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We highlight how the use of holistic biliteracy and translanguaging perspectives can be applied in the assessment of emergent bilingual middle school students’ writing to counter deficit views of their divergent repertoires. The study took place in a Mountain West middle school with a large Latinx population. We analyzed eleven emerging bilingual students’ (EBs) responses to a writing prompt in an English language arts class. Findings include EBs’ use of translanguaging [García, O. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell], or strategic languaging, in which the students used different codes/languages in their writing. Additionally, this study found that EBs might show different patterns of spelling development as they learn to access the different alphabetic patterns of their respective repertoires. Finally, the study highlights how EBs draw from diverse discourse patterns as they compose. The analysis revealed the cultural and linguistic knowledge(s) EBs bring to developing their writing, which are often not part of monolingual English writing rubrics. Thus, the implications suggest that teachers need to develop critical sociolinguistic responsive practices as the field seeks to equitably assess the writing of EBs. Moreover, we suggest that critical cultural and linguistic awareness is needed in order to nurture the identities and competencies of EBs.
