“Algo Significativo En Sus Vidas”: The Translingual Spanish Writing Practice of a Preservice Bilingual Teacher Reimagining the Informational Picture Book

Undergraduate bilingual teacher preparation in the United States has long been concerned with students’ “academic Spanish” development, particularly for US-born bilingual students who aspire to become bilingual teachers ( Guerrero, 2021 ). In Texas, Spanish-speaking bilingual teacher candidates need to pass the Bilingual Target Language Proficiency Test (BTLPT), which requires knowledge of a particular register of Spanish known as “formal” ( Arroyo-Romano, 2016 ), or “academic Spanish.” At the same time, research has begun to establish the link between developing students’ critical language awareness (CLA; Alim, 2010 ; Fairclough, 2013 ) and strong bilingual identities and their subsequent success on standardized measures of “academic Spanish” such as the BTLPT ( Caldas et al., 2018 ; Ek et al., 2013 ; Ivanič, 1998 ). However, identity and CLA in relation to “academic Spanish development” remains an underexamined topic of research. At the same time, recent policy initiatives have pushed to increase the presence of nonfiction informational texts—which are associated with conventional notions of academic language—in elementary classrooms ( Duke, 2000 ; Yopp & Yopp, 2012 ). This article explores one undergraduate preservice bilingual teacher's construction of a translingual, identity-infused Spanish informational picture book. We will argue that the student demonstrated CLA to produce a hybrid text that both reflects and transgresses the genre of informational text.