The Scope of the Chapter
Translanguaging is increasingly used in diverse and multilingual classrooms to support multilingual literacy development. That is, the use of more than one language by students is encouraged rather than restricted by single language policies such as the English-only movement. Translanguaging recognizes multilinguals as individuals who draw on all their linguistic resources to communicate.
One group that seldom figures in the translanguaging literature are multilingual speakers in school classrooms who are growing up speaking more than one language of power, i.e., languages that society perceives as advantageous for students’ future careers. These speakers are considered to be native users of their languages. Some examples of such individuals are a student growing up in Sweden using Swedish and English at home, at school, and out of school, or a student growing up in South Africa using Afrikaans and English at home, school, and elsewhere. This chapter focuses on high school classrooms with students who are such multilingual speakers, and who see it as normal, natural, and easy to use their entire language repertoire. For simplicity, in this chapter, these individuals are referred to as advanced multilingual speakers.
This chapter includes examples of how teachers can support translanguaging and translanguaging in writing for advanced multilingual speakers in the classroom. The focus of Teaching Tip 1 is upon how teachers can create translanguaging spaces (Kaufhold, 2018). When producing a multilingual text, advanced multilingual students use all their languages to think and write without the need to monitor that their final texts are in one language. In classrooms without such translanguaging spaces, these highly proficient speakers of several languages are required to use mental energy to restrict their communication to one language only. This cognitive capacity can be used more productively for learning.
Although multilingual classrooms are increasingly common, not least as these classrooms allow students to focus their cognitive capacity on learning and literacy development, there are contexts that require monolingual conversation and texts. These include writing for external assessment and for monolingual readers. Moreover, the ability to deliver texts in only one language is an important skill to learn for working life after high school and is part of the literacy skill set high schools provide their graduates. The production of such texts places greater cognitive demands on advanced multilingual speakers, as they have to check, or monitor, that their final texts are in only one language. The focus of Teaching Tip 2 is how teachers can facilitate and support final year high school students’ transition from production of multilingual to monolingual texts. We refer to this transition as Translanguaging in Writing to Writing withFeature Monitoring.
Using translanguaging systematically and pedagogically in classrooms enhances school students’ home languages and their bilingualism, helping learners to develop fluid multilingual practices which consist of proficiency in their home language(s) and a new language (see also Neokleous, Park, & Krulatz in this volume). In most of the literature to date, the focus is on contexts where translanguaging is an element of emergent bi- or multilingualism including a minority language and a dominant language (such as English). The present chapter contributes another perspective on the theoretical bases of translanguaging through support for the literacy practices of advanced multilingual speakers across the curriculum.