Translanguaging pedagogy for simultaneous biliterates struggling to read in English

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is about implementing a translanguaging approach to teach reading skills in English with simultaneous bilinguals who speak substantial amounts of Malay and Chinese at home. This new pedagogical approach was tried out with 2nd graders in 3 schools in Singapore: instead of the typical immersion approach to teaching reading skills in English, emergent simultaneous biliterates were offered translanguaging opportunities. The goal of this ‘proof of concept’ was to teach vocabulary, grammar and comprehension in English through systematic and judicious use of Chinese and Malay. 14\u2005h of video data from 3 schools was coded for interactional patterns in which the teacher and students translanguaged. The focus of this paper is on qualitatively analyzing the teacher s pedagogical strategies and individual students’ responses. Translanguaging stimulated metalinguistic awareness which helped individual students notice nuances in punctuation, orthography, grammatical structures and meaning that had previously gone unnoticed. Finally this study revealed that while teaching simultaneous bilinguals/biliterates it is important for teacher training to highlight moments when translanguaging might not be required for learning the target language.