By Helen Absalom, language specialist and primary ELA teacher
Did you know that translanguaging began as daily practice in Wales before becoming a global idea about language? In the 1980s, Welsh educator Cen Williams introduced the term ‘trawsieithu’ to describe a teaching strategy where students read in one language (Welsh) and discussed in another (English) and produced writing or speaking in the other language (Welsh) again. This reinforced both languages simultaneously.
In the 1990s, the term was translated into English as ‘translanguaging’. And eventually, it came to describe how multilingual people naturally use their full linguistic repertoire as one integrated system, rather than switching between separate languages.
Translanguaging at ISU
Here at ISU, translanguaging is guided by our ISU translanguaging matrix (see figure 1 below). The matrix has been developed by the PYP ELA Team in collaboration with our educational consultant Eowyn Crisfield and adapted from a model devised by Groningen University.
Language awareness - Greeting of the week
To foster positive attitudes towards language, each morning Grade 2 teachers and students inquire into the Greeting of the Week. Together they discuss similarities and differences between their home languages and the Greeting of the Week. They look for patterns in the focussed language’s writing system, practise the pronunciation of words, perform mini dialogues and try to find members of staff or students to greet.
Language Comparison - Examining language chunks
As part of our first creative writing unit, learners built a bank of vocabulary of words to describe a creature. As a translanguaging engagement, we read a book in Welsh. Before we read the book, teachers asked the children to listen carefully and try to find the Welsh equivalent of the English phrase, ‘My dragon is…’ This phrase was repeated often in the book as each dragon was described. By the end of the book and without any previous knowledge of Welsh (well, at least we think not!), the entire class was able to say:
‘Mae fy nraig i’n…’
We then compared the word order of all the languages and through translanguaging, we established the following generalisations about language:
‘Different languages use a different number of words, different word order and different punctualisation to express the same idea.’
Spontaneous translanguaging
Every day and in almost every lesson, the inquiring student will ask, ‘What does ____ mean?’ To foster translanguaging, the teacher asks, ‘Does anyone know how to say this word in another language?’. Children respond with a negotiation of meaning across languages and language families until we have much more than a definition in the language of instruction; we have a living on-the-spot multilingual dictionary co-constructed in real time by the learners of the class.
Planned translanguaging
We talk transparently about translanguaging with grade 2 students- they have all heard the expression and are developing their understanding of how the strategy works. For example, when recently investigating the apostrophe ‘s’ to show possession in English, students were first given the sentence, ‘This is Bob’s bag’ in their home languages. Children used their home language knowledge to work out the meaning of the sentence in English, sharing cross-linguistic connections.
Our most important stakeholders in our translanguaging is YOU! Yes, dear parent… this is your moment. You have come in tirelessly to support your child’s and you child’s peer group’s home language development through our Plurilingual Parental Partnership (PPP) endeavour which we now run in grades 1 and 2.
Before each of our new units of inquiry, teachers determine key vocabulary which learners will require as a hook into the unit as well as throughout the unit as their conceptual understandings deepen. Parents translate the vocabulary and our resident parent artist, Maria, creates illustrations to match the words. Parents then come in and run mini lessons with their language group, to teach them the unit vocabulary. The PPP engagement takes the form of language posters, which form part of a classroom glossary across all languages.