“Bangla Helps Learners to Get the Gist Better” – Translanguaging in Post-colonial English as a Foreign Language Classes in Bangladesh

Conference: The European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL2022)
Title: “Bangla Helps Learners to Get the Gist Better” – Translanguaging in Post-colonial English as a Foreign Language Classes in Bangladesh
Stream: Plurilingualism - Bilingualism
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Md. Sadequle Islam, University of Hamburg, Germany
Silvia Melo-Pfeifer, University of Hamburg, Germany

Abstract:

In post-colonial South Asia, and specifically in Bangladesh, students use their mother tongue while learning English as a second or further language (EFL) even if not overtly, while daily communicative translanguaging is seen as unproblematic. This apparent contradiction shows a gap between learning and communicative practices or, said otherwise, between pedagogical and communicative translanguaging. The paper discusses Bangladeshi teachers’ attitudes towards pedagogical translanguaging (Garcia & Li Wei, 2014) and its use in tertiary level EFL classroom. The research, carried out between April and December 2020 in one public and one private university in Bangladesh, was carried out by following a qualitative approach, where 8 (eight) semi-structured teachers’ interviews were conducted, both in Bangla and English. The interviews were analysed through content and discourse analysis. The findings show that translanguaging is seen as an unavoidable linguistic incident of Bangladeshi EFL classrooms and that the teachers would like to keep their classes monolingual, even when they report positive effects of translanguging in the learning and teaching process. Pedagogical translanguaging seems to be perceived more as a remediation strategy than a strategy to enhance student awareness and skilful use of English, its varieties and other languages.



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