Translanguaging and product-oriented drama: an integrated pedagogical approach for language learning and literacy development

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the translanguaging practices of 12 students and a teacher rehearsing a German play as part of an extra-curricular UK university theatre group comprising different European nationalities. Our aim was to understand how these practices support foreign language and literacy development in the context of a script-based, product-oriented approach to drama. The final three full rehearsals were audio-recorded and transcribed. Following functional analysis to identify translanguaging instances, discourse analysis was applied to selected extracts where learning was inferred or shown to occur. Rehearsals provided a rich learning environment in which participants were affectively engaged, with specific opportunities for contextualised language learning and literacy development. Translanguaging enhanced these learning opportunities, enabling students to engage with the German script as bilinguals drawing on both their linguistic and multimodal repertoires to build meaning. The integration of translanguaging and product-oriented drama offers a linguistically diverse and embodied pedagogical approach to language education and a wealth of learning affordances less readily accessed in monolingual environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• product drama
• language education
• biliteracy
• multimodality
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As noted by Wimmer and Schiller (2002), the label ‘foreigner’ and hence ‘foreign languages’ (Risager 2016, 52) is problematic in its tacit recognition of national power dynamics and potential ‘stigmatisation of the users of these languages’. Nevertheless modern languages taught in educational institutions tend to be referred to as foreign language subjects in many parts of the world and hence in the present paper this term is utilised without endorsing its potentially problematic connotations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by Arts and Humanities Research Council: grant number AH/V008234/1.

Notes on contributors

Madeleine Campbell

Madeleine Campbell, SFHEA, was born in in Toronto and lived in France before settling in Scotland, where she teaches Language Education at Edinburgh University. She is currently researching the potential of both verbal and non-verbal translation as participatory pedagogy in language education. She is Co-Leader of the Language(s), Interculturality and Literacies (LIL) Thematic Research Hub, where she is Ethics Lead for the Hub and organises the LIL Hub Seminar Series. The LIL Hub is a space for interdisciplinary scholarship, aiming to connect researchers across the University of Edinburgh and beyond, working on a wide range of issues relating to education and communication through language and multimodality, in the context of global and local spaces of learning. She has been Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded Experiential Translation Network (ETN) since Jan 2021. The ETN comprises a group of international scholars, artists and translators who investigate translation between languages (interlingual) and between media (intersemiotic) as a method of creation and communication, as a method for learning and teaching, collaboration and participation within multilingual, multicultural and multimodal settings. Her book Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders (2019), co-edited with Ricarda Vidal, challenges traditional notions of literary translation through the embodied perspective of practitioners working in a range of media, including dance, film, materials and the visual arts. Web page: https://edinburgh.academia.edu/MadeleineCampbell.

Alexandra Tigan

Alexandra Tigan, FRSA, is a consultant, researcher, and linguist with a wide range of experience in the education sector. She has supported educational, development, and humanitarian aid programming in over 30 countries, for clients ranging from private investors to UN agencies and leading iNGOs. She currently serves as Head of Operations at Thuso, a strategic consultancy operating in the humanitarian, development, education, investment, and health sectors internationally, with a particular focus on emerging markets, as well as fragile and conflict-affected states. Born in Romania, Alexandra completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Aberdeen, and also holds a Master of Science in Language Teaching, awarded with Distinction by the University of Edinburgh.