10. Unravelling Translanguaging: The Potential of Translanguaging as a Scaffold among Teachers and Pupils in Superdiverse Classrooms in Flemish Education

Translingual Discursive Spaces in Language and Arts Lessons

“…Although on the margins of the main classroom activity, translanguaging occurs naturally in studentstudent-interactions. These findings are in line with those from other studies that have shown that students are shuttling between languages contributed by others to co-construct meaning [2,14,15]. For example, Rosiers [14] has shown that, in spite of a clear policy against multilingualism, translanguaging did occur in student-student-interactions.…”

“…The first excerpt shows that Afomito communicates in an almost monolingual Luxembourgish mode, irrespective of the languages used by Mica, to manage the conversation and to get the task done. He takes up the discussion by repeating the verb they have to extend (line 2), he signals understanding (lines 6, 10) and confirms Mica's utterances (lines 14,20). In spite of his scarce deviations from Luxembourgish, Afomito intermittently shifts to German (lines 2, 4, 12, 14, 16, 18, 22) to refer to subject-related terminology.…”

“…Translanguaging becomes a 'problematic positioning tool' [8] that enables students to leverage their home language in an unequal way. Instead of being a strategy of resistance in the struggle against social inequality, it becomes another dominating force that translates into covert [14] or reductive translanguaging [2], leading students to suppress parts of their cultural and linguistic resources rather than strategically mobilize them to support their learning.…”

“…Surprisingly, here, it is not the teacher but one of Afomito's peers who engages in 'pedagogical' translanguaging [15] by contextualizing the German word 'teilen' and, hereby, taking over the role of the more knowledgeable other. Occurring at the margins of the classroom, without the teacher being present [14], Mica's translanguaging is likely to be related to his own agentive languaging [18].…”

“…In this excerpt, Portuguese is an incentive not only to initiate but also to further stimulate and broaden the conversation. The students begin with an enumeration of green fruit (lines 1-8), quickly move on to comparing languages (lines [14][15] and, then, bring in their cultural resources (lines 13,18). Ultimately, the students discuss the spelling of the English words Raquel has offered.…”