Ways to Implement Translanguaging for Turkish-Dutch Children

Abstract

Even though research says that not providing heritage language support to bilingual minority children leads to poor educational outcomes (for a review, see Potowski, 2021), Dutch primary schools provide no Turkish support to Turkish-Dutch children (Extra & Yağmur, 2004). One of the consequences of this is “a vicious circle that connects bilinguals’ language knowledge, language use and language anxiety” (Sevinç & Backus, 2017, p. 1). These children feel anxious about their Turkish abilities which decreases their use of Turkish and since they do not use Turkish, this limits the growth of their Turkish abilities and as their Turkish skills are low, this increases their anxiety about using Turkish (Sevinç & Backus, 2017). Seals and Olsen-Reeder (2020) propose that translanguaging, which “aims to normalize multilinguals’ transgressive performances as natural communicative acts” (Tian et al., 2020, p. 8), and translingual books can be a beneficial resource for heritage language speaking children. When translingual books created by them were employed in education settings, heritage language use increased among the children (Amosa Burgess & Fiti, 2019). While waiting for the educational policies to catch up with decades of research, I propose that translanguaging can be used to alleviate Turkish-Dutch children’s current predicament. Particularly, I put forward several translanguaging activities for parents and teachers to utilize such as using holidays or festivals to bring different cultures, traditions and vocabulary together (e.g. Tian, 2022) or using books with multiple languages (e.g. a Turkish-Dutch translingual book prepared by the author) to encourage children to use both Turkish and Dutch (e.g. Amosa Burgess & Fiti, 2019).