Who Benefits (and doesn’t) from Translanguaging?
Do you text? Do you consume or create TikToks? Do you share inside jokes? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, you’re translanguaging.
Translanguaging is the most radical - and the most critical - of the current teaching pedagogies designed to support multilingual learners. Sometimes, it strikes me as funny because translanguaging is such a natural way to communicate.
“Translanguaging: A fancy word used to describe the varied and dynamic ways that all people use language in everyday life.”
In a multilingual classroom, translanguaging manifests in a specific and pointed way - it is a praxis that encourages students to leverage their heritage language in pursuit of richer learning experiences and to embrace the natural and fluid ways that they use all their languages to communicate.
This looks like many different things. It can include having multilingual word walls in the classroom. It can be creating space for students to digest content in one language and analyze it in another. What all translanguaging practices have in common is that they eradicate any hierarchy of language and give students the agency to decide the best means of communication according to cultural and social context. Like I said: radical.
If you’re ready to launch a translanguaging practice in your school, click the button to get started.
The Beautiful Art of Disruption
We now turn to Grace, who embodies the art of disruption vis-a-vis translanguaging.
Grace was leading her 5th-graders in some cognate work during the social studies period. It was October, and although the poetry unit wasn’t scheduled for another 5 months, Grace could see far beyond the limitations of the general curriculum. She already knew that the earlier she exposed her MLLs to figurative uses of language, the better chance they would have to NOTICE and WONDER about terms they encountered in their textbooks, like “the Underground Railroad” or “the Tail of Tears.” I saw that gleam in her eye, like she was doing something subversive and powerful.
She was.
Grace was consciously and strategically disrupting the Monolingual Bias in the service of literacy and equity.
See, Grace was a teacher in one of my studies on teacher Pedagogical Language Knowledge, or PLK (Ardell, 2021), and we often spent time after her observations chatting about the instructional choices she made in order to center language in her social studies instruction. She noted that, year after year, her beginner and intermediate ELLs often misunderstood important vocabulary that came up in class. “So,” she explained with confidence, “I’m making a number of updates to the curriculum this year. First of all, I’m doing more translanguaging.” Her simple but radically effective practice included finding the tier 2 and 3 words and always introducing them in both languages. “Second, I’m prioritizing figurative language and literary words.” Grace hoped that, by actively and consistently applying terms like metaphor, satire, and analogy to texts, her students would better be able to notice where and how language has a double meaning, fostering richer academic conversations. She added:
Translanguaging do’s and don’ts:
But what does that look like, you ask? Let’s break it down into some Do’s and Don’ts that will help you envision how you might bring translanguaging practices into your classroom to stretch and celebrate your students’ linguistic abilities.
Translanguaging DO’s:
Providing resources in multiple languages
Responding to a question in a blend of two languages because that mixing allows the student to draw upon a greater store of knowledge and vocabulary
Pairing up students with similar language backgrounds but different proficiency levels
Modeling flexible, multilingual language usage yourself, and accepting that kind of output from your students
Creating learning objectives that are not tied to a single language (e.g., students will be able to summarize solutions to math problems in the language of their choosing both orally and in writing)
Translanguaging DON’ts:
Code-switching (this has more to do with the underlying philosophical differences of how we think about what language is vs. isn’t)
It isn’t bilingual speakers being lazy (cough, deficit view much?)
Seeing it as a disservice to students or a failure to prepare them for “the real world” (achem, we’re preparing them to change the world!)
So… who benefits?
By now you’re wondering what the answer to the title of this blog is: who benefits (and doesn’t) from a translanguaging framework? Well, everyone benefits, with the caveat anyone who believes bilingualism is beautiful and we should do everything within our power to develop more of it in our world.
Who doesn't benefit? Anyone who subscribes to the Monolingual Bias. Here’s the tricky part: translanguaging tacitly asking us to UNLEARN some of the strategies we rely heavily on and the belief systems that inform our pedagogy. I unpack what some of those unlearnings are in my translanguaging guide…
No me dudas…. If you would like to chat with me about any of the topics covered in this post, PLEASE book a call. Nothing brings me greater joy than arming bilingual, TESOL (and especially) monolingual practitioners with the tools to Disrupt the Monolingual Bias. Let’s be subversive, together.
