An Ethnographic Study of Translanguaging Practices in a Dual Language Two-Way Immersion Program

This dissertation examines how fifth-grade emergent bilingual students experienced and navigated translanguaging practices in a dual language two-way immersion program at Sunny School, a K–5 elementary school in West Texas. Although dual language programs are often designed to promote bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism, students’ everyday experiences revealed both possibilities and tensions within the program. Guided by translanguaging theory, critical bilingual education, and confessional ethnography, this study explored how students used their linguistic repertoires across Spanish and English instructional spaces, how these practices varied among students with different linguistic experiences, how classroom environments shaped language use, and how translanguaging influenced interactions among students, teachers, and peers. Employing ethnography as the methodology, this study draws on 45 school visits conducted between October 2024 and February 2025, including observation across Spanish Language Arts, math, science, ESL intervention, math intervention, lunch, recess, and informal school spaces. Data sources included fieldnotes, analytical and theoretical memos, semi-structured interviews with teachers and interventionists, informal conversations, one student focus group, students’ artifacts, and program documents. Data analysis was conducted through inductive, focused, and theoretical coding using ATLAS.ti. The findings reveal that translanguaging was deeply embedded in students’ everyday school experiences, but it was not consistently planned, recognized, or supported as an instructional practice. Instead, translanguaging emerged through students’ own efforts to access academic content, support peers, navigate English-dominant expectations, and build belonging. Newcomer students relied on Spanish, peer mediation, gestures, drawings, digital translation tools, silence, and adult support, while more experienced bilingual students often served as linguistic mediators across academic and informal spaces. This dissertation argues that translanguaging functioned not merely as flexible language use, but as academic labor, distributed peer infrastructure, relational belonging, trauma-informed care, institutional contradiction, missed opportunity, and ethnographic visibility. By centering students’ everyday multilingual practices, this study calls for dual language programs to move beyond rigid language separation and toward intentional, equitable, and humanizing translanguaging pedagogies that recognize multilingual students’ full linguistic repertoires as essential to learning, participation, and belonging.