What is 'Translanguaging' ?

Concept — Translanguaging comes from multilingual education theory: a bilingual learner is not treated as holding two sealed language systems, but one shared pool of language ability. Teaching built on this principle plans for every language the learner already knows to be used together as a resource for thinking, understanding and expressing ideas.

Application — The stem asks for a definition. Read against that principle, translanguaging is the pedagogical process of using more than one language as resources in a classroom: “pedagogical process” captures that the teacher plans it deliberately, and “as resources” captures that the languages serve meaning-making instead of being kept apart from each other.

Contrast — The other three statements name different ideas:

• Moving from one language to another while teaching and learning is code-switching, or language alternation: the two languages remain separate and the speaker changes over from one to the other.

• Understanding how languages change over the period of time is historical (diachronic) linguistics, a field that studies language change rather than a method of teaching.

• Language-in-education policy on how many languages are to be taught in a school is an administrative decision taken at system level, such as the Three-Language Formula.

Conclusion — Translanguaging is therefore the pedagogical process of using more than one language as resources in a classroom.