NPP 9: Translanguaging

 This National Priorities Project on how our Year 7 French Art Exhibition engages Interculturality with classroom language learning, is taking me on quite a journey. In previous posts I have raised as yet unresolved questions about tasks and resources which operate on different levels on a continuum between mechanical grammar drills and communicative self-expression. The lens of the Year 7 Exhibition will allow us to view the importance of this and apply it to our curriculum as a whole.

Today it feels as if the next step of our journey should be a diversion via Translanguaging.

What is Translanguaging?

I will start with general impressions and then try to look deeper into how it works and its relevance to our curriculum.

I associate Translanguaging with language teaching in the United States, maybe more in a Primary school context. I hope I am not miss characterising it if I say it seems to be a bit of a Dora the Explorer approach, mixing English with items of Spanish vocabulary. It aims to be culturally rich, effusive in its can-do attitude and unconcerned with nitty gritty grammar.

So you might get sentences like Ireri went to a local tianguis to buy some tasty uchepos for her abuelita because they remind her of her pueblo where she grew up in Michoacán.

It exists in a country where cultural contact and identity is in play. Monolingual and monocultural Americans enjoy moving into a multicultural space. The children of Spanish speakers learn to value and take part in their heritage language.

I hope I haven't done it too many injustices in this initial description. We certainly need to look more carefully at what is going on...

Translanguaging is based in a belief in language acquisition through comprehensible input. It tells us we shouldn't worry about pace or sequencing because we know that with enough input, the human brain will learn language. It is a communicative approach, but a reaction against a 100% target language approach that seeks to banish L1 (English) from the classroom. It seeks to acknowledge that pupils come with language knowledge. Learning another language builds on this rather than starting from scratch in a separate silo.

It acknowledges that most errors learners make are because they apply L1 assumptions to the language they are learning. And it fully embraces this without fear. Rather than holding up perfection in knowledge and use of the Target Language, it wants to see a slow accretion of proficiency in other languages as an extension of pupils' existing language.

And for the purposes of our NPP project, it is tightly bound up with Interculturality and identity. Learners are not denying their own linguistic identity and building a new language from scratch in the shadow of an unobtainable native speaker ideal. They are augmenting their own identity and linguistic repertoire with new exploration and experiences.

It never doubts for a minute that self expression, meaning and Interculturality trump drills, accuracy and explicit grammatical knowledge.

From our point of view it is extraordinary. We find it hard to imagine an approach which mixes languages, which isn't about learning to parse accurate sentences, which doesn't aim for mastery of a conceptual system, and which doesn't start out by trying to erase our accent and L1 syntax.

In recent years, the OFSTED research review and NCELP diagnosed that there isn't time in school for acquisition through comprehensible input to take place. And prescribed a hot housing of well sequenced grammatical conceptualisation as the only viable alternative.

Translanguaging refuses to be worried by this. It leads with the initial introduction of lexical and cultural items which sit happily in sentences with L1 syntax. Grammatical features will follow in good time and at their own pace. Meanwhile they shouldn't be an obstacle to self expression. In fact they are a reflection of the speaker's identity as an American learning Spanish. The here and now of the classroom is a communicative and intercultural space where language learning is an extension of the learner's identity.

It is confident that the language learning experience isn't about chasing native standards of accuracy. It's confident that language learning is a journey to be enjoyed. And it's confident that language learning, although it takes time, is something that we are naturally good at.

I have to stop and go to pick the car up from its MOT now. But along with Littlewood's continuum from mechanical to communicative, and Task Based Learning, we can see that Translanguaging is a vision of language learning we should take into account when looking at how identity, communication and Interculturality engage with accumulation of language and the ability to use it. And I do have some answers. Not definitive answers, but thoughts and insights based on the examination of our curriculum we are undertaking in this National Priorities Project...

Next Post: Are we more comfortable with Interlanguage than Translanguaging?