Background: The teaching of reading strategies that enhance comprehension is a priority for many practising lecturers involved in academic literacy programmes. However, due to the unprepared nature of a large section of students entering the Higher Education system, a number of students have been found to lack basic literacy skills such as reading for comprehension. A plethora of studies has been conducted locally and internationally with the aim of finding solutions to help students who struggle with text comprehension, especially at university level.Objectives: The purpose of this research is to show how paraphrasing as a strategy can be combined with a translingual approach to instruct students explicitly on how to read and comprehend textsMethod: Using a group of first-year multilingual medical students, this research included translanguaging as an additional component to the use of paraphrasing as a reading comprehension strategy.Results: The paper provides insight into how translanguaging can be used to assist multilingual students to understand texts through paraphrasing. Drawing empirical data from classroom activities, this paper shows how lecturers can help students to use translanguaging and paraphrasing as metacognitive strategies to help improve their comprehension of texts.Conclusion: Finally, the importance of allowing students to utilise their multilingual repertoires is emphasised and reiterated, through translanguaging, in order to enhance learning.
Since the turn of the century there has been an increase in the use of translanguaging in multilingual learning
contexts. Many researchers have shown how translanguaging enhances multilingual students’ ability to understand academic content.
This experimental study provides empirical evidence that translanguaging can enhance reading comprehension. An experimental group
and a control group were used to establish whether there was a significant difference between the performances of the two groups
after reading an academic text. Using the t-test analysis, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the
control group and the experimental group. These findings prompt us to conclude that translanguaging is an effective strategy that
enhances reading comprehension.
A plethora of research concerned with translanguaging pedagogy exists. The available research shows a considerable effort by researchers at the tertiary level in South Africa. However, the question about which language should be used for assessment, especially at university, has been a matter of concern among many lecturers. Using a group of first-year medical students, a study was conducted to find out if proficiency in the English language is required as a measure of success in content-related material. Statistical analysis of a control group and an intervention group showed a significant difference in the performance of the students after the assessment of a task. The intervention group, that had been given the opportunity to discuss the main ideas of a text and write a summary based on the text, performed better than their counterparts in the control group. However, it should be noted that during the assessment, the English language grammatical rules were not the priority; instead, emphasis was placed on students’ ability to identify and use the main ideas in the summary. The results prompts this researcher to conclude that students are emancipated from the bounds of proficiency in the English language through the use of a translanguaging pedagogy when assessed on their display of content knowledge instead. For this reason, the researcher urges all academics to compile assessments that focus on content knowledge and allow students to use translanguaging to understand and make meaning of content material.
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