Project Summary
The data for this study came from a more extensive mixed-methods study that focused on understanding educators’ perspectives on translanguaging and its use in bilingual classrooms across the United States. The overall purpose of this study was to determine how bilingual educators make sense of translanguaging, and how, if at all, they use it in their teaching practice. This study helped enhance understanding about how languages are used in bilingual programs and for what purposes. The survey helped to collect information from larger samples of educators across the country to elicit information about attitudes that may otherwise have been difficult to measure using observation. Furthermore, it also allowed educators to share their understanding and attitudes towards a relatively debated language teaching technique anonymously.
Data Description and Collection Overview
The study used an online survey to inquire about educators’ self-reported understanding and practices about translanguaging. (The authors intentionally did not define the critical term, since this was one of the questions and a focus of the survey itself.) The study targeted educators of emergent bilingual services (EBS) across the United States and was administered in 2019. Any educator working in a K-12 language program met the survey inclusion criteria. This included bilingual programs, English as a second language, or another language program in a K-12 school. This meant that participants could be classroom teachers, language or other specialists, school/district administrators, educational consultants, staff from institutes of higher learning, and other potential stakeholders involved or interested in bilingual education in K-12 schools.
The recruitment of survey participants was conducted through a sample of convenience given its cost-effectiveness and easy access to educators through the networks of the two organizations that sponsored the project: WIDA at University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). The survey was shared through the websites of the two organizations over a period of eight months between March 25 and November 24, 2019. Survey participants were recruited through flyers at conferences, notices posted on websites of organizations engaged in research related to bilingual education and advertised via mailings to members of organizations engaged in research related to bilingual education. The availability of the survey was further disseminated through a group of organizations dedicated to dual language and bilingual education in the U.S., called the National Dual Language Forum. This method was used to reach as many participants as possible and did not include purposeful sampling.
Summary of participant demographics can be found in the Visualizations file included in the deposit. While most of the respondents taught in the United States, 36 respondents reported working in international schools outside of the United States. A total of 972 responses were collected, of which 447 were complete responses.
The survey included a total of 30 Likert scale items with a five-point scale, organized into sections related to the reasons why EBs switch languages (4 items), educators’ beliefs about the appropriateness of translanguaging (3 items), educators’ perceptions of the benefits and limitations of translanguaging (8 items), and educators’ reported classroom practices (15 items). The survey also included two open-ended questions: one at the beginning of the survey asking the participants to define translanguaging in their own words and one at the end of the survey asking them to share one or two activities they do with their students in which they use translanguaging. At the end of the survey, there were demographic questions about educators’ roles in their schools, the types of programs in which they worked, the grade levels they served, their years of experience in education, and their language abilities. The survey also asked for information about where the educators worked and how they heard about the survey.
The Likert scale survey items were based on the literature on practices and understanding of translanguaging. The survey took 20-25 minutes to complete, and participants could take the survey anywhere and at their own convenience. No personally identifiable information was collected. The responses from the surveys were compiled and analyzed to identify frequency of responses and themes.
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
The informed consent, full survey questionnaire, and this data narrative serve as documentation files for this project. Additionally, all survey responses and visualizations from them are included as data files. The csv file containing the survey responses depicts the raw data. It contains both complete and incomplete responses and would best be analyzed side by side with the questionnaire. For example, column “BG” (Q19), corresponds to the question asking “From which of the following sources did you hear about this survey? Check all that apply.” Since the participants could mark multiple optisons, this column (BG) contains multiple answers such as “a colleague or friend; on a website; at a conference; etc.” The survey visualizations file contains varied visualizations of the data, including the key demographics of the survey respondents.
For the International Multilingual Research Journal article listed in Related Publications, the authors analyzed the responses from the two open-ended questions specifically, using only full participant answers to provide a better understanding of the beliefs, and practices of the individual respondents, as well as of the contexts in which they teach.
