Translanguaging as a vehicle for L2 acquisition and L1 development: students’ perceptions

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to report on a project aimed at exploring the use of translanguaging as a strategy to support bi-/multilingual students in acquiring academic literacy in English while promoting the terminologisation of African languages through exploratory scientific talk. The topic is contextualised by juxtaposing multilingualism as a problem with multilingualism as a resource. This is followed by a discussion of translanguaging as an alternative to monolingual education. An overview is given of a number of empirical studies on translanguaging conducted in South Africa during the past 15 years. Subsequently, I discuss a research project that elicited students" opinions about translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy. Speakers of eight African languages, including Afrikaans, experienced cognitive and affective benefits. Despite some reservations, they also considered translanguaging to be a useful platform for creating technical terms in African languages, and were positive about future use.

Die wisselwerking tussen teorie en praktyk in die ontwerp van ’n kurrikulum met transtaling as kernkomponent

“…In 2015 het ek 'n studie van beperkte omvang onderneem om vas te stel of transtalingspraktyke in 'n akademiesegeletterdheidsmodule as voordelig ervaar word deur sprekers van sowel die inheemse Afrikatale as Afrikaans (Carstens 2016). Die meerderheid respondente was van mening dat transtaling binne die konteks van vakspesifieke akademiese geletterdheid konseptualisering vergemaklik.…”

Transcending Solely Print - based Texts through Blogging – A Multimodal Approach

“…To scaffold this meaning-making process by using blogs, translanguaging 5 could be employed as a viable mechanism to support the notion of language as a resource (Carstens 2016), and thus address the linguistic barrier mentioned earlier.…”

“…Kress (2000b: 337) parallels this observation by pointing out that English language professionals present a false impression when they say that 'language fully represented the meanings they wish to encode and communicate'. Dealing with comprehension problems when engaging with text, students would adapt their 'environment in increasingly effective and successful ways ' (Van Lier 2004: 97) by converting their linguistic skills by employing their entire semiotic repertoire and draw upon various sets of language features from different languages or other semiotic systems (Carstens 2016). These multicultural literacies are developed at secondary school to make sense of difficult content and provide them with equal opportunity in the academic environment (Hibbert & Van der Walt 2014).…”

“…linguistic factors and diverse learning styles. These challenges are highlighted by researchers who concur that students enter the tertiary world with various limitations inculcated by their poor conceptual literacy 2 (Rodrigues & Abrahams 2017;Antia & Dyers 2017Carstens 2016;Mkonto 2015;Madiba 2014;Boakye 2012). In addition, Bozalek, Garraway and McKenna (2011: 8) rephrase the cause of this conceptual divide as 'the gap between the ways of knowing which students come with from school and those which the (university) curriculum exposes them to'.…”

“…presenting knowledge through printed text in English, and to a lesser extent printed text in translation form (Millar & Barris 2017;Rodrigues & Abrahams 2017). As tertiary students are mostly exposed solely to print-based texts as primary sources of communication, one could have an opinion that the source of the problem is linguistic in nature as English is in effect the de facto language of learning and teaching (LoLT) (Carstens 2016;Heugh 2007;Alexander 2003). Reading texts produced in English could present various challenges for EAL students to be successful in their efforts in the academic environment (Rodrigues & Abrahams 2017).…”