Teacher Resources

TRANSLATE (Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approaches To Emergent bilinguals) is an instructional approach that provides teachers with the means to access all of the language of their students learning English. In TRANSLATE, students are taught to identify key excerpts from language arts texts and to use selected cognitive, linguistic and social strategies to facilitate translation and comprehension of that text. After students create translated texts, they compare and evaluate their translations, and then summarize their newfound understandings.

TRANSLATE was designed by Robert Jiménez and colleagues over multiple iterations across 20 years in Nashville public schools. The team has worked in elementary and middle schools with teacher collaborators to refine the approach, which was inspired by decades of prior research that suggest the value of using students’ home language resources to support English text understanding.

TRANSLATE was designed for students reading two to three grade levels below grade-level expectations. The focus is on striving readers who are also bilingual, but the approach can also be used with monolinguals when the focus is on dialect and register shifting.

Why does Reading Interactively matter? For many students who are disfluent readers, slow, laborious word reading can impact text comprehension. As a result, less-fluent readers may not experience reading as a more fluent reader might: as meaning-making. Over time, too few experiences to be fully engaged in the task of text comprehension can leave less-skilled readers with under-developed skills to make meaning from text and with few opportunities to be exposed to the language and concepts found in grade-level print. For these reasons, we include teacher read alouds that give access to the concepts and language of an authentic grade-level text. Additionally, multilingual youth need to see themselves in the texts that they read as part of fostering a positive multilingual and multicultural identity. 

What skills and competencies does Reading Interactively develop? Interactive read-alouds cultivate English reading comprehension skills and offer opportunities to acquire grade-level language and content knowledge. When the texts read aloud are culturally relevant, they also promote a positive multilingual and multicultural identity. Student activities, including Guiding Question discussions and gist activities foster, create opportunities for fostering oral language and practicing newly acquired text comprehension skills. 

There are four levels of informational text passages (ranging from beginning reader to grade 4) written on topics related to those in the anchor text. During reach cycle, students are paired with a classmate to support sharing of background knowledge, and to offer opportunities to develop reading fluency through repeated readings. Students are also provided with opportunities to develop writing fluency during these lessons. 

Why does Building Background Knowledge and Fluency matter? The goal of this activity is two-fold: to develop students’ shared background knowledge about a topic that may be unfamiliar but is relevant to understanding the key themes and ideas of the unit; and to develop students’ skills to read fluently. Both aspects are essential to skilled reading. Indeed, when student bring higher levels of background knowledge, they are better able to comprehend texts that contain complex language and would typically seem too challenging to tackle independently. Because skilled reading requires connecting ideas across a text, the more fluent a reader is, the better able that reader is to read a text without interruptions. Imagine reading a complex text. Each time reading is interrupted – to self- correct, to identify an unknown word, to process complex sentence structures – a reader’s comprehension of the text is also interrupted. When reading disfluently, readers simply have less cognitive ‘space’ to make meaning from a text because they are engaged in the laborious process of word reading. It is for this reason that we focus on fluency. It is not that reading words quickly and easily is important in and of itself; however, when readers can more fluently read text, they are better able to engage in comprehending it, which is the goal of TRANSLATE. 

A similar process is at work in writing fluency–students require opportunities to write routinely in order to develop a level of automaticity that allows for idea communication. 

What skills and competencies does Building Background and Fluency develop? Paired fluency work develops students’ fluent reading skills in the service of supporting text comprehension and exposes students to valuable background knowledge that can be used to comprehend the anchor text’s themes and content. In addition, each text contains key vocabulary words useful for discussing the unit’s anchor text. Finally, writing tasks embedded in these lessons create opportunities for practicing newly-acquired encoding knowledge and to communicate with an authentic readership. 

Each Cycle, students work with a partner/small group to analyze text segments and to translate text from English into a home language. The text segment is drawn from the read loud text. As students work to make meaning of the text segment, they are noticing both the language structures and engaging in deeper comprehension of the anchor text’s themes and ideas. These lessons teach both Text Navigation Routines, or routines for managing the language of print that can be applied across future reading tasks, and have a Language Feature Focus, in which students are engaged in noticing a particular language feature (e.g., prefixes, sentence structures, connectives).

Units place a focus on the use of one translanguaging strategy: translation. After translation, students discuss the ways in which they translated the text, focusing first on the language. There is no ‘correct’ way to translate a text and the goal is not to achieve a direct translation. Instead, the aim is to notice how language is used. Next, students paraphrase the meaning of the segment and answer purpose questions to connect this with the meaning of the anchor text.

Why does Diving into Language matter? Multilingual students bring existing knowledge about language as a result of moving between languages. For example, students may notice how word parts are common across Spanish and English or that Arabic and English contain different sentence structures. However, we rarely use these metalinguistic skills in schools or seek to develop these further. This is a missed opportunity. Indeed, by developing our students’ metalinguistic skills we can aid them in becoming independent learners of language.

Through the Diving into Language lessons, students develop metalinguistic and metalingual skills that are particularly useful when comprehending English text. In fact, a central aim of this activity is to aid students in developing their text comprehension skills and to deepen their understanding of the unit’s anchor text. In addition, as students are given permission to use home language resources, they are supported to develop their multilingual identities and to view these skills as positive assets that aid learning in the classroom. This is often a significant shift for youth who have had few opportunities to use home language resources in classroom settings.

What skills and competencies does Diving into Language develop? The Diving into Language lessons, which occur twice per cycle, give students opportunities to use a home or additional language in the service of supporting English text comprehension and developing a positive multilingual identity.

TRANSLATE is designed to occur over a 10-day cycle. Each lesson is 45 minutes, and additional activities are provided for educators with longer instructional blocks.

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David, S., Pacheco, M.B., Jiménez, R.T. (manuscript accepted for publication). Designing translingual pedagogies: exploring collaborative translation through a classroom teaching experiment. Cognition and Instruction.

Puzio, K., Keyes, C., & Jiménez, R. T. (2016). It Sounds More Like a Gangbanger: Using Collaborative Translation to Understand Literary Concepts. Language Arts, 93 (6), 430-443.

Cole, M.; David, S. & Jiménez, R. T. (2016). Negotiating investment in culturally responsive instruction. Language Arts, 93 (6), 444-456.

Jiménez, R. T.; David, S.; Pacheco, M.; Risko, V. J.; Pray, L.; Fagan, K.; & Gonzales, M. (2015). Supporting Teachers of English Language Learners by Leveraging Students’ Linguistic Strengths. The Reading Teacher, 68 (6), 406-412.

Pacheco, M. B., David, S. S., & Jiménez, R. T. (2015). Translating pedagogies: Leveraging students' heritage languages in the literacy classroom. Middle Grades Research Journal, 10 (1), 49-63.

Jiménez, R. T., David, S., Fagan, K., Risko, V. Pacheco, M., Pray, L., Gonzales, M. (2015). Using Translation to Drive Conceptual Development for Students Becoming Literate in English as an Additional Language. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 248-271.

Keyes, C., Puzio, K., & Jiménez, R. T. (2014). Collaborative translations: Designing bilingual instructional tools. Journal of Education, 194(2), 17-24.

Puzio, K., Keyes, C. S., Cole, M. W., & Jiménez, R. T. (2013). Language differentiation: Collaborative translation to support bilingual reading Bilingual Research Journal, 36(3), 329- 349.