What If We Enable Translanguaging in the EFL Classroom? Observations and Reflections from Two Reading Groups

Conference: The European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL2021)
Title: What If We Enable Translanguaging in the EFL Classroom? Observations and Reflections from Two Reading Groups
Stream: Plurilingualism - Bilingualism
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Nada Bin Ghali, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Translanguaging pedagogy suggests a new perspective in language education relating to multilingualism; multilingual learners have one linguistic repertoire and not two or more separate language systems (García and Wei, 2014). When learners translanguage, they are able to draw on all their language features in a flexible and integrated way (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). In the Foreign Language Classroom, however, the tendency to use the target language only is still advocated as a pedagogy. This study attempts to enable learners in English as a foreign language classroom to draw on their full linguistic repertoire through collaborative reading lessons. Through strategically enabling translanguaging in reading lessons (Celic and Seltzer, 2011), this study has revealed that learners showed creative ways of language use for learning and reflected positively on this experience. Learners in the two groups were observed over six weeks and were asked to reflect their learning every week. The same learners were also interviewed at the end of translanguaging weeks after completing a modified model of the learning reflection (Ash and Clayton, 2009). This study positions translanguaging as collaborative and agentive, within a sociocultural framework of learning positioning translanguaging as a resource for learning as well as a process of learning. Translanguaging learning episodes are elicited from classroom observations, artefacts, interviews, reflections, and focus groups where they are analysed qualitatively following the sociocultural discourse analysis (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Mercer, 2004). Initial outcomes suggest functions of translanguaging in collaborative reading tasks and recommendations for a collaborative translanguaging pedagogy approach.

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