533 The Reading Teacher Vol. 69 Issue 5 pp. 533–537 DOI:10.1002/trtr.1390 © 2015 International Literacy Association MAKING MEANING THROUGH TRANSLANGUAGING IN THE LITERACY CLASSROOM Mark B. Pacheco n Mary E. Miller S tudents who speak languages other than English are the fastest growing population in schools today (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2010). The term emergent bilingual highlights the unique strengths that these students possess: Along with simultaneously acquiring English and making sense of content material, emergent bilinguals also continue to develop their heritage languages in their homes and communities. Cummins (2005) has argued that leveraging these students’ bilingualism can promote their academic, cognitive, and social achievement. Rather than limiting emergent bilinguals to the use of a single language when making meaning in in the classroom, translanguaging pedagogies encourage stu- dents to draw from all of their linguistic resources (García & Kleifgen, 2010). In this Teaching Tip, we share three examples of pedagogies that productively engage students’ heritage languages in the liter- acy classroom. Each activity that we share not only leverages students’ heritage languages for academic achievement in English but also strives to promote students’ emerging bilingualism. Translanguaging is based on the idea that emer- gent bilinguals regularly and naturally use all of their languages to make meaning in the world (García & Kleifgen, 2010). These languages are part of one lin- guistic system that an individual strategically accesses depending on the context. In the literacy classroom, pedagogies that welcome the use of translanguaging can help emergent bilinguals in a variety of ways, such as facilitating access to background knowledge (Sayer, 2013); assisting with the acquisition of new vocabulary (Cunningham & Graham, 2000); strengthening under- standings about features of language, or metalinguistic Mark B. Pacheco is a graduate student in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA; e-mail mark.b.pacheco@vanderbilt.edu. Mary E. Miller is a graduate student in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University; e-mail mary.e.miller@vanderbilt.edu. TEACHING TIP