Instructional Activities That Use Community Literacies

By Author: emily zhou
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A second recommended activity involves the translation of texts originally produced in languages other than English. Teachers can arrange for students to work in cooperative learning groups for this task, with group members selected based on their knowledge of different languages and writing systems. The students could select a text for translation. For example, we found an informational text in a Spanish-language newspaper titled "Aprenda sobre los Estados Unidos de America." One fragment of text asks the question "^Que celebmmos el dia 4 de Julio?" Students will probably translate this as "Learn about the United States of America. What do we celebrate on the 4th of July?" but other variations are possible. The teacher might ask students to create a document that communicates the message of the text rather than a word-for-word translation.

Other considerations that will arise in discussion include the translation into the wording in English that "sounds best," is the Tag Heuer Carrera Replica most accurate, and presents the most convincing message. ...
... Some texts are not as easy to translate. For example, in Figure 1, the text reads "He is sending him to new heights" and is accompanied by an image of a pilot handing a model airplane to a boy. Students translating the idiomatic expression "to send (someone) to new heights" into a language other than English will discover multiple layers of meaning that will require interpretation and discussion to produce a comparable text in the other language. Translation activities like these are rich sites of learning opportunities or "teachable moments" (Goodman, 2003), especially for ELLs who speak different varieties of a language (e.g., Portuguese from Brazil, Cape Verde, or Portugal). Students working on a translation task from Portuguese to English or English to Portuguese would almost certainly need to negotiate the linguistic and pragmatic choices necessary for creating the best translation. These discussions should direct students to consider word choice, idiomatic expressions, and the cultural values involved in the interpretation and presentation of ideas. All of these activities have the potential to increase students' abilities to appreciate diversity in language as well as their metalinguistic understandings of two or more languages.

A third way of working with transnational and community literacies is to ask students to interview people who have produced or commissioned certain texts or others familiar with their production. Students and teachers can determine through an initial analysis of each text who would be the best candidates and sources of information. It would be important to interview community members for the purposes of discovering who created the text, for what purpose, with what intent, for what audience, and with what results. Finally, we encourage teachers to explore with their students the possible economic implications of these literate forms. Questions that could be asked include whether there are specific literacy skills involved in the production Omega Replica Watches process and how these skills were learned. Were they taught by a family member or employer, or did the authors take a course or receive specialized training to learn to produce specific kinds of texts? How long does it take to learn to write these texts, and how much money do the producers charge to create them? Students could also ask whether the production of these texts is considered a full-time en?deavor, as would be the case for a newspaper reporter, photographer, sign maker, advertisement writer, or computer graphics designer.