Language, literacy, and love: A critical framework for teaching adolescent emergent bilinguals

A high school English teacher/doctoral student and two university researchers share a three-part framework for educating emergent bilinguals across disciplines with these constructs: language, literacy, and love. Through long-term professional development, teachers at two high schools began to view language as translanguaging, literacy as multiliteracies, and love as the critical notion of armed love. Specifically, as educators recognized the value of students’ home languages, they understood how all languaging was useful to acquire English, access content, and develop confidence in disciplinary literacy. Building off an understanding of students’ languaging, educators then focused on multiliteracies in their disciplines, incorporating multilingual and multimodal literature in their curriculum that represented student diversity. Finally, teaching through a critical lens of armed love, educators began to examine societal, political, and economical constructs relevant to their emergent bilinguals’ lives. This framework is useful to effect sustainable changes for teaching and learning equity with students in the dynamic process of English language acquisition.