Translanguaging

Translanguaging is a term describing the use of more than one language within a single classroom lesson or communicative act, coined in the 1980s by the Welsh-language education researcher Cen Williams to describe a pedagogical practice in which students might, for example, read a text in one language and discuss or write about it in another. The term and the theory behind it have since broadened well beyond that original classroom practice to describe multilingual people's everyday language use generally: rather than treating a bilingual or multilingual person as switching back and forth between two or more separate, bounded language systems, translanguaging theory holds that multilingual speakers draw on a single, unitary linguistic repertoire built from all the linguistic features available to them, selecting and deploying whichever features suit the communicative situation without regard to the named-language boundaries that outside observers, and often the speakers themselves, are used to imposing on that repertoire. In education, translanguaging pedagogy has been promoted as a way to validate the full linguistic resources multilingual students bring to a classroom, encouraging teachers to let students draw on their home languages as a resource for learning content and developing academic language, rather than requiring instruction and student output to stay confined to a single target language at a time.