Towards bilingual expertise – evaluating translanguaging pedagogy in bilingual degrees at the university level

Abstract

Abstract A great deal of effort has been made in recent years to promote multilingual values in academia and society. This was one reason why the University of Helsinki introduced the Bilingual Bachelor’s programme (TvEx) in 2010 to guarantee a sufficient number of bilingual professionals in Finnish society. The aim of this study is to explore students’ reflections on the (learning) challenges they face in becoming bilingual experts. The data consist of lecture observations and 13 semi-structured retrospective interviews with 14 students conducted during 2018–2019. The results show that emerging bilingual students need to build a sense of belonging with both language groups in order to develop bilingual expertise. From the students’ point of view, teaching is experienced as satisfactory in terms of both language and content learning, especially in smaller teaching groups in which students feel safe to ask questions and where they are given individual support. It thus seems that learning in terms of both language and disciplinary content could be improved if teachers were to raise language awareness by explicitly addressing the language agenda of the class at the beginning of each course. They could, for example, initiate a discussion on the language situation(s) in the classroom in order to negotiate a functional set of teaching practices that would suit all students present in the class. Our findings also imply that teachers need to develop more student-centred approaches through which they can help their students to deepen content knowledge and to improve language skills.