Translanguaging as a vehicle for L2 acquisition and L1 development: students’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to report on a project aimed at exploring the use of translanguaging as a strategy to support bi-/multilingual students in acquiring academic literacy in English while promoting the terminologisation of African languages through exploratory scientific talk. The topic is contextualised by juxtaposing multilingualism as a problem with multilingualism as a resource. This is followed by a discussion of translanguaging as an alternative to monolingual education. An overview is given of a number of empirical studies on translanguaging conducted in South Africa during the past 15 years. Subsequently, I discuss a research project that elicited students’ opinions about translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy. Speakers of eight African languages, including Afrikaans, experienced cognitive and affective benefits. Despite some reservations, they also considered translanguaging to be a useful platform for creating technical terms in African languages, and were positive about future use.

Keywords:

• academic literacy
• L1 development
• L2 acquisition
• multilingualism
• terminologisation
• translanguaging