Using Wordless Picturebooks to Promote Bilingual Students’ Translanguaging Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using the transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1995, 2001) and translanguaging pedagogy (García, 2009) as guiding lenses, this study explores how 1st-grade Korean-English bilingual students engage in storytelling and meaning construction using two languages when they encounter one of the chosen wordless picturebooks. The findings indicate that although visualizing is the main strategy to create the plot from the wordless picturebook, the students incorporate other reading comprehension strategies (i.e. using prior knowledge, making connections, predicting, revising and verifying their predictions, and inferencing) to construct the meaning of the story. Since storylines are delivered through illustrations only in wordless picturebooks, the bilingual students flexibly translanguage by deploying their linguistic resources from both languages during their story creation. The findings imply that using wordless picturebooks can be an influential pedagogical instrument to help bilingual students employ a broader language repertoire in their oral narrative production so that their responses from different perspectives and experiences are valued during literary activities in the classroom.