Speaker 1: Many of you will have heard the word translanguaging in
relation to languages teaching. There's a great deal of hype
around translanguaging. We want to make sure that you get
a sensible, practical understanding of what trans languaging can do
and how it might be used in a language's classroom.
The one thing is that we know that the conventional
view of languages is that two languages are generally taught
as two isolated systems. The focus has tended to be
historically on the structure of those languages. So you've got
the vocabulary, you've got the actual grammatical structure, and so on.
But most people who live in bilingual and multilingual parts
of the world engage in practices where they bring words,
they borrow words from one language, they pop them into
the language that they're using. English, by the way, is
not a pure language. It is a dog's breakfast of languages. Okay,
it is just the biggest advertising I don't I think
you have another word in Australia. In South Africa we
would say fufy. It is the biggest furfy of all time.
Because it's not actually one language, it's just a collation
of languages. Okay, We've borrowed from Greek, Roman, every single
language community that the English speakers have ever come into
contact with. They just pinched their vocabulary, popped them in,
and there there is English. Okay. So what happens is
English has been trans languaging. It has been borrowing words,
it has been absorbing words people have been using, alternating
between expressions in English or French or German. They put Latin,
sometimes they pop them in. All over the place. In
our South Australia, We've borrowed a lot of vocabulary from
all of the migrant community who have come here, and
we have borrowed a lot of vocabulary from the indigenous
communities who were here before all of us. So, code
mixing is mixing of languages. Usually you have a dominant
structure and you just incorporate a few words or phrases
into a dominant language. Code switching can be a chunk
of language you speak, or you write, or you use
a chunk of one language and you switch over and
you use another chunk of a language. The technical thing
is that if you use at least a clause in
a sentence in one language and you switch over, and
you then you develop a second clause a subordinate clause
in the second language. You are code switching. If you
have one sentence in one language and you alternate with
one sentence in a second language, that is code switching.
If you speak for ten minutes in one language, or
you write a paragraph in one language and you switch
over and you write or speak in the other language,
that is code switching. We normally do this for particular purposes.
It's not arbitrary. Everybody's got a reason for why they
do this. We often do this when we want to
emphasize something. We often do this for effect. I used
to do this with my children. If I wanted them
to listen to me, they wouldn't listen to me and
behave and obey me in English, so I'd have to
invoke also because that's ooh okay. We use code switching
very often for deliberate purposes. Now, sometimes in teaching languages,
the idea that children or students might code mix or
code switch has got a bad name, and it's been
regarded as an illegitimate practice. So, during the period when
we felt that it was necessary to separate two languages
completely and use a direct method or the audio lingual method,
we said to students in the classroom, you are only
going to speak French, you are only going to speak Chinese.
But that has never happened. In practice. We have always
engaged in various code mixing and code switching practices because
as teachers, we know the students can't understand only the
target language we have to mediate, so we use code
switching actually quite purposefully, quite often. So what has happened
is that there's now a contemporary view that this is
a normal thing to do. And because we move back
and forth between languages, people have started saying language is
not a thing, it's not a noun, and it's actually
a verb. It's a process. We're involved in languaging. The
word translanguaging is a translation of a Welsh term for
the practice of purposeful or deliberate code switching in a
classroom in a bilingual classroom between Welsh and English. Welsh
used for explaining what's going on. English use for reading
and writing perhaps, and vice versa, so that the term
originally came from purposeful code switching, usually in order to
make students feel comfortable in the classroom. So when we
are saying it's important to work with the children, or
the students' home languages, their English, and their additional languages.
We try to make things very comfortable for the students
in the classroom. We might use trans languaging so that
we are promoting students well being. We're trying to equalize things.
We're trying to make language learning not a big, terrifying ordeal,
but it's something where if you don't know everything, you
will be able to you'll be able to use your
trans languaging practices. So we can use trans languaging for convivial,
horizontal purposes, and that helps students to feel comfortable in
the classroom. However, it's also our job to ensure that
students learn the target language as well as possible, so
we also have to find ways to separate the language
and usually the target language. We're teaching the target language,
we're teaching the vocabulary, teaching the sentence structure, we're teaching
students to read and write text in the target language.
So we use both horizontal and vertical aspects of translanguaging.
And what we're trying to suggest here is that it's
really important to know that you can use the horizontal
approaches to translanguaging for part of the time, but not
all of the time. Most likely because you are time strapped,
you have to limit that amount of time, and most
likely you have to spend most of your time on
teaching the target language and separating the languages. But you
can use both both aspects of trans languaging, and the
way to focus on the vertical approach is to use translation,
translating things like wise sayings, translating little stories, and reading
and writing tasks that the students can work with.
Speaker 2: So we've talked a bit about trans languaging, this great buzzword.
Thinking about this, I broke down some purposes that trans
languaging can serve in your language's classroom. And of course
trans languaging can be English in the target language. It
can be home languages and English, home languages and target
language and everything together. So these multi lingual practices can
support students to work together. It can be a teaching strategy,
and it can be something that teaches model to show
this is what multi lingual people do. It can support
fluency in writing and earlier Catheen was talking about fluency
as you know, being able to write quickly or just
continue without being stuck, and trans Languaging can be a
very useful little shortcut to say, don't know that word,
I'll pop it down and come back to it later.
Trans Languaging, particularly for students who multi lingual, is a
support for their higher order thinking because they have additional
resources which help them think about things from a different
perspective or think with a different level of ease about
concepts that you're teaching in the class. Trans Languaging and
this is I find really exciting, can be content that
students can analyze to say, hey, what's happening with language here,
what's happening with languages together here? And you'll see an
example of this. And of course translation is a really
specific set of skills that students can learn and developed
from early ages and with different profession sees in languages.
So these are examples that we will see. Trans Languaging
for multi lingual students is a very purposeful practice. It's
always purposeful, it's never an accident. And I'm sure in
your own experience you would understand where I'm coming from
when I say that. And trans languaging supports relationships, it
supports learning, it supports connection to culture and keeping culture
and language alive. Particularly in an environment that can sometimes
feel hostile or a bit limiting when minority languages come
into play. And also really importantly, translanguaging supports personal identity.
So I can give you some examples here of what
students in this school we're doing with language. So we
can see here students use language to support their family
and to connect with the community, and to make connections
between family members and the community through translation. Students use
their languages for collaborative learning and to support each other.
And you can see in the second example of Selena,
she was helping a new student from India in science,
but they didn't actually have a shared language as such.
So Selena was Afghan, she spoke Azaragi. She'd lived in
Pakistan and she knew ur Do. The other student was Gujarati,
so she spoke Gadrati, but she also knew Hindi. Now,
as luck would have it, Hindi and or Do for
these students was mutually comprehensible languages, so they could communicate
with each other. Students also use their languages for their
independent learning. And you can see the exacts of Shanaia,
who would you know, think about something in English? Think no,
that's not working, I'll switch to my other language and
see see what happens. See if I can come up
with some more ideas. So trans languaging, I mean, none
of this happened by accident. All of it took effort,
but all of it supported learning and it was totally
worth it. But the question is what the teachers think?
First of all, do they know what's going on? Sometimes?
Do they know what to do with it? Not very often,
And this is sometimes where we get a bit maybe
worried what do we do with this? But as languages teachers,
I think, you know, we have a good foundation and
we have an advantage that yeah, I get this in
a social context. I can see this is not a
taboo kind of activity. And the question then becomes, you know,
not should it happen or not, but how can I
make this into a resource in my classroom. So we
can see here that these teachers from different learning areas
we've got hass drama languages and English represented here, that
they can see the value of these languages and trans languaging,
and that these practices support their students' identities, support the
subject learning, support their thinking, and support them in language
learning as well. So it can be a tool for fluency,
or it can be a content a type of content
for analysis. But we can see here that it's also
a learning process as well, and something that's purposeful and
worth attending to, I suppose and thinking about how can
we make more of this in our classrooms.