2025 AAAL Conference Presentation—A Descriptive Study of Students’ Multilingual and Multimodal Communication Practices in Elementary School Science
March 22 @ 8:35 am - 9:05 am
A Descriptive Study of Students’ Multilingual and Multimodal Communication Practices in Elementary School Science
Date & Time: March 22, 2025 | 8:35–9:05 a.m. Mountain Standard Time
Location: AAAL, Denver, CO
Presenter(s):
Keira Ballantyne (Center for Applied Linguistics)
Caitlin Fine (Metropolitan State University of Denver)
Description:
The last decade has seen increasing interest in benefits that K–12 students gain from using their full linguistic repertoire in classrooms. Foundational theoretical work has established that multilingualism is a fluid and adaptive set of practices embedded in sociocultural interactions (García, 2009; García & Lin, 2016; Lopez et al. 2015). Scholars use the term translanguaging to describe the fluid linguistic practices of bilinguals (García, 2009; Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015; Wei & García, 2022) and also the pedagogical practices that support bilingual students’ full linguistic selves (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; García, 2018; Seltzer & García, 2020).
This empirical study seeks to understand how children use their full linguistic repertoire and communicative resources to represent their understanding of elementary school science. Our study is a component part of developing and validating the Multilingual Multimodal Science Inventory (M2-Si), a formative assessment that supports educators in understanding what their students know and can do in science, not just what their students know and can do in science in English.
In collaboration with educators, the team developed 16 M2-Si classroom activities designed to support multilingual multimodal responses from participating students. The current study examines a large sample of student work produced in response to these activities (n=959).
Data comes from elementary school science classrooms across seven school districts in North Carolina. Classrooms include monolingual English and multilingual students, and dual language and monolingual instruction. Data were collected collaboratively by researchers and a cohort of eleven practicing classroom educators.
Our descriptive study seeks to understand the range of multilingual and multimodal practices that students leverage in scientific sense-making activities. We present a classification schema for the activities, descriptive statistics on the distribution of multilingual and multimodal response types, and detail on specific communicative practices observed in the dataset.
