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As we move into 2019, the United Nations' International Year of Indigenous Languages, it's time to consider not only how we think about Canada's linguistic identity but also how we might develop best practices for learning and teaching languages.

Since 1969, Canada has recognized two official languages, English and French, but many people who live in the country are in fact multilingual. There are approximately 60 Indigenous languages and 140 immigrant languages in Canada besides English and French.

For example, in my own case I use five languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English and a little Italian and French. I was born in Brazil in a family with Italian and Spanish heritage, and learned Portuguese, the country's official language, at school. Later, I learned English, followed by French after I moved to Montréal. In Canada, stories like mine are more common than we think.

To teach English in a way that acknowledges multiple languages in Canada, we need an approach that values and advances students' existing language and cultural identities.

Plurilingual instruction is an approach that doesn't discourage or shy away from using the learner's primary language(s) when the new language is introduced. Plurilingual approaches seek to move beyond monolingual approaches, focused on the target language only.

A plurilingual approach can be taken to teach any new language. But in particular, my research has led me to focus on how plurilingual approaches to teaching English could change students' experiences of language learning.

English is often a second or third language

In Canada, 7.7 million residents speak a non-official language as a mother tongue, an increase of 13.3 per cent between 2011 to 2016, and the number of people speaking more than one language at home is on the rise.

Using more than one language is not uncommon in Canada, particularly in metropolitan areas such as Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver where switching and mixing languages for different purposes is part of everyday life.

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Canada is multicultural in addition to being multilingual. Cultural diversity is not only represented by immigrant cultures but also by diversity within Indigenous, anglophone and francophone groups. After all, these groups are both linguistically and culturally diverse in the sense that not everyone who speaks the same language and is part of the same cultural background speaks or behaves the same way.

While Canada recognizes English and French as official languages, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called for the revitalization, promotion and preservation of the country's Indigenous languages. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act also mandates that we "preserve and enhance the use of languages other than English and French, while strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada."

But the way English language programs have presented teaching English to students doesn't acknowledge the diversity of multiple linguistic backgrounds. The category "English as a second language" - so common now it is frequently shorthanded to ESL - ignores the fact that many students find themselves in my situation: they are, in fact, studying English as a third, fourth or fifth language.

Further, ESL programs often undervalue the use of more than one language to access information, communicate and use cultural knowledge in interactions with people from diverse backgrounds.

Benefits to students

In plurilingual language instruction, teachers focus on developing what linguists call a linguistic repertoire rather than the mastery of one language only.

Plurilingual instruction values the use of languages, dialects (or varieties of language) as well as cultural knowledge that students have developed throughout their lives; they build on this knowledge to further develop proficiency in the new target language.

For example, students learn strategies such as translanguaging: when learning words in the target languages, they reflect on similarities and differences in other languages.

And, as the language learner's confidence grows with switching between languages, this also develops the person's ability and confidence to make language choices and manage language risks in socially and linguistically diverse social settings.

Thus, researchers believe that embedded with plurilingual competence is also pluricultural competence: learners experience greater comfort with, and enjoyment in, the fluid linguistic and cultural demands and opportunities of communicating in diverse societies.

While plurilingual instruction is relatively new in Canada, many countries including Uganda, Spain and Mexico have introduced plurilingual instruction and reported benefits of linking linguistic and cultural diversity in language education.

Studies based in Canada alone suggest that when teachers use a plurilingual approach language students gain opportunities to personally identify with multiple languages and value multiple strategies for language learning. Students also become confident and skilled in using different languages or a language mix depending on their location.

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In my most recent study, I examined plurilingual instruction in comparison to regular instruction that emphasized one language only (monolingual) in a university English language program in Toronto.

I recruited seven teachers who taught the same program to 129 students but used different approaches.

After four months, students who received plurilingual instruction reported it was beneficial for the development of cognition, linguistic and cultural empathy, relatability, critical thinking and willingness to learn more languages, among other benefits.

All of the teachers in my study showed preference for plurilingual instruction and reported that it challenges cultural stereotypes and encourages students to be active, engaged learners who are empowered and confident with their own language use.

While more research is needed to confirm these results, future research could also be done in classrooms where French is taught as the official language, or where any languages are taught to help our understanding of benefits of plurilingual instruction.

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It's time to change the way we teach English

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As we move into 2019, the United Nations' International Year of Indigenous Languages, it's time to consider not only how we think about Canada's linguistic identity but also how we might develop best practices for learning and teaching languages.

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Milpera - Translanguaging - Michelle Ocriciano

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There Is No Best Method—Why?N. S. PRABHU

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There Is No Best Method—Why?N. S. PRABHU

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Enter your email address below. If your address has been previously registered, you will receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password. If you don't receive an email, you should register as a new user

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(Critical) discourse analysis in foreign language study in an age of multilingualism

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"(Critical) discourse analysis in foreign language study in an age of multilingualism"

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REVIEW: The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning

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REVIEW: The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning

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The Translanguaging Classroom | Caslon Publishing

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Caslon makes books for administrators and teachers of bilingual and English learners on differentiating instruction, assessment, biliteracy, translanguaging, and special education.

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Review: A Brief History of Neoliberalismby David Harvey

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Review: A Brief History of Neoliberalismby David Harvey

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Education, Multilingualism and Translanguaging in the 21st century

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Education, Multilingualism and Translanguaging in the 21st century

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Psychology Today interview with Ofelia Garcia

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Psychology Today interview with Ofelia Garcia

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Interview conducted by François Grosjean

In the last ten years or so, a new term has appeared in the field of bilingualism, most notably in the area of bilingual education - translanguaging. One of its most visible proponents is Professor Ofelia García of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In a 2015 publication with Ricardo Otheguy and Wallis Reid, she defines translanguaging as, "... the deployment of a speaker's full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages". Ofelia García has very kindly accepted to answer a few of our questions and we wish to thank her wholeheartedly.
You are a strong defender of allowing bilingual students in school to use their entire language repertoire through translanguaging. You write, "... forbidding bilinguals to translanguage, or assessing it negatively, produces an inaccurate measure of their language proficiency." Can you expand on this a bit?
If we are truly interested in knowing what bilingual students know and what they can do with language, we must separate their ability to use certain forms of one language or another from their ability to use language. For example, in schools, students are asked to find the main idea of a text, to support an argument with text-based evidence, to infer, to make a convincing oral presentation, to work out a math problem. Especially emergent bilingual students may not be able to show that they can do these things if only allowed to use the language legitimized in school. Only by drawing from their entire language repertoire will bilingual students be able to demonstrate what they know, and especially what they can do with language. Being able to perform with language-specific features legitimized in schools is not the same as having general language ability or being knowledgeable of content.
Translanguaging in the classroom functions well when the children and the teacher share the same minority language. But in many other classrooms, students come from many different language backgrounds. How can translanguaging take place then?
Translanguaging pedagogy requires a different type of teacher, a co-learner. Classrooms are increasingly multilingual in the world. It is impossible for teachers to know all the languages of students. But it is possible for teachers to build a classroom ecology where there are books and signage in multiple languages; where collaborative groupings are constructed according to home language so that students can deeply discuss a text in the dominant school language with all their language resources; where students are allowed to write and speak with whatever resources they have and not wait until they have the "legitimate" ones to develop a voice; where all students language practices are included so as to work against the linguistic hierarchies that exist in schools; where families with different language practices are included. Any teacher, including a monolingual one, can take up translanguaging to enable their bilingual students to make deeper meaning and legitimize their home language practices.
Given that bilingual students, as they grow older, will increasingly find themselves interacting with monolinguals, especially in their future work place, should schools also encourage them to "keep to one language" and measure their proficiency at doing so?
Translanguaging leverages the fluid language practices of all bilingual students and communities to learn deeply, while also equipping students to recognize when to use what features for what purposes. Of course schools must develop bilingual students' critical metalinguistic awareness, and their ability to suppress some language features from their repertoire at appropriate times. And schools must give students affordances to perform with only some of their features at times. And teachers must assess what students can do using their entire repertoire of language features, as well as selected ones. Yet, teachers should not evaluate bilingual children's performances using only certain of their language features as being valid performances, and should not compare those performances to those of monolingual children in that language.
Turning to the more linguistic and cognitive aspects of translanguaging, how does the notion that a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person - something I stressed as early as 1985 - tie in to translanguaging?
Your notion is essential to the concept of translanguaging. Translanguaging is based on François Grosjean's idea that bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one (see here). That is why their performances in one or another language cannot be compared to that of monolinguals, since they would then be expected to draw only from less than half of their entire repertoire. This puts bilinguals in an unfair position.
In what way is translanguaging different from interacting with other bilinguals, changing base language freely, translating whenever needed, and intermingling one's languages in the form of codeswitching and borrowing?
There is an epistemological difference between the theoretical position on language contact that has led to the constructs of borrowing, code-switching, calques, language interference, etc. and the concept of translanguaging. Language contact studies start with named languages as categories, and then look across these named categories. Linguists often refer to the behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others. For these bilingual speakers, their language features are simply their own. Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is going beyond named languages and taking the internal view of the speaker's language use.
The linguistic phenomena mentioned in the previous question have been studied by researchers for more than sixty years. What are the benefits of replacing them with "translanguaging" when the behavior is clearly the same?
The behavior may look to be the same from the external social perspective, from a perspective that doesn't question why named languages and language hierarchies exist or the relationship between language and power. But seen from the internal perspective of the bilingual speaker, translanguaging behavior is clearly different. Translanguaging legitimizes the fluid language practices with which bilinguals operate. It posits that bilinguals have a much more complex and expanded repertoire than monolinguals. Bilingual speakers then appropriate all their linguistic features, no matter their social standing, instead of categorizing them as belonging to one national group or another to which they may not belong.
In your 2015 paper with Ricardo Otheguy and Wallis Reid, you state that we all have our own idiolect - a collection of individual lexical and structural features - and that there are large areas of overlap among idiolects so that we can communicate with one another. People call this sharing a language (e.g. English), something that is psychologically real for them, and yet you state that language is only a social and political construct, not a lexical or structural one. Can you explain?
Linguists can only describe linguistic features, but they cannot say as linguists which features constitute one language or another. The naming of a language is always a social, political and economic decision, not a linguistic one. Thus, it is not true that separate named languages have linguistic reality. However, it is true that languages are social constructs that have had very important real and material consequences in the lives of people, some bad, and some good. This social construction of language also has an important identity function for groups and individuals that cannot be denied. But named languages have often been constructed by a process of standardization that leaves out the practices of minoritized populations.
Bilinguals, according to you, only have one idiolect made up of more lexical and structural features than monolinguals and a more complex socio-cultural marking of which features to use and when. What evidence do you have, cognitive or neurolinguistic, that bilinguals do not have separate idiolects, one for each of their languages?
I am a sociolinguist who has specialized in the education of bilinguals. My evidence comes from the classrooms and from listening to bilingual children. From the bilingual eleven year old who once told me: "Spanish runs through my heart, but English rules my veins," concretely expressing that for him there is one language system that cannot be separated because otherwise it would lead to his death. From the five year old Spanish-speaker who was learning English by repeating after the teacher, "That tree is grander." From the teacher who tells me that her young first graders are always talking to themselves in Spanish, even when working through English. The work of neurolinguists is also beginning to show that when bilingual speakers perform linguistically, all the features of their repertoire are activated and available, even though speakers selectively suppress some features depending on the communicative situation in which they find themselves.

For a full list of "Life as a bilingual" blog posts by content area, see here.

Photo of a group of school kids with their teacher from Shutterstock.

References

García, Ofelia (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell/Wiley.

Otheguy, Ricardo, García, Ofelia & Reid, Wallis (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281-307.

François Grosjean's website.

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Interview conducted by François Grosjean In the last ten years or so, a new term has appeared in the field of bilingualism, most notably in the area of bilingual education - translanguaging. One of its most visible proponents is Professor Ofelia García of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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EAL Journal

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'Translanguaging' - the use of different languages together - can be a powerful tool for learning ... but it can also go against the grain for language teachers who are used to supporting learners to master the intricacies of a single language. In this post, we ask what the research tells us about 'translanguaging' and how it can be used to support EAL learners in the classroom.

Picture the scene: two students are sitting together, working intently on a handout. They have different first languages but some shared knowledge of the words and phrases of each other's languages, so they are moving in and out of English to get their message across. Another two students are sitting together nearby. Both of them are Spanish speakers, but are very strong in English and often use it as their main language. At other times, as now, they blend Spanish and English together.

Are either of these examples of translanguaging?

In both cases, yes. The young people are using resources from different languages together, with very little regard for what we might call the 'boundaries' of named languages such as 'Spanish' or 'English'. They are using elements of each language together to communicate more effectively. This is translanguaging: it's about using the all your language resources to communicate.

Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.

Ofelia García (2009: 140)

Translanguaging is about communication, not about language itself. There are times when we need to be language teachers, focusing on accuracy in English so that our learners can pass exams and be taken as proficient speakers in wider society. Much of the time, though, we are working with students to explore concepts, add to their knowledge, make connections between ideas and to help them make their voices heard by others. This is often about communicating, and this is where using all our language resources can be very valuable.
A (very) brief history of translanguaging ...
Translanguaging is nothing new - it can be a very natural way for multilingual people to communicate - but as a focus of research it emerged in the 1980s in Bangor, north Wales. Cen Williams and colleagues were investigating strategies for learners to use two languages (Welsh and English) in a single lesson. They came up with the term 'trawsieithu' to describe reading or hearing input in one language (e.g. English) and writing or speaking about it in another (e.g. Welsh, or vice versa). The term was translated into English (and popularised) as 'translanguaging' by their colleague Colin Baker (see Lewis, Jones and Baker 2012).

Since then the term has expanded to cover the use of multiple languages in many contexts. It is one of a series of related terms (such as polylanguaging and flexible multilingualism) and the subtle differences between them suggest the wide range of academic work investigating how multiple languages are used - especially for learning. We can use 'translanguaging' as our general term.
The beginnings of a translanguaging pedagogy
Translanguaging pedagogy challenges what Jim Cummins (2008) called the 'two solitudes' approach to bilingualism, in which languages were kept strictly separate. It sees languages as a property of the community: the language resources that are relevant to the classroom are those shared by the students and the teacher. This separates the languages of the classroom community and the language of the test or the curriculum. We can use our classroom repertoire to learn, share and communicate, coming to focus on the language of the curriculum (highly formal and accurate English, for example) as necessary. It means making a distinction between forms of learning that require display (such as essays, often written in 'best English') and forms of learning that do not (such as worksheets). We can move between them within a lesson: perhaps using all our repertoire to discuss and to draft, moving into more formal/correct English to report to the group, back into translanguaging to revise the work-in-progress and into a very formal register for the final written product.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the strongly monolingual slant of recent education policy, much work into translanguaging pedagogy has been done outside mainstream classrooms. Creese and Blackledge (2010), for example, have looked at Gujarati and Chinese complementary schools. Li Wei and Zhu Hua (2013) studied learners at university, but connected translanguaging to migration and identity development in ways that are very relevant to school-based language policies. Hornberger and Link (2012) look at children the US, with an explicit focus on the restrictive language policies of that country, and offer ideas that are very applicable to the UK. A good starting point is García and Li Wei (2014) - a recent and very readable (only 165 pages) discussion that has a strong focus on translanguaging and education, with one author based in the US and one based in the UK.

The first issue of the EAL Journal (published in September and free to all NALDIC members) features Li Wei writing about translanguaging and the EAL classroom. Click here for information on how to join.
Recent developments
García's recent work has focused on translanguaging pedagogy as a political act, a critical response to the monolingual bias of current education policy. Earlier this year the South London EAL Group (part of NALDIC's national network of regional interest groups) discussed García's work on translanguaging stance - a teacher's political commitment to encouraging bilingualism in her classroom. The video below features Constant Leung discussing this approach and explaining how it connects to the UK context:
Constant Leung discussing Ofelia García's work on translanguaging, at NALDIC's South London EAL group. But what about exams?
Very often, we meet the colleagues who are keen to encourage multilingualism in their classroom (even experiment with a translanguaging pedagogy), but who are worried about how it will affect their students' exam performance.

A translanguaging approach is entirely consistent with high expectations in exams - if we recognise the difference between language and communication.

testing the proficiency of children in a language must be kept separate from testing their proficiency in language.

(Otheguy, García and Reid 2015: 299)

Translanguaging pedagogy is about you and your students. It draws on the languages you have available to your group - so even if you don't speak all (or any) of the other languages your students do, you can welcome them and encourage the learners to use them in the classroom. You can then make a distinction between your classroom approach to languages and the language resources the students will need to use in exams. If you have used a translanguaging pedagogy in your classroom (even if that wasn't the term you used for it) we would love to hear from you.
References
Creese, Angela and Adrian Blackledge (2010). Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching? Modern Language Journal 94 (1), 103-115.

Cummins, Jim (2008). Teaching for Transfer: Challenging the two solitudes assumption in bilingual education. In: Jim Cummins and Nancy H. Hornberger (eds). Encyclopedia of Language and Education Vol. 5: Bilingual Education (2nd edition edition). Boston: Springer Science + Business Media.

García, Ofelia (2009). Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century. In: Ajit Mohanty, Minati Panda, Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (eds). Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the local. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, pp.128-145.

García, Ofelia, S. Johnson and K. Seltzer (forthcoming). Translanguaging Stance. In: Ofelia García (ed.). The Translanguaging Classroom. Philadelphia, PA: Carson.

Lewis, Gwyn, Bryn Jones and Colin Baker (2012). Translanguaging: origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation 18 (7), 641-654.

Li Wei and Zhu Hua (2013). Translanguaging Identities and Ideologies: Creating Transnational Space Through Flexible Multilingual Practices Amongst Chinese University Students in the UK. Applied Linguistics 34 (5), 516-535.

Otheguy, Ricardo, Ofelia García and Wallis Reid (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (3), 281-307.

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Interested in translanguaging and what it means for EAL? We look at the research and share the essential info.

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Ofelia García on "Translanguaging" during the Multilingualism & Diversity Lectures 2017.

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Ofelia García on "Translanguaging" during the Multilingualism & Diversity Lectures 2017.