Challenging Minority Language Isolation: Translanguaging in a Trilingual School in the Basque Country

Abstract

Learning two or more languages at school is quite common all over Europe, but languages are often isolated from each other. This pedagogical practice is in contrast to the way multilingual speakers use their whole linguistic repertoire when communicating in social contexts. These multilingual solitudes are challenged when translanguaging pedagogies are used and multilingual students are allowed to use the resources in their linguistic repertoire. The specific focus of this article is to examine translanguaging as a pedagogical tool as related to a context wherein Basque is the main language of instruction, but a minority language in society. The article reports the characteristics of a pedagogical intervention based on translanguaging, which aims at developing language awareness, metalinguistic awareness, and communicative and academic competences in Basque, Spanish, and English. Our findings show that pedagogical translanguaging can be compatible with the maintenance and development of a minority language.

Teaching English through pedagogical translanguaging

“…The languages involved in these studies are Indo‐European and their vocabularies are more likely to be related but pedagogical translanguaging can also include non‐Indo‐European languages such as Basque. Leonet, Cenoz, and Gorter (2017) report a study where compounds in Basque, Spanish and English are compared and the similarities and differences in their structure is compared.…”

Developing morphological awareness across languages: translanguaging pedagogies in third language acquisition

“…They concluded that translanguaging, understood in the original Welsh way as using different languages for input and output, was a useful tool because it facilitated the understanding of content. The potential benefits of pedagogical translanguaging have also been highlighted by Canagarajah (2011) or Leonet, Cenoz, and Gorter (2017).…”

Conceções dos professores portugueses sobre multilinguismo e práticas educativas em salas de aula multilingues

“…O modo como se concebe a aprendizagem da L2 ou L3 tem subjacente representações sobre as línguas (L1, L2, L3) e pode estar eivado de ideologia (Conteh & Meier, 2014). Conceber o conhecimento linguístico de mais do que uma língua como a integração de sistemas mais do que como sistemas isolados de conhecimento, aproxima-se do que se pensa ser o modo de agir dos falantes multilingues (Aronin, 2019;Leonet, Cenoz, & Gorter, 2017;Lewis, Jones & Baker, 2012). E pode transformar-se numa ferramenta pedagógica valiosa ao mobilizar os reportórios linguísticos dos estudantes para desenvolver a consciência linguística, o conhecimento metalinguístico e competências comunicativas e académicas em várias línguas (Leonete t al., 2017).…”