Caring across linguistic difference: translanguaging pedagogies for low-overlap interactions

Abstract

Incorporating students’ home languages into the classroom is one powerful way to welcome and show immigrant students care. But what if teachers can’t speak these languages? Sharing findings from a collaborative educational ethnography in a large urban ESL program in the U.S., this article offers a framework that new and practicing teachers can use to create warm relationships, support academic progress, and challenge inequality within their classrooms, even when their own linguistic repertoires overlap little with those of their students.