Translanguaging
What if your learners’ languages aren’t separate boxes?
Translanguaging is multilingual people’s use of all their languages as one resource for making meaning, and a way of teaching that deliberately draws on all of learners’ languages instead of keeping them apart.
In a science lesson in Hà Nội, two students read an English text on photosynthesis, argue about it in Vietnamese, then write their summary in English. Many teachers were trained to treat this as a lapse to be stopped. In Welsh secondary schools, Cen Williams treated something similar as a method, with pupils taking in a lesson in one language and working in the other. In his 1994 thesis he called it trawsieithu, and the English form, translanguaging, spread through Colin Baker’s 2001 textbook.
Ofelia García (2009) widened the term to the everyday ways bilinguals use language to make sense of their worlds. With Li Wei (2014), she built it into a theory of language and education. In the strong version set out by Otheguy, García and Reid (2015), labels such as English and Vietnamese are social and political categories. Inside the speaker, they argue, there is one connected store of words and grammar. This is where translanguaging parts company with code switching, usually described as moving between two separate language systems. Li Wei (2018) goes further, treating gesture, images and other ways of making meaning as part of the same resource.
The idea is contested. Jeff MacSwan (2017) supports translanguaging in school but argues, from code-switching research, that bilinguals do have two distinct grammars in their heads. Jürgen Jaspers (2018) argues that translanguaging is likely to change schools and society less than its advocates claim, while still valuing the research. Still, the classroom case does not hang on the theory: planned use of learners’ languages can scaffold understanding while English remains the target of the task.
In actionTwo languages, one task
- S1
- Câu này nói là cây cần ánh sáng để make glucose, đúng không? (This sentence says plants need light to make glucose, right?)
- S2
- Ừ, và chlorophyll hấp thụ ánh sáng. (Yes, and chlorophyll absorbs the light.) So we write: Plants use light energy to make glucose.
- T
- Good. Now check your English summary against the text.
The students negotiate meaning across Vietnamese and English, but the reading and the written output stay in English: input in one language, discussion in another.
In the classroom
- 1
Pair learners who share a language to discuss an English reading in any language they choose, then require the written output in English, echoing Williams’s planned switch between input and output.
- 2
Build class glossaries in which learners record new English terms with first-language equivalents, an example sentence and a note on where the meanings do not quite match.
- 3
Decide in advance where other languages serve the lesson and where English-only practice matters, and explain both to learners, so that translanguaging is purposeful rather than a default.
Myth and reality
Translanguaging is just a trendy new name for code-switching.
The observable talk can look similar, but proponents describe it from the speaker’s single repertoire rather than as switching between two systems, and also as a deliberate pedagogy. Whether that theoretical difference holds up is still debated.
Reflect
When a student switches to their first language in your class, what is your first reaction, and what belief about language learning is that reaction based on?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Cen Williams coined the Welsh term trawsieithu in his 1994 Bangor doctoral thesis on bilingual secondary teaching. Its English form, translanguaging, spread through Colin Baker’s 2001 textbook on bilingual education. This article by Baker and Bangor colleagues traces how the term travelled from Welsh classrooms to wider use.
Lewis, G., Jones, B., & Baker, C. (2012). Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18(7), 641–654.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.
The standard book-length account of translanguaging as theory and as classroom pedagogy.
Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.
Li Wei’s theoretical statement, elaborating translanguaging space and translanguaging instinct and answering common criticisms.
Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281–307.
The clearest statement of why translanguaging is not code-switching, and of the unitary-repertoire view.
MacSwan, J. (2017). A multilingual perspective on translanguaging. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 167–201.
The main sympathetic critique: keeps translanguaging pedagogy but defends the reality of multiple languages in the bilingual mind.
Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. (2010). Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching?. The Modern Language Journal, 94(1), 103–115.
Classroom data from UK complementary schools showing how teachers and students use flexible bilingualism to learn.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Code-Switchingnot yet writtenDescribes alternation between two systems; translanguaging starts from one repertoire.
- InvestmentTreating learners’ languages as resources can deepen their investment in classroom practices.
- Native-Speakerismnot yet writtenBoth challenge monolingual native-speaker norms as the only legitimate model.
- English as a Lingua Francanot yet writtenAnother research tradition that starts from multilingual speakers rather than native norms.
Know a teacher who’d like this?
Send them the card. It’s made for Facebook, Zalo, LinkedIn and Instagram, and links back here.