transnational
literacies in multilingual classrooms: a biliteracy lens, International Journal of Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism, 15:3, 261-278
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International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

Vol. 15, No. 3, May 2012, 261
278

Translanguaging and transnational literacies in multilingual classrooms:

a biliteracy lens
Nancy H. Hornberger* and Holly Link
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216, USA

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(Received 26 October 2011; final version received 12 January 2012)

As US classrooms approach a decade of response to No Child Left Behind, many
questions and concerns remain around the education of those labeled as English
language learners, in both English as a Second Language and bilingual education
classrooms. A national policy context where standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction and first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued
poses unusual challenges for learners whose communicative repertoires encompass
translanguaging practices. Drawing on the critical sociolinguistics of globalization
and on ethnographic data from US and international educational contexts, we
argue via a continua of biliteracy lens that the welcoming of translanguaging and
transnational literacies in classrooms is not only necessary but desirable educational practice. We suggest that Obamas current policies on the one hand and our
schools glaring needs on the other offer new spaces to be exploited for innovative
programs, curricula, and practices that recognize, value, and build on the multiple,
mobile communicative repertoires and translanguaging/transnational literacy
practices of students and their families.
Keywords: additive bilingualism; biliteracy; bilingual education; code-switching;
ELL; communicative competence

Introduction
You know, I dont understand when people are going around worrying about, We need
to have English-only. They want to pass a law, We want English-only. Now I agree
that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of
worrying about whether immigrants can learn English
theyll learn English
you need
to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your
child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.
You know, its embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English,
they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can
say [is], Merci beaucoup. Right? You know, no, Im serious about this. We should
understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool
to get a job. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international
business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an
early age. . . (Barack Obama, 8 July 2008, Powder Springs, GA)

In this pre-election speech on the state of the US economy, Barack Obama conveys a
global perspective and pro-multilingual stance on language policy in education. His
positive outlook on bilingualism and foreign-language learning recognizes not just
*Corresponding author. Email: nancyh@gse.upenn.edu
ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.658016
http://www.tandfonline.com

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N.H. Hornberger and H. Link

the well-documented fact that children of immigrants residing in the US rapidly learn
English but also that multilingualism provides economic advantages and is a norm
outside of the US (Ferguson and Heath 1981; McKay and Wong 1988; Potowski
2010).
One in five students in the United States is the child of an immigrant (Capps
et al. 2005 as cited in Ga ndara and Hopkins 2010, 7), and between 1995 and 2005,
the EL [English Learner] student population grew 56% (Batalova, Fix, and Murray
2007, as cited in Ga ndara and Hopkins 2010, 7). Yet, educational policy under No
Child Left Behind ignores these changing demographics in schools across the US and
does little to reflect either the pro-bilingual stance in Obamas speech or the large
body of research on the benefits of bilingualism (e.g., Baker 1988; Ben-Zeev 1977;
Bialystok 2001; Garca and Otheguy 1994; Kroll and de Groot 2005; Peal and
Lambert 1962). Even while exemplary bilingual education models such as two-way
immersion programs are growing in number across the country,1 current scholarship
documents the increasingly restrictive language policies in US schools and the
pervading atmosphere of high-stakes testing that serves to undermine bilingual
education and multilingualism (e.g., Escamilla 2006; Gandara and Hopkins 2010;
Hornberger 2006; Menken 2008; Wiley and Wright 2004). As US school populations
shift and represent an increasingly diverse world of linguistic flexibility, we argue that
refusing to acknowledge the language resources of students and their families limits
the possibilities for students educational success and achievement and shuts down
opportunities for the development of multilingualism.
In the Obama administrations Elementary and Secondary Education (ESEA)
2010 Reauthorization: Blueprint for Reform, the section on the education of diverse
learners, and more specifically, English Language Learners, states that grant money
will be available to help states and school districts implement high-quality language
instruction programs, including dual-language programs, transitional bilingual
education, sheltered English immersion, newcomer programs for late-entrant English
Learners, or other language instruction programs (ESEA 2010). While this policy
seems to foreground bilingual models over other forms of programming for those
labeled English Learners, it remains to be seen how schools and districts across the
country will work toward developing and implementing bilingual education while
high-stakes testing in English remains the sole measure of student and school
success.
In this paper we present and discuss a vision that both parallels and extends
Obamas global perspective and pro-multilingual stance, one that might re-orient
educational policy to build on students rich and varied language practices to
facilitate successful school experiences and greater academic achievement. In order
to do so, we offer a conceptual framework and scenarios from a number of
educational contexts, in both the US and around the world, that illustrate such
language and learning practices, characterized here as translanguaging and transnational literacy practices. In brief, translanguaging in its original sense refers to the
purposeful pedagogical alternation of languages in spoken and written, receptive and
productive modes (Baker 2001, 2003; Williams 1994), a usage we expand on in what
follows; while transnational literacies are literacy practices that draw on funds of
knowledge, identities, and social relations rooted and extending across national
borders (Warriner 2007b).

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Consider the following brief scenarios (to which we will return later):
(1) A pair of first graders in Pennsylvania, USA comment to each other in
Spanish and English while they co-read a text written in English (Link 2011).
(2) A fifth grader in California, USA incorporates Spanish words and phrases
into her poem about her grandmother in Mexico (Campano 2007).
(3) At an all school weekly assembly in the UK, the head teacher interweaves
English and Gujarati while addressing students and their families about an
upcoming school event (Blackledge and Creese 2010).
(4) Third-year students in a bilingual BA program in Contemporary English and
Multilingual Studies at the University of Limpopo, South Africa, confer
among themselves in class, freely code-switching in Sepedi and English, as to
which of six child language development paradigms introduced in class this
week best corresponds to a short text they have just read in English
(Hornberger 2010).
In the above scenarios, students and teachers in a range of school settings and
classrooms both in and outside of the US, engage in translanguaging and
transnational literacies, border-crossing communicative practices that are becoming
more prevalent in an increasingly globalized world. If we were to observe the
interactions in the scenarios above, it would become clear that not only are students
and teachers drawing on more than one language or literacy, but they also are using
multiple and dynamic varieties of these different languages and literacies

vernacular, formal, academic, as well as those based on race, ethnicity, affinity or
affiliation, etc.
for varying purposes in different contexts. Recognizing, valorizing,
and studying these multiple and mobile linguistic resources are part of what
Blommaert (2010) refers to as a critical sociolinguistics of globalization that focuses
on language-in-motion rather than language-in-place. In this focus on the mobility of
linguistic and communicative resources, linguistic phenomena are viewed from
within the social, cultural, political and historical contexts of which they are a part
(Blommaert 2010, 3).
A sociolinguistics of globalization helps frame the notions of translanguaging
and transnational literacies. Translanguaging, or engaging in bilingual or multilingual discourse practices, is an approach to bilingualism that is centered not on
languages as has often been the case, but on the practices of bilinguals that are
readily observable (Garca 2009, 44). The notion of translanguaging can be seen as a
new approach to understanding long-studied languaging practices of multilinguals,
such as code-switching in which speakers draw on two different grammatical systems
in their utterances (Gumperz 1982). While research on code-switching has tended to
focus on issues of language interference, transfer or borrowing, translanguaging
shifts the lens from cross-linguistic influence to how multilinguals intermingle
linguistic features that have hereto been administratively or linguistically assigned to
a particular language or language variety (Garca 2009, 51). Moreover, the concept
of translanguaging broadens the research lens by focusing not just on spoken
language but on a variety of communicative modes.
This expansion and refocusing of a concept that originated in Welsh-English
bilingual pedagogical practices not only effectively portrays language-in-motion as
referred to by Blommaert (2010), but also helps reframe how researchers and
educators alike might better understand the language and literacy practices of those

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they study and teach. Recent work such as Blackledge and Creeses (2010) linguistic
ethnography of multilingualism in heritage language schools in the UK shows how
students, their families, and teachers draw on translanguaging, or flexible language
practices that contradict monolingual language policies and ideologies at the
national level and help them negotiate multilingual and multicultural identities
across home and community settings (4).
Similarly, as briefly noted above, transnational literacies refer, in our sociolinguistically mobile times, to literacy practices whose referents and meanings extend
across national borders
perhaps most clearly instantiated in the literacies of
transmigrants who move or have moved bodily across national borders while
maintaining and cultivating practices tied
in varying degrees
to their home
countries (Warriner 2007b). The cross-border movements of bodies, as well as of
goods and information, are the direct result of globalization and specifically the
internationalization of systems of production (Richardson Bruna 2007), processes
which tend to de-territorialize important economic, social and cultural practices
from their traditional boundaries in nation-states (Sua rez-Orozco and Qin-Hillard
2004, 14, cited in McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, and Saliani 2007, 84). While
transnationalism refers to the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility
across space, (Ong 1999, as cited in Warriner 2007b, 201), transnational literacies
can be seen as literacy practices that reflect the intersection of local and global
contexts (McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, and Saliani 2007).
We propose that developing awareness of and an orientation to translanguaging
and transnational literacies in classrooms with students from diverse cultural and
linguistic backgrounds can provide practitioners, teachers, and researchers with a
fuller understanding of the resources students bring to school and help us identify
ways in which to draw on these resources for successful educational experiences. We
structure our discussion of these practices through a biliteracy or multiliteracy lens
drawing on the Continua of Biliteracy model (Hornberger 1989, 2003; Hornberger and
Skilton-Sylvester 2000). We begin by outlining the Continua model and discussing it
in light of recent scholarship on the sociolinguistics of globalization, translanguaging
and transnational literacies, and then highlight examples of translanguaging and
transnational literacy practices from current research on multilingual classrooms and
students, as exemplified in the scenarios. In our conclusion we return to the current
political climate and educational policy in the US, suggesting how policy-makers at all
levels might benefit from an orientation that values the multiple and mobile
communicative resources and repertoires of students and their families, enabling
greater support for the development of bi(multi)literacy for all students.
The continua of biliteracy: a lens for envisioning multilingual classrooms
Although scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers often characterize dimensions of
bilingualism and literacy in terms of oppositional pairs such as first versus second
languages (L1 vs. L2), monolingual versus bilingual individuals, or oral versus
literate societies, in each case those opposites represent theoretical endpoints on what
is in reality a continuum of features. Furthermore, when we consider biliteracy, the
conjunction of literacy and bilingualism, it becomes clear that these multiple
continua are interrelated dimensions of highly complex and fluid systems; and that it
is in the dynamic, rapidly changing and sometimes contested spaces along and across
multiple and intersecting continua that most biliteracy use and learning occur.

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Biliteracy can be defined as any and all instances in which communication occurs
in two (or more) languages in or around writing (Hornberger 1990, 213), where these
instances may be events, actors, interactions, practices, activities, classrooms,
programs, situations, societies, sites, or worlds (Hornberger 2000, 362; Hornberger
and Skilton-Sylvester 2000, 98). The continua model of biliteracy offers a lens
through which to see research, teaching, and language planning in bilingual and
multilingual settings. The model uses the heuristic of intersecting and nested
continua to represent the multiple, complex, and fluid interrelationships between
bilingualism and literacy and the contexts, media, and content through which
biliteracy practices and abilities develop. Seen through this lens, it becomes clear that
multilingual learners develop biliteracy along reciprocally intersecting first language

second language, receptive
productive, and oral
written language skills continua;
through the medium of two or more languages and literacies ranging along continua
of similar to dissimilar linguistic structures, convergent to divergent scripts, and
simultaneous to successive exposure; in contexts scaled from micro to macro levels
and characterized by varying mixes of monolingual
bilingual and oral
literate
language practices; and expressing content encompassing majority to minority
perspectives and experiences, literary to vernacular styles and genres, and decontextualized to contextualized language texts (Hornberger 1989; Hornberger and
Skilton-Sylvester 2000; see Figure 1). Since educational policies and practices often
and overwhelmingly privilege compartmentalized, monolingual, written, decontextualized language, and literacy practices, the continua of biliteracy lens offers a vision
for contesting those weightings by intentionally opening up implementational and
ideological spaces for fluid, multilingual, oral, contextualized practices, and voices at
the local level (Hornberger 2002, 2005, 2006; Hornberger and Johnson 2007;
Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000).

A sociolinguistics of globalization and the context continua

The continua model of biliteracy posits that contexts influence biliteracy development and use at every level from two-person interaction (micro) to societal and
global relations of power (macro) and that they comprise a mix of oral-to-literate,
monolingual-to-multilingual varieties of language and literacy (Hornberger 1989).
Recognition of context as an important factor in language use dates back at least to
the 1960s, when sociolinguistics broke new ground by moving the analysis of
language beyond a focus on structure to one on language use in social context. More
recently, Blommaert (2010) proposes and charts a further paradigmatic shift from a
sociolinguistics of variation to a sociolinguistics of mobility befitting todays
increasingly globalized world and mobile linguistic resources, and he draws on
longstanding conceptual tools such as sociolinguistic scales, indexicality, and
polycentricity to help us think about language in this new sociolinguistics. In this
paradigm, contexts of biliteracy can be understood as scaled spatiotemporal
complexes, indexically ordered and polycentric, in which multilingualism and
literacies develop within mobile multilingual repertoires in spaces that are
simultaneously translocal and global. Framed in this light, the call for opening up
implementational and ideological spaces for fluid, multilingual, oral, contextualized
practices and voices in educational policy and practice becomes an even more
powerful imperative for contesting the social inequalities of language.

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N.H. Hornberger and H. Link

Figure 1. Power relations in the continua of biliteracy. Reprinted with permission from
Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000, Multilingual Matters Publishers, Bristol, UK.

Communicative repertoire and the media continua

Biliteracy is about communication in two or more languages in or around writing;
crucial to this are the media
the languages and scripts
through which biliteracy is
practiced. Media in the continua of biliteracy model refer to the actual communicative repertoires, that is, the language varieties and scripts through which
multilingual literacies are expressed and the sequences or configurations in which
they are acquired and used. The model defines these in terms of the linguistic
structures of the languages involved (on a continuum from similar to dissimilar),
their orthographic scripts (from convergent to divergent) and the sequence of
exposure to or acquisition of the languages/literacies (ranging from simultaneous to
successive) (Hornberger 1989).
From early formulations of the ethnography of communication to the present,
linguistic anthropological research in sociolinguistics has emphasized a focus not on

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languages per se but on verbal or communicative repertoires. Gumperz and Hymes

introduced the concept of verbal repertoire in their early writings; Gumperz (1964)
used it to describe multilingualism in India; Hymes referred to a childs verbal
repertoire as the range of varieties of language, the circumstances, purposes, and
meanings of their use (Hymes 1980, 106). More recently, Blommaert (2010)
describes repertoires as the complexes of linguistic, communicative, semiotic
resources people actually possess and deploy, namely concrete accents, language
varieties, registers, genres, modalities such as writing
ways of using language in
particular communicative settings and spheres of life, including the ideas people have
about such ways of using, their language ideologies (102). In like vein, Garca (2007,
2009), in recognition of the mobility and fluidity of linguistic resources, the
disinventing and reconstituting of languages (Makoni and Pennycook 2007) calls
for a focus not on language in and of itself but on the multiple discursive practices
that constitute . . . languaging (Garca 2009, 40). In this view, languages are seen not
as fixed codes, but fluid codes framed within social practices (Garca 2009, 32;
cf. 2007: xiii; cf. Cortese and Hymes 2001).
Assumptions within the continua model about the fluidity of language varieties
and scripts, and the multiple paths and varying degrees of expertise in individuals
communicative repertoires, are consistent with these theoretical stances of the
ethnography of communication and the sociolinguistics of mobility; but also with
work on multimodal expression and multiliteracies that extends literacy beyond
reading and writing to other domains, such as the visual, audio, spatial, and
behavioral (e.g., Cazden et al. 1996). Consideration of the media of biliteracy entails
attention not just to different languages, dialects, styles, and discourses but also
different communicative modes including technological ones, as they are acquired
and used
not in a dichotomized sequence but more often in criss-crossed, hybrid
mixes, and languaging practices. This is not to suggest that incorporating multiple
varieties, scripts, communicative modes, and criss-crossed paths of acquisition and
use proceeds unproblematically in schools or other biliteracy learning contexts.
Translanguaging and the development continua
The continua model posits that the development of biliteracy may start at any point
on any of three intersecting continua of first language-to-second language (L1
L2),
oral-to-written, and receptive-to-productive language and literacy skills, uses, and
practices; and that individuals biliteracy learning may proceed steadily
or just as
easily backtrack, spurt, or criss-cross
in any direction along those intersecting
continua, usually in direct response to the contextual demands placed on them.
There is always potential for transfer of skills across the three development continua,
but, by the same token, understanding or predicting transfer is elusive precisely
because the three continua are interrelated and furthermore nested within all the
other continua (Hornberger 1989).
Research in bilingualism has consistently suggested an integrated, holistic,
context-sensitive view of bilingual development, a view wherein the bilingual is
much more than the sum of two monolinguals. Cummins (1979) groundbreaking
proposal of the developmental interdependence and thresholds hypotheses laid the
theoretical ground for what remains a central tenet in scholarship on bilingualism (if
not, sadly, in educational practice): namely, that a childs first language skills must
become well developed to ensure that their academic and linguistic performance in

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the second language is maximized (Baker and Hornberger 2001, 18). Close on the
heels of this work, bilingualism scholars like Zentella (1981), Grosjean (1982), and
Valde s (1982) provided empirical evidence for bilinguals fluid code-switching as
highly context-sensitive, competent but specific language practice. Decades of
research continue to corroborate, deepen, and extend this understanding.
Just as Grosjean (1985) suggested that a bilingual is not the sum of two
monolinguals any more than a hurdler is simply the sum of a sprinter and a high
jumper; Garca (2009), in her recent tour-de-force on bilingual education in the
twenty-first century, argues that bilingualism is not monolingualism times two (71),
not like a bicycle with two balanced wheels, but more like an all-terrain vehicle,
whose wheels extend and contract, flex and stretch, making possible, over highly
uneven ground, movement forward that is bumpy and irregular but also sustained
and effective (45). She borrows and adapts the term translanguaging to highlight
this bilingual fluidity.
The term translanguaging, as originally proposed by Cen Williams (1994), refers
to Welsh
English bilingual pedagogical practices where students hear or read a
lesson, a passage in a book or a section of work in one language and develop their
work in another, for example by discussion, writing a passage, completing a work
sheet, conducting an experiment; input and output are deliberately in a different
language and are systematically varied (Baker 2001, 281; 2003, 82). Baker argues that
the continua of biliteracy anticipate and extend the notion of translanguaging,
providing a reminder of the strategic need to consider all the dimensions of the
continua to create full biliteracy in students (Baker 2003, 84).
Translanguaging practices in the classroom have the potential to explicitly
valorize all points along the continua of biliterate context, media, content, and
development. Such practices, also recently and eloquently theorized and documented
as hybrid classroom discourse practices (Gutie rrez, Baquedano-Lo pez, and Tejeda
1999), multilingual classroom ecologies (Creese and Martin 2003), a four-quadrant
pedagogic framework for developing academic excellence in a bilingual program
(Hornberger 2010; Joseph and Ramani 2004, forthcoming), supportive bilingual
scaffolding (Saxena 2010), and flexible bilingual pedagogy (Blackledge and Creese
2010), offer possibilities for teachers and learners to access academic content through
the linguistic resources and communicative repertoires they bring to the classroom
while simultaneously acquiring new ones.
Transnational literacies and the content continua
The continua model posits that what (content) biliterate learners and users read and
write is as important as how (development), where and when (context), or by what
means (media) they do so. Whereas schooling traditionally privileges majority,
literary, and decontextualized contents, the continua lens reveals the importance of
greater curricular attention to minority, vernacular, and contextualized whole
language texts. Note that the term minority here connotes not numerical size, but
observable differences among language varieties in relation to power, status, and
entitlement (May 2003, 118), a meaning better conveyed in todays usage by the term
minoritized (McCarty 2005, 48). Minority texts include those by minoritized authors,
written from minoritized perspectives; vernacular ways of reading and writing include
notes, poems, plays, and stories written at home or in other everyday non-school
contexts; contextualized whole language texts are those read and written in the

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context of biliteracy events, interactions, practices, and activities of biliterate learners

everyday lives (Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000). Assumptions within the
continua model about the importance of incorporating minoritized identities and
perspectives, vernacular genres and styles, and contextualized texts in biliteracy
learning contexts parallel other developments in research on bilingualism and
multilingualism including the funds of knowledge project and work on transnational
literacies, taken up below in our discussion of the scenarios.

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Translanguaging and transnational literacies in multilingual classrooms

We return here to the scenarios introduced above, considering them through the
continua of biliteracy lens, illuminating the ways translanguaging and transnational
literacy practices in these scenarios build on students communicative repertoires to
facilitate successful school experiences and greater academic achievement. We take
up the scenarios in a sequence moving from a focus on individual repertoires and
home/community funds of knowledge, to the opening of implementational and
ideological spaces in schools through teachers and students initiative.

Scenario 1: Beatriz

portrait of a multilingual student2

A pair of first graders in Pennsylvania, USA comment to each other in Spanish and
English while they co-read a text written in English (Link 2011).
At age three, Beatriz moved from Guerrero, Mexico to a peri-urban town outside
of Philadelphia with her mother and two older siblings to join her father, who had
arrived several years earlier. Her hometown in the US is considered to be a
community of the New Latino Diaspora (NLD) where increasing numbers of
Latinos (many immigrant, and some from elsewhere in the United States) are settling
both temporarily and permanently in areas of the United States that have not
traditionally been home to Latinos (Hamann, Wortham, and Murillo 2002, 1).
Beatriz attends a school with minimal previous exposure to Latino immigrants until
recent years in which growing numbers of Spanish-speaking, and primarily Mexicanorigin or Mexican-heritage children have arrived.3 Although the sole language of
instruction is English at the school, its classrooms are becoming multilingual spaces
as children from both Spanish and non-Spanish speaking households speak and are
learning Spanish for a variety of functions throughout the school day.
During literacy time Beatriz sits on the rug with her first grade classmates, listens
to a story read in English, and then discusses it in both Spanish and English with a
peer. When called on, she offers, in English, a complete sentence about the storys
setting. Shortly after, she and several students leave to attend their daily English as a
Second Language (ESL) class upstairs in the library during which time she
participates in guided, leveled reading in English, and chats with her friends in
Spanish and English while completing spelling work in English. On returning to her
classroom, she joins her Centers group at the computers to practice rhyming words in
English, and then reads and discusses a book written in English with two friends, one
a bilingual Spanish
English speaker and the other, an English-speaker. The three
discuss the story and then work together to draw and compose several sentences
about it in English, Beatriz and her Spanish-speaking peer teaching their classmate
vocabulary in Spanish.

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At lunchtime Beatriz accompanies a recently arrived Mexican student to the

lunchroom and interprets from English to Spanish for her as they walk through the
cafeteria line. During recess she joins a small group of girls to sing and play hand
games with lyrics in primarily English and some Spanish, games she continues
playing on the school bus trip home. Once home Beatriz greets her baby sister,
recounts her day in Spanish to her mother, and translates several documents for her
about upcoming school events. She then accompanies her siblings outside to meet up
with neighborhood friends where they set up on the stoop with paper and crayons,
chatting and calling out to passersby in English and Spanish. Later they sit at the
dining room table and complete their homework, writing in English and discussing
spelling and math in both languages. As housemates enter and exit the house, Beatriz
greets them in Spanish, and when the landlord comes to check on a leaky faucet,
Beatriz interprets for her mother. When her father returns home from work the
family eats together while watching the news on Telemundo, and then Beatriz and her
siblings entertain each other by telling stories in mostly Spanish and some words and
phrases in English about La Llorona, a character in Mexican folklore.
From this portrait we glimpse Beatrizs communicative repertoires, the wide
range of varieties of Spanish and English that Beatriz uses for different functions
across the many settings and throughout the multiple activities in which she engages
over the course of her day. In spite of the fact that English is the language of
instruction at her school, her teachers positive attitude toward students use of
Spanish among one another has not only legitimated the linguistic resources she
brings from home but also allowed for their development across school-based
activities, both academic and social. Thus, as the Continua model helps highlight,
typical power weightings evident in many school settings that emphasize or accept
only English use in school, in Beatrizs school are re-balanced toward bilingualism
and students own language practices. In this sense there is a developing ideological
and implementational space in which students voices are validated and valorized.
At the same time, in Beatriz case, the school policy of English as the sole
language of instruction delimits the possibilities for biliteracy development and locks
Spanish use at school primarily into vernacular, oral use. In the following scenarios,
we provide examples of classrooms and schools in which not just translanguaging
practices are valued, but also bi(multi)literacy is encouraged to develop. Important
to note is that the programs discussed below are both English-medium and bilingual
programs with large numbers of students from culturally and linguistically diverse
backgrounds.
Scenario 2: drawing on home translanguaging and transliteracy practices in school
A fifth grader in California, USA incorporates Spanish words and phrases into her
poem about her grandmother in Mexico (Campano 2007). Campano (2007)
conducted research in his own classroom at a school with Lao, Pakistani, Chinese,
Hmong, Filipino, Mexican, and African-American students in a Filipino American
community in California. Students at his school spoke over 14 different home
languages and many were from immigrant families. While his school was Englishmedium and his research did not explicitly focus on the development of biliteracy, his
classroom was one in which students reading and writing were geared toward their
own experiences, knowledge and family histories. Literacy practices that welcomed
and built upon students home languages (e.g., intergenerational storytelling and

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271

teatro theatre [based on El teatro campesino peasant theatre]) were the norm, and
served to foster literacy in other languages alongside English.4 In light of the
Continua model these practices can be seen as expanding the media through which
literacy is learned and used, and as privileging the minority end of curricular content.
Moreover, they emphasize the life stories of the students and their families, accounts
that are based on transnational literacies.
In a similar vein, the funds of knowledge (Gonza lez, Moll, and Amanti 2005;
Moll and Gonza lez 1994) project highlights what the Continua model refers to as
minoritized identities and perspectives, vernacular genres and styles, and contextualized texts in biliteracy learning contexts. Moll and colleagues argue that community
funds of knowledge (sometimes called household funds of knowledge or local funds of
knowledge), defined as historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of
knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and wellbeing (Moll and Gonza lez 1994, 443), are a resource which can and should be drawn
on in schooling for language minority populations. The centerpiece of their work is
collaboration with teachers in conducting household research, because, as they put
it, it is one thing to identify resources but quite another to use them fruitfully in
classrooms (441). In the words of one teacher collaborator, the teacher mediates by
creating curricula that reflect both the standard curriculum and the themes,
languages, and culture of students lives . . . when teachers incorporate household
funds of knowledge into the curriculum and use dialogic teaching methods, students
are liberated to direct their own learning (Floyd-Tenery 1995, 12).
Other scholars also document how teachers can effectively teach students with
multiple communicative repertoires and linguistic practices in mainstream or ESL
classrooms. For example, Skilton-Sylvester (2003) describes how an ESL instructor
working with Cambodian students in Philadelphia built on their language (Khmer),
which not only made it a legitimate part of whole-class discussion but also made it a
legitimate part of literacy practice in the classroom (16). Walqui (2006) drawing
from a Vygotskyan sociocultural perspective charts how teachers of English
Language Learners (ELLs) promoted linguistic and academic development through
a number of scaffolding strategies such as modeling, bridging, contextualizing,
schema-building, re-presenting text, and developing metacognition. One of the key
premises in the work of both Walqui (2006) and Skilton-Sylvester (2003) is that it is
possible to support additive bilingualism in classrooms even when the teacher does
not speak languages other than English (Skilton-Sylvester 2003, 13). Here again
language and literacy practices are not confined to solely English but involve the rich
and varied cultural and linguistic resources of the students and can be seen as
drawing from the less powerful ends of the biliteracy Continua; in these cases, as in
those of Campano (2007) and Moll and Gonza lez (1994; Gonza lez, Moll, and
Amanti 2005), translanguaging and transnational literacies are the norm and serve to
promote academic achievement.

Scenario 3: teachers organizing spaces for translanguaging and transnational literacy

practices at school
At an all school weekly assembly in the UK, the head teacher interweaves English
and Gujarati while addressing students and their families about an upcoming school
event (Blackledge and Creese 2010).

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N.H. Hornberger and H. Link

Blackledge and Creese (2010) uncover flexible bilingual, translanguaging

pedagogies through ethnographic team research in UK heritage language education
contexts, by definition sites of transnational literacy practices. The team collaborated
on four interlocking case studies in four cities focusing on complementary schools in
Gujarati, Turkish, Bengali, and Chinese heritage communities, wherein young people
growing up in the UK are engaged in instruction centered on traditional texts,
scripts, and symbols associated with heritage identities beyond UK borders,
identities which they at times participate in and at times resist. The researchers
document specific translanguaging knowledge and skills such as use of bilingual
label quests, repetition, and translation across languages; students use of translanguaging to establish identity positions both oppositional to and encompassing of
institutional values; and teachers endorsement of simultaneous literacies and
languages to keep pedagogic tasks moving. They offer theoretical insight and
empirical evidence to argue for a release from monolingual instructional approaches
and easing of the burden of guilt associated with translanguaging in multilingual
educational contexts. They also emphasize the importance of considering local
circumstances in terms of the socio-political and historical contexts in which
translanguaging is embedded along with the local ecologies of schools and
classrooms. Blackledge, Creese, their co-researchers, and the teachers and students
whose practices they document, demonstrate that schools can be alternative, safe
spaces for multilingualism and transnational literacies, sites where young people
creatively use varieties of language including standard, regional, class, and youthoriented varieties as well as parodic language to take up, resist, and negotiate
multiple academic and identity positionings.
There are numerous studies researching how teachers in established bilingual
programs, and in particular two-way immersion models, draw on the linguistic and
cultural backgrounds of their students (e.g., Fortune and Tedick 2008; Freeman
1998; Hornberger 2003), and we discuss only a few here, drawing on a continua of
biliteracy lens to highlight practices of translanguaging and transnational literacies.
Freeman (2004) focuses on student voice and the media of biliteracy in studying how
a bilingual middle-school teacher facilitates the production of a bilingual telenovela
(soap opera) in collaboration with students, drawing on their transnational knowledge, language and literacy practices and communicating with them according to
these practices. In a study on the reading comprehension of bilingual children in
second and third grade, Martinez-Rolda n and Sayer (2006) focus on the contexts and
development of biliteracy. In documenting how students use Spanish, English, and
Spanglish to discuss texts written in both languages, they come to see Spanglish [use
of loan words, calques and code-switching] as crucial to students reading
comprehension and positioning in relation to texts. In highlighting the kinds of
translanguaging and transnational literacy practices that in other contexts tend to be
marginalized, they argue for their valorization and use in the classroom.
In some bilingual classrooms and schools, teachers explicitly design instruction
and plan for interactions that build on translanguaging practices and transnational
literacies. Baker (2003) writes about the strategic use of Welsh (a minority language)
and English (a majority language) in a bilingual high school as teachers design
lessons that incorporate the use of both languages and foster biliteracy and
transliteracy. Such a practice recalls Moll and Diaz (1985) classic study showing
how an instructional design allowing bilingual fourth graders the opportunity to
discuss their English reading text in their first language, Spanish, enabled them to

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achieve higher reading levels in English, commensurate with their reading levels in
Spanish.

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Scenario 4: students claiming spaces for translanguaging and transnational literacy

practices at home and in school5
Third-year students in a bilingual BA program in Contemporary English and
Multilingual Studies at the University of Limpopo in South Africa confer among
themselves in class, freely code-switching in Sepedi and English, as to which of six
child language development paradigms introduced in class this week best corresponds to a short text they have just read in English (Hornberger 2010; see also
Granville et al. 1998; Joseph and Ramani 2004, forthcoming; Ramani and Joseph
2010; Ramani et al. 2007).
Students in the Limpopo program take coursework through both the medium of
English and the medium of Sepedi, one of nine African languages officially
recognized, alongside English and Afrikaans, in South Africas Constitution of
1993. Though the program founders, who are also the instructors in the Englishmedium modules, are not fluent speakers of Sepedi, they and their students practice
a translanguaging and transnational literacies approach in which students are
encouraged to claim spaces for both spoken and written Sepedi and other local
varieties alongside South African English, other Englishes, and other international
languages. For example, in the class mentioned in the scenario, students are
preparing to engage in a third-year project exploring Sepedi-speaking childrens
private speech in their own communities, following Vygotskyan conceptual and
methodological guidelines, originally written in Russian and here studied and
discussed with their instructor in English, and implemented in their communities in
Sepedi. The program, and the translanguaging and transnational literacies therein,
are a vivid and explicit instantiation of the continua of biliteracy, and even more
importantly, of the ways in which translanguaging and transnational literacy
practices enable a kind of learning that is at once about discovering their culture
and the great ideas in the literature, one unlocking the other (Michael Joseph, pers.
comm., 28 July 2009).
On the other side of the world in the US, transnational multilingual youth and
adults of diverse origins and communities
New Yorkers of Dominican, Colombian,
Bengali, and Chabad Jewish-American heritage, Mexican immigrants from Guanajuato and Jalisco in Iowa and California, respectively, and adult women refugees
from Bosnia, Iran, and Sudan now residing in the intermountain west, claim spaces
in and out of school to deploy translanguaging and transnational literacy practices
that maintain and transform identities and social relations as they shift and develop
across time and space (Warriner 2007b). Dominican student Mara succeeds in
positioning herself and being positioned over time as a good student at Lupero n
bilingual high school in New York, by drawing on resources provided by the schools
local model of success, including high status for Spanish language and literacy and
valuation of task-based literacy practices (Bartlett 2007); three young Latinas draw
on transnational funds of knowledge and social relations in developing their retelling
of the return to Mexico narrative, a counterstory to deficit portrayals of Mexican
immigrant families (Sa nchez 2007); newcomer Mexican students informal literacy
practices of tagging, branding, and shouting out at Captainville High are shown to
be literacies of display of their transnational identities (Richardson Bruna 2007);

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N.H. Hornberger and H. Link

three youths engage in online multilingual, multimodal creative exploration and

negotiation of complex multiple identities across race, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic,
and nationalist lines (McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, and Saliani 2007); and
women refugee ESL learners struggle to negotiate successful new work identities for
themselves, in spite of, rather than because of, an ESL pedagogy that prioritizes
reading, copying, responding to known-answer questions, filling in the blanks, and
memorizing at the expense of drawing on the first-language literacies and multilingual competencies they brought with them (Warriner 2007a).

Conclusion

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The approaches to transnational literacies and translanguaging practices discussed in

the examples above sit in contrast to those embraced through dominant, current
education reforms in the US and elsewhere.
Within current educational reforms in the USA, literacy is approached as something
technical and neutral, an approach that implies a view of education as a process of
transmission of skills, detached from contextual, cultural, or ideological issues,
reflecting a perspective that has been described as an autonomous view of literacy.
[Street 1995] (Martnez-Rolda n and Sayer 2006, 293)

In contrast to such a view, the continua of biliteracy offers a lens that enables both
government and classroom policy-makers (Menken and Garca 2010) to envision and
incorporate students mobile, multilingual language and literacy repertoires as
resources for learning. Refracting and reinforcing Obamas positive outlook on
bilingualism and his bilingual-friendly ESEA Blueprint, the continua of biliteracy is
in effect a blueprint for innovative and excellent educational reform that might at
last reconcile the schizophrenia of US educational policy that for most of the nations
history has sought with one hand to enhance English speakers foreign language
capacity while with the other to eradicate ELLs language expertise, often in those
very same languages. Such a reform is particularly pressing as schools and
communities across the US experience ever-increasing linguistic and cultural
diversity.
Educators are perpetually poised between what is and what might be, between the
actual and the imagined (Greene 2000, as cited in Garca, Skutnabb-Kangas, and
Torres-Guzma n 2006, 11). As we who are committed to multilingualism continually
seek to open and fill up implementational and ideological spaces for multilingual
education (Hornberger 2006), it may be that Obamas current policies on the one
hand and our schools glaring needs on the other offer new spaces to be exploited for
innovative programs, curricula, and practices that recognize, value, and build on the
multiple, mobile communicative repertoires, translanguaging and transnational
literacy practices of students and their families. Let us hope so.
Notes
1.
2.

The Center for Applied Linguistics online Two-way Immersion Directory lists over 350
programs across the US (see http://www.cal.org/).
This composite portrait reflects data from a growing body of research conducted in a
NLD community led by Stanton Wortham and Kathy Howard, among others. For

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

3.
4.

5.

275

specific research that documents Beatrizs experience as a first grader, see Link 2011. All
names used are pseudonyms.
Approximately 70% of the schools current lower elementary grades (K-2) are Spanishspeakers.
While policies insist that students will only attain high achievement on standardized
testing if English is the exclusive language of the classroom, Campanos (2007) work
shows otherwise. His students gained in their annual test scores in both math and literacy
by 15 percentile points, and continued to increase over the following two years (120).
This portrait reflects Hornbergers research and collaboration with Dr. Esther Ramani
and Dr. Michael Joseph, founders and directors of the University of Limpopo bilingual
BA program. I am grateful to Esther and Michael for their unstinting generosity and
inspirational scholarship and academic leadership. My thanks also to the Fulbright
Senior Specialist program for sponsoring my 2008 sojourn at the University of Limpopo.

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