Translanguaging as a pedagogy for equity of language minoritized students

ABSTRACT

For years, bilingual programmes have allocated the languages of bilinguals to separate teachers, lessons, or even days or hours of the week to avoid damaging the ‘purity’ of languages, confusing language-minoritized students and hindering their achievement (Creese & Blackledge, 2011. Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools: Multiple language practices in interrelationship. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1196–1208. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.006; García, 2014. Countering the dual: Transglossia, dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging in education. In R. Rubdy & L. Alsagoff (Eds.), The global-local interface, language choice and hybridity (pp. 100–118). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters). The authenticity and the effectiveness of these practices have recently been questioned, and alternative pedagogical approaches, which view bilingualism as a unitary linguistic system and a resource for content and language learning, have been proposed. Translanguaging is one of these pedagogical approaches that has emerged to counteract the strict separation of language policies in schools and advocates that an effective pedagogy should mirror the fluid languaging practices of bilinguals (Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2017. Reframing language allocation policy in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal, 1–15). This paper aims to explain the development of translanguaging as a teaching method in schools and the intersections between translanguaging as a pedagogical tool and the tenets of critical teaching. First, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and how they perceive bilingualism are discussed. Next, translanguaging is defined and differentiated from code-switching. Finally, translanguaging is discussed as a transformative pedagogy used to promote equity in the classrooms that include language-minoritized students. Although translanguaging has international relevance, this study draws only from the U.S. context.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• code-switching
• translanguaging
• equity
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Named languages refer to the terms ‘English’, ‘Spanish’, ‘Arabic’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Swahili’, ‘Russian’, ‘Haitian Creole’, etc. to highlight that they are socially invented categories (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005). That is, they are regarded as languages by the societies, but stay limited to describe bilinguals’ linguistic resources.