ABSTRACT
A translanguaging perspective in recent years has been gaining ground in bilingual education and research to seek bilinguals’ implementation of their entire language repertoires. Although translanguaging is a normal and natural means of communication among bi/multilinguals, it is not yet a widely sanctioned language practice in heritage language (HL) education systems since maintaining the designated language throughout the school day is an ideal pedagogy. The purpose of the study was to investigate my (as a second-grade Korean HL school teacher) instructional methods and pedagogical practices toward bilingual students’ HL learning and bilingualism through teacher action research. The study shares findings from the classroom discourse that captures the students’ and my translanguaging practices when engaging in culturally distinct and authentic children’s picture book reading and discussions. Overall, my pedagogical translanguaging was characterized when (a) providing identity-focused instruction, (b) building rich learning spaces through language exploration, and (c) creating a safe translanguaging space through flexible language use modeling. The study insinuates the promises of including culturally relevant literacy instruction to facilitate students’ bilingual identity construction, support the integrated use of their linguistic resources and heritage cultures, and generate transformative power to promote their criticality.
