Translanguaging in bilingual teacher preparation: Exploring pre-service bilingual teachers’ academic writing

Translanguaging, or the complex, dynamic, and integrated linguistic practices of bilinguals have been recently identified as a pedagogical strategy to facilitate learning in bilingual classrooms. Given its potential implications for teacher preparation, a qualitative case study was conducted at a university on the Texas-Mexico border to explore translanguaging practices of pre-service bilingual teachers in academic writing. Findings showed that Latina pre-service bilingual teachers creatively leveraged their Spanish and English linguistic repertoire to produce meaningful Spanish writing. Moreover, pre-service teachers created translanguaging spaces through writing in multiple ways, showing the potential of translanguaging as a practice in action and a pedagogical tool to defy the monolingual tradition prevailing in bilingual teacher preparation.