In this paper, we present an analysis of the language practices of four Spanish/English dual language (DL) preschool teachers, focusing on the ways in which the teachers mediate bilingual interactions with students and distribute Spanish and English across different classroom discourse functions. Findings reveal teachers’ flexible and strategic use of each language to support children's developing bilingual competencies as well as to negotiate several communicative, academic, and management functions. Findings further illuminate the utility of bilingual speech/interaction as a communicative and academic resource and suggest that a strict language separation approach, as traditionally implemented in DL programs, may be at odds with the natural social interactions of bilinguals who draw on a number of communicative strategies, including codeswitching and tandem talk, to construct meaning.

This study examined how a pair of Spanish/English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) preschool teachers enacted their bilingualism while working cohesively and simultaneously toward common instructional goals. We drew on classroom video data, field notes, and other relevant artifacts collected weekly during shared readings of English- and Spanish-language storybooks over the course of one academic year to document coteachers’ book-based interactions with each other and their students. Guided by translanguaging (O. García, 2009a, 2009b; O. García & Wei, 2014) and distributive cognition (Brown & Campione, 1996; Hutchins, 1995) frameworks, findings elucidate how teachers drew on their own and each other’s dynamic bilingualism through both monolingual and bilingual performances, supporting the coordination of instructional targets (e.g., vocabulary, narrative genre) and instructional practices (e.g., translation, explanation). Findings have implications for DLBE program language policy and practice as they highlight the utility of a bilingual pedagogy.

The population of bilingual students learning and using more than one language in the United States has more than doubled in the past 30 years. This is especially true in early childhood, which makes it crucial that educators of young emergent bilingual children understand and support these young children’s bi/multilingual development, including critically understanding the implication of adopting different perspectives of bi/multilingualism. Although much is known about classroom practices in support of emergent bilingual children in Kindergarten and beyond, little is known about those practices in the early years. This article provides a systematic review of relevant empirical studies that investigated teachers’ and children’s dynamic language use in bi/multilingual early childhood education settings. The authors identify several strategic languaging practices enacted by both teachers and children, and strategies for fostering these practices; as well as ways in which teachers leveraged their agency through their languaging practices. Implications for future research, practice, professional development, and policy are discussed.

This article draws upon a small moments writing strategy to support language teacher educator learning as a form of reflective practice. Three language teacher educators formed a community of practice to analyze audio recordings of a graduate level TESOL course focused on dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging to identify opportunities where a professor and his students might leverage and enact their own linguistic repertoires to enhance their meaning-making about translanguaging as theory and praxis. Findings reveal four types of engaging opportunities: to expand and continue the co-construction of knowledge about translanguaging; to create space for teachers and students to translanguage; to engage students in clarifying inaccuracies or misunderstandings about translanguaging; and to complicate prior understandings of and socialization into language and how it works. Implications are provided to support the language teacher education community in developing pedagogy that better supports students’ understandings of translanguaging as a theory of language and practice.

Translanguaging is now well documented as both theory and practice/pedagogy (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2021; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009; García et al., 2021; García & Wei, 2014; Lin, 2019;...

This exploratory study investigated the nature and distribution of dual-language preschool teachers' questions across parallel Spanish- and English-medium read-aloud activities. The notions of comprehensible input ( Krashen, 1985 Krashen, S. 1985. The input hypothesis: Issues and implications, Beverly Hills, CA : Laredo. [Google Scholar] ) and language output ( Swain, 1985 Swain, M. 1985. “Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development”. In Input in second language acquisition, Edited by: Gass, S. and Madden, C. 235–256. New York, NY : Newbury House. [Google Scholar] ), along with a reciprocal interaction model of teaching ( Cummins, 2000 Cummins, J. 2000. “Biliteracy, empowerment, and transformative pedagogy”. In The power of two languages 2000: Effective dual language use across the curriculum, Edited by: Tinajero, J. V. and DeVillar, R. A. 9–19. New York, NY : McGraw-Hill. [Google Scholar] ), guided our understanding of teachers' use of questions to engage students in book-based extended dialogue in each target language. We utilized digital video recordings and field notes to capture the naturally occurring teacher–child interactions of read-aloud activities in two dual-language preschool classrooms over a period of two months. Findings revealed that teachers asked a variety of questions, exhibiting a multitude of functions and levels of cognitive challenge; however, question types were not equitably distributed across the two instructional languages as teachers asked significantly more inference-based and factual questions during Spanish-medium read alouds and more experience-based and word-focused questions in English-medium read alouds. Implications for practice are discussed.