ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the richness of the bilingual practices that Spanish heritage students bring to K-16 classrooms, in the belief that an understanding of these practices will allow educators to take full advantage of their pupils’ competencies in the further development of linguistic, metalinguistic, and analytic skills. The cognitive and social mechanisms implicated in bilingual practices have been well studied within various subdisciplines of linguistics, often under the umbrella label code-switching. More recently, the interlacing of languages and varieties has garnered attention among scholars within the field of education, where the conceptual construct translanguaging has been proposed in referring not only to the continuity of learners’ multilingual repertoires but also to the pedagogies that support these expressive and creative modes. Herein, we espouse a critical-pedagogical view, in advocating for pedagogies that legitimize the extensive continuum of bilinguals’ repertoires in the community and in the classroom. While such approaches have been adopted for young emergent bilinguals in elementary schools and for adolescents in high school courses for heritage speakers, to our knowledge, similar strategies of valuing hybrid language practices have not been fruitfully implemented for university-level learners. We submit that the embracing of code-switching and translanguaging pedagogies can serve educators in guiding learners of all ages in developing bilingual oracy and literacy as well as in promoting bilingual identities that support academic achievement.
