Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A pedagogy for Learning & Teaching

Translanguaging in the classroom allows children to develop links between the social, cultural, community and linguistic domains of their lives.

This article reports on research that questions commonsense understandings of a bilingual pedagogy predicated on what Cummins (2005, 2008) refers to as the “two solitudes” assumption (2008, p. 65). It sets out to describe a flexible bilingual approach to language teaching and learning in Chinese and Gujarati community language schools in the United Kingdom. We argue for a release from monolingual instructional approaches and advocate teaching bilin gual children by means of bilingual instructional strategies, in which two or more languages are used alongside each other. In developing this argument, the article takes a language ecol ogy perspective and seeks to describe the interdependence of skills and knowledge across languages.

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