Kai

"If I'm not understanding, I do something to help myself."

As a tenth-grade social studies teacher, Caleb prepared his students to evaluate historical documents, formulate a stance, and use writing to defend their position. Caleb engaged Transliteracy pedagogy with his student Kai, a home-language Spanish speaker whose peers, media and community seemed to inundate him with English. Caleb’s goal was to foster deeper reading comprehension with Kai, and he began by observing his reading in both languages. Caleb observed that Kai showed effective self-monitoring in English, checking his comprehension along the way with fix-up strategies, but that when he read in Spanish, he ignored his errors and seemed to be more focused on reading the passage quickly. This was important because self-monitoring affected Kai’s text comprehension. Caleb designed a Transliteracy lesson to recognize Kai’s strength in English self-monitoring and teach its application in Spanish. He carried out the steps of the Transliteracy lesson, described earlier, and displayed below.

Caleb shared that when Kai read in Spanish following the lesson, he read deliberately, attempting to self-monitor. Afterward, he reported that Kai was more successful at answering comprehension questions about the text. He posited that comprehension improved because he had been thinking and processing his reading along the way. Caleb admitted that finding the time for individual instruction was logistically challenging, but also found the conference “incredibly productive,” sharing, “the lesson we created helped the student to construct his own scaffolding… it served as a reminder that students have knowledge that they themselves can access.”  For Caleb, Transliteracy helped mediate power relations in student interactions. Instead of the teacher needing to tell the students what to do and fix, he shared control of the ecology, illustrating an antiracist approach to literacy assessment and instruction (Inoue, 2015). Caleb planned subsequent whole-group lessons on self-monitoring, asking students to consider their reading behaviors in both languages and encouraging them to use strategies cross-linguistically.