01/07/25 Live Event – Using a Translanguaging Approach to Assess Language Skills in Multilingual Youth

FINANCIAL: Cecilia Perez, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is an employee of The University of Southern California, Los Angeles and receives a salary.

NON-FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Cecilia Perez does not have any non-financial relationships to disclose.

Dr. Cecilia Perez is a bilingual speech-language therapist and faculty at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She was raised in Santa Ana California, where she grew up amidst rich language diversity reflected in the local community (Spanish, English, Vietnamese). In her home she was raised using features of Guatemalan Spanish and Mexican Spanish, where a common point of contention and banter at the dinner table was “quien lo dice bien, los Guatemaltecos o Mexicanos?” This became frequent contemplation and also one of the many avenues that brought her to the study of language, it’s connection to colonialities and communication liberation through a translanguaging framework. Having once been a Latinx adolescent herself and later as a clinician who worked closely with them, her research interests include highlighting the language practices of racialized adolescents in ways that defy the deficit rhetoric often attached to this demographic.

This presentation explores how clinicians can pair a translanguaging framework and cultural narratives to assess how Latinx adolescents use critical thinking language, language complexity and productivity. Translanguaging refers to the ways that multilinguals “access different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, to maximize communicative potential”（Garcia, 2009, p. 140) and it describes how they use “one linguistic repertoire from which they select features strategically to communicate effectively” (García, 2009a, p. 1). In this way, translanguaging expands our notions of multilingualism to reflect the dynamic languaging skills that Latinx use to make meaning.

Fables have been used as ecologically valid tools to assess adolescent language skills under the pretense that they elicit meta-cognitive and complex language (Nippold et al., 2020). Another approach that theoretically parallels this assessment logic is using Corridos (Mexican ballads embedded with historical, social-political, and personal narratives that depict various values widely held in Latinx communities) to observe the robust languaging skills of Latinx youth. Latinx adolescents use critical thinking language, language complexity and productivity when they are translanguaging and are discussing culturally relevant narratives, Corridos (Perez et al., 2024). This presentation underscores the value of allowing adolescents to employ their entire linguistic repertoire. Translanguaging and use of culturally situated narratives enables opportunities to observe the various features of “home” languages, school language and positively affirms Latinx adolescents’ cultural-linguistic identities and practices.

Participants will be able to:
• Define translanguaging as a framework.
• Connect language sampling techniques to a translanguaging approach.
• Describe tools and strategies to assess the language skills of adolescents.
• Describe the importance of using culturally situated approaches to multilingual assessment with Latinx youth.

Time-Ordered Agenda
10 minutes–Introductions and disclosures.
10 minutes– Review of adolescent development, PICO question about multilingual adolescent language.
25 minutes– Translanguaging and adolescent language sampling research.
30 minutes- Assessment of Latinx adolescent language.
15 minutes- question and answer session