Beyond Puntos y Rayas: Translanguaging Pedagogy for Language Minoritized Students

This article explores how “puntos y rayas” (full stops and lines) function as symbolic and structural barriers in education for language-minoritized students. Through autobiographical reflection and classroom cases, the authors show how rigid boundaries around standardized language and raciolinguistic ideologies marginalize students and obscure their rich communicative repertoires. A contrasting example of a translanguaging classroom illustrates how educators can disrupt these boundaries by validating students' full semiotic, linguistic, and multimodal practices. The authors present the case of a teacher who creates translanguaging spaces, enabling students to draw on their full semiotic, linguistic, and multimodal resources to construct knowledge collaboratively. By positioning spontaneous translanguaging as pedagogical, this framework resists deficit views and creates space for sociolinguistic analyses as opportunities for transformation in the classroom. Ultimately, translanguaging offers both a theoretical lens and practical approach for dismantling linguistic barriers and advancing justice in education for minoritized communities.