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Rooted in Strength
Espinosa and Ascenzi-Moreno demonstrate how our emergent bilingual students who speak two or more languages in their daily lives― thrive when they are able to use “translanguaging” to tap the power of their entire linguistic and sociocultural repertoires. Additionally, the authors present rich and thoughtful literacy practices that propel emergent bilinguals into reading and writing success. The core of this approach is honoring and leveraging the language and cultural resources emergent bilinguals bring to school― and rooting instruction in their strengths. Knowing more than one language is, indeed, a gift to the classroom! Includes a foreword by Ofelia Garcia.
224 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2021
13 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 10, 2021
An excellent and important professional text about planning for culturally responsible literacy experiences for multilingual students in non linear, programmatic ways with fill in the blank approaches that don’t feed first their incredible translanguaging strengths. The book includes a wide breadth of research for the workshop model but also concrete and practical ideas for bringing multimodality and translanguaging into each and every component of literacy instruction. Assessment too! Authentic and thoughtful, I loved this book and will be using it with many of the schools I support.
July 30, 2021
This is a beautifully written resource that spoke to my heart and soul as an educator of multilingual children and lover of reading. Espinosa and Ascenzi-Moreno filled the pages of this book with practical and effective ways to create reading landscapes where all learners flourish not just survive. As a longtime educator, I found this book to be a breath of fresh air. I can see it useful to both new teachers and those like me with more experience. You won’t be disappointed. Loved it!!!
July 28, 2024
Loved this and it’s a great step towards culturally relevant pedagogy. Four stars because a lot of the suggestions are more applicable to multilingual and bilingual school settings rather than the reality of monolingual schools with limited resources for ML learners. Learned a lot though that I can apply to my own classroom and pedagogy!
May 12, 2021
Finally a book on translanguaging! This book is incredibly accessible, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Not to mention data that is student-driven by emergent bilingual readers/writers strengths. Espinosa and Ascenzi-Moreno provide multiple strategies that allows educators on any spectrum of their career to reflect about translanguaging and literacy. In order to envision and implement it in the classroom. Each strategy is backed by tons of research that aims to cultivate a linguistic landscape where translanguging is valued and where our multilingual learners flourish.
Brief overview of how this book is organized
Part 1: Tranlanguaging into literacy
Part 2: Reading into meaning
Part 3: Writing into understand
Features that you will find
- Vignettes that illustrate how the ideas introduced in each chapter look and feel in a classroom
- Short activities that challenge readers to explore concepts by applying them to your own teaching and learning experience. *This can be done alone or with colleagues. I had tons of fun doing this with colleagues.
- Suggestions for professional developments
- Latest research on bilingualism by bilingual scholars
I can’t stress enough how important and required this text ought to be.
Brief overview of how this book is organized
Part 1: Tranlanguaging into literacy
Part 2: Reading into meaning
Part 3: Writing into understand
Features that you will find
- Vignettes that illustrate how the ideas introduced in each chapter look and feel in a classroom
- Short activities that challenge readers to explore concepts by applying them to your own teaching and learning experience. *This can be done alone or with colleagues. I had tons of fun doing this with colleagues.
- Suggestions for professional developments
- Latest research on bilingualism by bilingual scholars
I can’t stress enough how important and required this text ought to be.
July 9, 2023
After I bought this book, I was disappointed to read this at the beginning:
“Rather than dwelling on developing teacher’s understandings and knowledge of translanguaging, this book focuses on vision…” p. 5
I was disappointed, because I wanted to develop my understanding of translanguaging!
I do not work in the US, but I think this applies to my school environment, or did, because I believe we are trying to move away from it:
“This is a radical departure from the traditional response to emergent bilinguals, who too often are actively discouraged from using all of their language resources in school, including any language other than English, because their teachers feel the best way to learn either content or language is without “interference” from another language.” - p. 12
So how helpful is this book. Does it give me a strong vision for “using translanguaging to grow multilingual readers and writers”?
Yes and no.
The book is an excellent review of practices that I use now to teach reading and writing. I was heartened to find that the authors agree with them. In some cases, I was reminded of things I want to do more or better.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the advice about how to extend those practices for bilingual/multilingual children. I am not saying nothing was helpful, but I needed less review, I think, and more extension. Too frequently, I thought the authors took how to extend for granted and gave more details about reviewing basic good practice. Too frequently, I remember thinking, “I know about that, tell me more about this or tell me more about how translanguaging looks in this scenario.”
Maybe the best example of the authors going deep is the pages about adapting reading assessments for bilingual students. To be fair, the authors give examples of how to think about reading assessment and writing by comparing English and Spanish. It is up to us, I think, to imitate this thinking for languages our students use, such as, in my case, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. There may be less connections though, like cognates, between those languages and English, which makes me wonder what I need to do instead then…
There is an opportunity for the authors or someone else, I think, to write a book that includes such details. Or, if that book exists, please let me know. There’s enough in this book to get started and to keep busy though - maybe. I say maybe because I am not sure I have the theoretical underpinnings necessary to confidently proceed… I wondered at times if the authors spoke from their guts or from research!
“Rather than dwelling on developing teacher’s understandings and knowledge of translanguaging, this book focuses on vision…” p. 5
I was disappointed, because I wanted to develop my understanding of translanguaging!
I do not work in the US, but I think this applies to my school environment, or did, because I believe we are trying to move away from it:
“This is a radical departure from the traditional response to emergent bilinguals, who too often are actively discouraged from using all of their language resources in school, including any language other than English, because their teachers feel the best way to learn either content or language is without “interference” from another language.” - p. 12
So how helpful is this book. Does it give me a strong vision for “using translanguaging to grow multilingual readers and writers”?
Yes and no.
The book is an excellent review of practices that I use now to teach reading and writing. I was heartened to find that the authors agree with them. In some cases, I was reminded of things I want to do more or better.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the advice about how to extend those practices for bilingual/multilingual children. I am not saying nothing was helpful, but I needed less review, I think, and more extension. Too frequently, I thought the authors took how to extend for granted and gave more details about reviewing basic good practice. Too frequently, I remember thinking, “I know about that, tell me more about this or tell me more about how translanguaging looks in this scenario.”
Maybe the best example of the authors going deep is the pages about adapting reading assessments for bilingual students. To be fair, the authors give examples of how to think about reading assessment and writing by comparing English and Spanish. It is up to us, I think, to imitate this thinking for languages our students use, such as, in my case, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. There may be less connections though, like cognates, between those languages and English, which makes me wonder what I need to do instead then…
There is an opportunity for the authors or someone else, I think, to write a book that includes such details. Or, if that book exists, please let me know. There’s enough in this book to get started and to keep busy though - maybe. I say maybe because I am not sure I have the theoretical underpinnings necessary to confidently proceed… I wondered at times if the authors spoke from their guts or from research!
April 1, 2023
Much of what is in the book is literacy best practices. Excellent information for new teachers, but I needed more. It is helpful to (re) read about various instructional strategies - even if I have seen them before. The reminder is always good. It is also helpful to be reminded of how to better include emergent bilinguals. Too many of the examples, however, assume the teacher is bilingual - those of us who are not, needed more support/ideas.
June 1, 2024
This is a great book with beautiful examples, makes sense that a book about reading would be a good read, but often that is not the case! Espinosa does a beautiful job showcasing examples and balancing that with theories of application. Love it! Wish more teachers in the bilingual space were working on brining students' full language repertoire into their spanish-only classrooms -- it's the growth mindset practice of language acquisition.
December 24, 2023
Effectively informational in its purpose to present the concept in translanguaging in practical ways. Definitely a keeper for future reference.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews