| Body | Objectives: Students will...
- gain an explicit awareness of translanguaging practices in their community: what language(s) and varieties, who, and when
- examine connections between translanguaging practice and individual and community identity
- express a perspective on how language use connects with identity
Materials Needed: Exploring Community Language Use worksheet, Language Use and Identity worksheet
Procedure:
- Introduce the concept of translanguaging: a person's and community's use of their entire linguistic repertoire (different languages and/or language varieties) in communication (for more on translanguaging see this Topic of the Week article). Give examples from your own life or what you observe in students' communities. Some possibilities are expressions in an indigenous language that everyone on the reservation knows, use of a heritage community language by different people in different contexts, or local/regional ways of saying things. You can choose to introduce the term "translanguaging," or you can simply talk about "how people use language."
- Ask students to fill out the Exploring Community Language Use worksheet. Encourage the sharing of ideas with classmates; possible structures include think-pair-share or rotating partner sharing.
- Distribute the Language Use and Identity worksheet. Ask for examples of what portraits of language use, with different speech balloons, might look like to represent different examples from the table students filled in on the Exploring Community Language Use worksheet. If you've made an example yourself ahead of time, or if you've done this activity before and saved some student examples, you can show these to the class for inspiration.
- Ask learners to draw community or individual language use portraits. Students can share and reflect on their work in a variety of ways: displaying the portraits on a bulletin board, small-group sharing, or solicitation of volunteers to share their work with the whole class.
Notes: In some community contexts, differences in language use are clear. For example, indigenous communities often have some use of an indigenous language as well as English, and heritage language communities often use the heritage language in certain circumstances. In other community contexts, such as a rural setting with little mobility and widespread monolingualism, you may need to focus more on different varieties of English - for example, slang, a local accent, or deviations from "standard" English grammar.
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