Marsha Jing-Ji Liaw is Education/Curriculum director at a K-12 bilingual school, an independent researcher and a visiting scholar at Umass Amherst. Her research and educational leadership work centers around critical biliteracies; that is, how children develop criticality in two language systems, and how knowing two (or more!) languages can contribute to children being critical. Other interests include teacher education in second language and literacy, second language writing, pedagogy of multiliteracies, multicultural children’s literature and ethnographic methodology. She earned her Ph.D. from Language, Literacy and Culture Concentration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Dr. Kathryn Accurso, Dr. Brenda Muzeta and Dr. Marsha Jing-Ji Liaw will jointly deliver a talk on ‘Teaching between languages: Five principles for the multilingual classroom‘.
Talk abstract
Do you work in a school or classroom where students have a range of language backgrounds, including some you don’t share? This article introduces some basic principles of a translanguaging pedagogy to help teachers think about how they can draw on students’ existing language skills even when they don’t speak the same languages as students. This approach is designed to support students’ development as multilingual speakers, writers, and thinkers even as they are expanding their disciplinary English.
