Lesson Plans & Class Activities -Materializing Translingualism

Jacki Fiscus Tranglinsual & Transmodality lesson plan framing:

Using conceptual frameworks from translingualism, multimodality, and transmodality, this lesson plan uses a fishbowl discussion (a core discussion group and a “backchannel” group) to engage students in an analysis of Radio Man, a graphic story written in both English and Spanish.

Emily George Weekly Discussion Post framing:

This weekly assignment serves as an “idea pool” as well as an organized space for students to engage with popular news sources. It also provides built-in accountability to motivate students’ interaction with each other’s ideas. The setup of this assignment opens up space for students to choose sources that are not only published in English, but in other languages. In the meantime, there is clear scaffolding to help students evaluate the validity of the sources.

George Weekly Discussion Post

Zhenzhen He-Weatherford Fishbowl activity framing:

This fishbowl discussion activity was originally used in the multilingual section of a first-year composition course. However, it can be easily adapted to other classrooms where teachers want to facilitate carefully scaffolded class discussions and in the meantime encouraging student autonomy. Some benefits of this activity are:

• Students get to hear their peers’ ideas in a structured and coherent discussion environment.

• Students can further develop their own discussion styles by observing other people. This is especially useful for students who are not very familiar with the relatively interactive classroom culture in US classrooms, or lack confidence in speaking up in front of a group at the beginning of the class.

• Learning from other discussions, students can be more intentional about their discussion strategies in their future group or whole-class work.

• The relatively democratic nature of the discussion (student facilitated with minimal teacher intervention) fosters an open and collaborative classroom culture that increases students’ sense of ownership in their own learning environment.

He-Weatherford Fishbowl Activity

Dino Kladouris Translation activity framing:

This assignment, used in English 111 in conjunction with Asian-American literary texts. A similar activity could be adapted for other writing courses using a text like “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (Anzaldúa). This activity enables students to rhetorically analyze overtly translingual texts that use multiple codes. When teaching an activity like this, it is important to discuss with students that translingualism could include this type of “code-meshing” but may also include multiple, overlapping codes that are less visible.

Kladouris Translation and Close Reading Activity

Holly Shelton hybrid text activity framing:

This class activity invites students to analyze a collection of short “hybrid” texts (James Baldwin, Victor Villanueva, Amin Maalouf, etc.), tapping into the effects of using a language or specialized vocabulary, strategies of doing it in English writing, and gain and losses in the process. It also comes with presentation slides if teachers want to develop it into a longer class session.

Notes from the teacher:  For the "hybrid" texts, I have two variations.  The first option is to print out the handout version of each example excerpt and cut them apart.  I then tape them up on the walls around the room with another sheet of paper as a "gallery walk" activity for students to respond on the paper with an observation or question.  The second option is to print multiple copies of the handout, cut them apart, and distribute them to the students, who then find other people that have the same excerpts and work together on analyzing and discussing that specific example.  Then they present their findings to the class when we get to that particular slide.

Shelton Hybrid Texts