Naqvi R., Thorne K., Mc

Jiménez R. T., García

Jiménez R. T., D

García G. E., Sacco L. J

García G. E., Godina H. (2017).

Escamilla K., Hopewell S., Butvilofsky

Cummins J. (2007)

Beeman K., Urow

herefore, it will be important to investigate specific pedagogical strategies teachers can use to support children as they translate and read DLBs because as children’s metalinguistic knowledge grows, their biliteracy is likely to develop more. Strategic engagement with DLBs may play a role in achieving the benefits of being biliterate.

Furthermore, the translation strategies in this study may not apply to languages more orthographically distant than English and Spanish

Therefore, it will be important to understand how children’s translation strategies correlate with overall story comprehension, as well as how children engage with DLBs when given full autonomy.

nstead, DLBs seem to offer excellent opportunities for teachers to provide explicit instruction in analyzing and comparing and contrasting how languages work and ideas are translated.

This study found that as children age and develop stronger literacy skills, they tend to more frequently use translation strategies that are language-based and usually more accurate.

Children could also translate passages from a DLB and compare their translations with the text.

This reinforces previous findings that identifying cognates is not an innate bilingual ability and instead depends on age and reading proficiency (e.g., García & Godina, 2017; Genesee et al., 2008; Jiménez et al., 1996; Nagy et al., 1993). Because children benefit from cognate instruction (e.g., García, Sacco, et al., 2020), the current study and previous work highlight the need for dual-language programs to devote instructional time to developing cross-language connections and bilingual metalinguistic awareness.

Findings from this study also reinforce scholarship rejecting monolingual mindsets that promote strict language separation within dual-language education (e.g., Cummins, 2007; Palmer et al., 2014).

Such a developmental trajectory has potential pedagogical implications to help teachers guide instructional practice. For example, knowing that younger children and those with low oral reading accuracy tend to rely on words’ general page locations, which often results in inaccurate translations, means teachers may want to focus instruction on comprehension, specifically guiding children to find and use known words to translate when reading DLBs, to draw on existing knowledge of topics, and to employ knowledge of how texts and languages work.

this study begins to suggest a developmental trajectory for translation and biliteracy, which has been identified as a research need (e.g., Hopewell & Escamilla, 2014).

illuminate how children specifically leverage their linguistic repertoires and semiotic knowledge while reading parallel texts in two languages.

hese conditions could explain students’ higher oral reading accuracy scores in English and their emergent Spanish metalinguistic understandings.

Further, both programs provided supplemental English reading instruction for all students outside of the designated classroom English literacy block, but limited to no additional Spanish literacy support

A limitation is that I did not conduct formal observations of classroom instruction.

The current study reinforced this conclusion and also showed that DLBs’ side-by-side positioning of translations did not seem to automatically trigger readers to compare and contrast languages. Instead, it seems children would benefit from instruction to develop and apply metalinguistic knowledge in multilingual contexts.

this study found that the strategies third graders and those with lower oral reading accuracy used tended to be text-based. In contrast, fifth graders and those with higher oral reading accuracy tended to use strategies that were language-based

established the existence of translation as a bilingual reading strateg

his study also adds to existing research (e.g., Thibeault & Matheson, 2020) by showing specifically how children refer to the translated language in DLBs when reading, and it provides insights into children’s development of metalinguistic knowledge with instructional implications.

this study found that bilingual third and fifth graders strategically used their linguistic repertoires—that is, they infrequently guessed random words—when translating. Instead, they mainly used strategies informed by developing knowledge of languages and semiotic textual features.

In contrast, children from English-only homes (M = 4.48, Mdn = 4.50) were statistically more likely to use nearby punctuation marks than children from homes with some Spanish spoken (M = 2.95, Mdn = 3.00), U = 283.50, z-score = −2.03, p = 0.043. This finding suggests that children from English monolingual households may have relied more on punctuation to compensate for less practice with or exposure to Spanish.

Children infrequently guessed unrelated Spanish/English words or invented Spanish-/English-sounding words.

accurately recognizing that words are not always translated literally. For example, fifth-grader Imelda translated “villagers” not solely as “gente” or “pueblo,” but as the full phrase “la gente del pueblo” because she said, “Village es pueblo. Luego villagers es como gente del pueblo” (“Village is pueblo. Then villagers is like people of the village/pueblo”).

Children used the following three strategies almost 60% of the time: knowledge of surrounding words in each language (not using cognates), the word’s page location (such as proximity to margins or alignment with the translation), and proximity to punctuation marks

variety of strategies to translate (Table 1), often employing more than one.

SPSS

overall frequencies of codes or strategies.

Children’s descriptions of their translation strategies were not always clear.

To create a codebook, I used Gee’s (2014) Fill in Tool because all communication (but especially children’s verbal protocols) assumes shared knowledge that must be inferred. Further, the goal of verbal protocol analysis is “to make inferences about their [participants’] thoughts, processes, and responses” (Cho, 2021, p. 391). Gee (2014) recommended that when analyzing discourse using the Fill In Tool, one should question the message, considering “what needs to be filled in here to achieve clarity,” and then make sense of the message “based on what was said and what you know or can surmise about the context” (p. 14). Gee’s questions for the Fill-in Tool operationalize inferential processes to understand a message.

initial codes

children’s gestures, such as head movements indicating where they looked and what they pointed to, because discourse analysis can be used with body language and gestures (Gee, 2014; Kress, 2011), in this case to further illuminate children’s strategies

but also filler words, rising intonation, or long pauses, which can suggest uncertainty.

I strategically selected words to enhance opportunities for revealing how children may use their linguistic repertoires while reading. Drawing on a pilot study, I selected words that children were not likely to know in at least one language or words that revealed translation subtleties—for example, “muebles,” “scraps,” and “calcomanías” for Francisco’s Kites and “grueso,” “beamed,” and “strips” for Rainbow Weaver

which were audio and video recorded,

I conducted open-ended, individual interviews, asking each child the following questions:•What languages do you speak at home? With whom? (Potential clarifying questions: What languages do your parents speak? Do they speak Spanish?)•What language do you speak most at home?•When did you learn to read English or Spanish?

I counterbalanced texts by title, attempting to ensure that children with varying reading and language abilities were in each condition (i.e., reading both titles but in different orders).

simplified sentences and ideas to create texts in English and Spanish below third- and fifth-grade levels of readability, as determined using Flesch-Kincaid and Fernández Huerta (1959) formulas for English and Spanish. When simplifying the text, especially for third graders, I replaced some Spanish words with synonyms such as “tela” for “tejido” to maintain meaning while using potentially more familiar vocabulary

I modified the original texts by reducing word counts to approximately 300 words per language for third graders and 500 per language for fifth graders to shorten reading times.

I taught dual language at one school years prior to data collection, and I had been volunteering in the other school’s dual-language program.

I did not collect demographic information due to increased sensitivity around immigration status and racial/ethnic backgrounds during data collection (2017–2018).

urthermore, the field of verbal protocol studies has expressed some concerns about children younger than second grade being able to verbalize mental processes and reading strategies (Hilden & Pressley, 2011).

I included two grade levels to determine if there were differences in how children read DLBs by age

Waterside largely enrolled children from English monolingual homes in their dual-language program, whereas Armstrong enrolled a higher percentage of children from Spanish-speaking homes.

Waterside had a 50:50 model with instructional time evenly divided between languages throughout the grades and Spanish literacy instruction beginning in second grade.

61% of the school’s population classified as economically disadvantaged.

41% of the school’s population classified in state-reported public data as economically disadvantaged;

Research Question 2 required identifying and comparing trends in strategy use, which is Chi’s (1997) rationale for “quantifying qualitative analyses of verbal data” (p. 271)

Because “verbal protocol analysis requires a process of inference making” (Cho, 2021, p. 395), I used discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) to qualitatively analyze children’s actions, what they said, and how they said it to infer their translation strategies (Research Question 1).

The study aimed to answer the following questions:1.What strategies did bilingual children use to translate while reading DLBs, and how successful were these strategies (i.e., likely to result in accurate translations)?2.How did translation strategy use vary according to children’s grades, home language(s), and oral reading accuracy?

he present study aimed to increase the field’s understanding of specific ways bilingual children make connections across DLBs’ languages when reading independently—that is, the ways in which they use their knowledge and DLBs to support translation.

imilarly, Sneddon’s (2009) multiple-case study of six children in the United Kingdom, ages 6 to 9, provided

In addition, researchers described how teachers valued and allowed students to use their linguistic capital to make meaning when responding to DLBs.

without teacher prompting.

some evidence for assumptions that DLBs can support bilingual children’s language and literacy learning, as well as their linguistic and cultural awareness;

The few studies about reading DLBs

United Kingdom

herefore, DLBs have great potential to support translation and biliteracy development; however, little is known empirically about how bilingual children use the two languages in DLBs while reading independently.

Cummins (2007) also reported that writing DLBs allowed bilingual children to build vocabulary and notice structural differences as they translated across languages.

In each aforementioned study, readers described mentally translating information to support comprehension—a strategy specific to bilinguals as it had not been reported in prior verbal protocol studies of readers’ comprehension strategies (e.g., Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).

García

More research is also needed to understand how bilinguals draw upon their linguistic repertoires when reading complete texts

but the question becomes the extent to and ways in which readers do so—a gap this study addressed.

However, in his review of research, Goldenberg (2011) cautioned that children did not seem to spontaneously make connections between languages to support reading. Consequently, he called for more research to determine how to support children in these efforts.

the focus of this study was on students’ “activity” of reading DLBs and translating words. Although DLBs physically separate languages, readers drew upon unified linguistic repertoires, their experiences, and DLBs’ linguistic and semiotic resources to translate. Focusing on readers’ flexible actions aligned with a “translanguaging literacies approach” (García & Kleifgen, 2020, p. 568).

the RAND Model led me to consider reader characteristics such as how their home languages, ages, and length of time in dual-language programs might influence their translation strategies and the likelihood strategies resulted in accurate translations.

nalyzing the “reader,” “text,” “activity,” and “sociocultural context” considers the linguistic knowledge of syntax and words’ meanings needed for translation and the knowledge of how context influences language use. Analyzing the aforementioned components provided insights into how bilingual children used their knowledge and experiences and DLBs’ information to translate words and the conditions under which they used certain translation strategies—thereby addressing the study’s two research goals.

sociocultural context

RAND Model of Reading Comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002) was another useful frame.

Translation has also been tied to reading comprehension in studies where bilingual children and adolescents who actively translated for their families had higher English language arts standardized test scores

has informed recent research (e.g., Bauer et al., 2017; Pacheco et al., 2019) and grounds this study.

translation as “a translingual activity” that is also a “powerful pedagogical strategy

translation is one way to engage in aspects of translanguaging

conceptualized as a complex,

translation and translanguaging are not interchangeable. García, Aponte, et al. (2020) emphasized that translation alone does not disrupt power differentials between languages or language practices, as translanguaging does.

that is, bilinguals flexibly draw upon a unitary knowledge of languages and sign systems to make sense of a multilingual world, a process known as translanguaging (García & Li, 2014).

translation does not merely convert one bounded language directly into another, but instead involves selecting and employing knowledge of semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and more across languages to communicate meaning (Jiménez et al., 2015;

translation as an everyday, nuanced activity of communication and meaning-making innate to bilinguals

Escamilla et al. (2014)

Therefore, the following theories and frameworks that situate cognition within social contexts informed data collection and analysis: translanguaging and the RAND Model of Reading Comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).

structured verbal protocols

Instead, the term denotes a specific type of bilingual book, and the study focused on bilingual children’s fluid language practices when reading these texts.

DLBs have many names

his study contributes to understandings of children’s engagement with DLBs and biliteracy development in Spanish and English, which informs recommendations for dual-language bilingual education programs.

Scholars have argued that the close placement of languages in DLBs facilitates comparison and thereby students’ development of vocabulary and metalinguistic awareness (Semingson et al., 2015)

develop their metalinguistic knowledge

aim to develop bilingualism and biliteracy

instructional implications for supporting biliteracy development and for dual-language programs.

Verbal protocols/think-alouds explaining their translation strategies were analyzed qualitatively using discourse analysis and quantitatively to establish trends

Sixty-three Spanish-English biliterate third and fifth graders participated in the study. V