Translanguaging challenges in multilingual classrooms: scholar, teacher and student perspectives

ABSTRACT

The challenging task of establishing meaningful translanguaging in multilingual classrooms necessitates negotiation between different stakeholders. Such negotiation requires investigation of the contexts and ways in which translanguaging may be implemented as a suitable teaching strategy. The aim of the current study was to elicit practical and pedagogical issues of translanguaging in the classroom via interviews with three different groups of stakeholders: language education researchers, teachers, and multilingual learners. We visited four differently composed multilingual high schools from which concrete examples were recalled in semi-structured interviews on the topic of translanguaging with the selected stakeholders. Adopting an iterative study design, interviewees were presented with daily life examples from the school visits as well as statements from other stakeholder interviews. Their statements and reactions to the statements of others were recorded, qualitatively analysed and categorised. Overall, seven distinct pedagogical challenges concerning a translanguaging pedagogy emerged from the interview analysis: (1) Side effects; (2) Goal formulation; (3) Learning the language of schooling; (4) English and other semiotic resources; (5) Affective functions; (6) Effort; and (7) Confusion. These palpable pedagogic issues may be helpful in understanding how translanguaging in multilingual contexts can be implemented, thus bridging the gap between theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• pedagogy
• multilingualism
• students
• teachers
• scholars

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We adopt the term ‘home languages’ to refer to those languages, other than the language of schooling, which are transmitted to students in their families. We follow leading international translanguaging studies (e.g. as Celic & Seltzer, 2011; García & Kleyn, 2016) as well as European multilingual education studies (e.g. Duarte, 2016; Pulinx et al., 2017). The authors are well aware of debates concerning terminology in this field. Other terms include, for instance, mother tongue and heritage language.

2 Examples include CLIL (e.g. Coyle, 2007) and transitional bilingual education models (e.g. Slavin, Madden, Calderón, Chamberlain, & Hennessy, 2011).

3 It should be noted that parallel lines of research that use different definitions also exist (Gorter, 2017). For example, Functional Multilingual Learning is another name for a multilingual pedagogy (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014).

4 By migration background we refer to students and/or their parents who were born outside of the Netherlands. Home languages in this study included Turkish, Bosnian, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Romanian, Punjabi, Hindi, Portuguese, Bulgarian, and Polish.

5 These two students had to describe the atmosphere in a Disney video by avoiding frequently used words like ´nicé or ´biǵ. They were tasked with making mind maps by using all of their languages, and to seek appropriate words in those languages. They could talk among each other in the languages they wanted, as long as they excluded nobody. Afterwards, they searched together for the correct words in the language of schooling, so they could discuss the assignment in the language that everybody understood. They also did homework in their home languages.

6 This refers to translanguaging pedagogy.

7 They call it ‘the symbolic’ dimension.