Teaching ‘Register Overlap:’ A Proposal for a Translingual Pedagogy to Support Spanish and English Academic Register Learning

Abstract

AbstractClassrooms are not always linguistically permeable, and instruction focused on bolstering English reading comprehension too often neglects students’ additional linguistic resources in languages other than English. However, to the task of comprehending English text, multilingual readers bring a host of communicative resources across multiple languages. Indeed, recent studies have found that students educated concurrently in Spanish and English within bilingual schools possess positively correlated Spanish and English academic register resources, with academic register knowledge in each language making unique contributions toward explaining variability in these dual‐language learners’ English reading comprehension. This recent research offers the tantalizing insight that teaching students to notice overlaps in communicative expectations and linguistic patterns—or register overlaps—across Spanish and English academic registers should receive greater focus. Here, to speak to classroom application, we offer suggestions for how educators might use equivalent Spanish and English metalanguages—or language to talk about language—to highlight register overlaps in Spanish and English academic text. We contend that this purposeful noticing of register overlaps can deepen students’ awareness of the linguistic resources available to them for comprehending academic texts and support them in developing critical metalinguistic awareness, or the skills and habits of mind needed to critically consider how registers have been naturalized and are subject to change. This article supports educators to enact one aspect of translingual pedagogy that builds on students’ observations about the language of school in order to increase linguistic flexibility, awareness, and criticality.