Translanguaging: navegando entre lenguas – pedagogical translanguaging for multilingual classrooms

Abstract

What is it? Most of the world population speaks two or more languages, which means many classrooms are intrinsically multilingual. In addition, education in more than one language is currently being promoted across the world, and there is an increasing interest in exploring how bilingual speakers are educated, reflecting “the shift from monolingual ideologies in the study of multilingual education to multilingual ideologies and dynamic views of multilingualism” (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020, p. 300). This change in interpreting multilingualism is supported by the emergence of concepts such as translanguaging. Nowadays, the term translanguaging is used in various contexts (for example, bilingual and multilingual education, English-medium instruction, or language teaching, including Content and Language Integrated Learning, or CLIL; see Cenoz & Gorter, 2020, pp. 305-306). Everyday or social translanguaging refers to how multilinguals tactically use their whole linguistic repertoire for communication purposes. Rather than indicating what languages are, translanguaging focuses on what multilingual speakers do with languages, which is to fluidly navigate across them. Therefore, the boundaries between languages become more diffused.