Translanguaging at the Heart of Language Education: A Systematic Review
摘要
Translanguaging refers to different aspects of multilingualism. It can designate the way bilinguals and multilinguals use their linguistic resources to facilitate communication, in addition to a pedagogical approach utilizing more than one language within a language classroom. Language learners at any level, capacity, and scope bring to the classroom a myriad of background knowledge and cognitive and conceptual networks. Maximizing this asset, translanguaging utilizes all of learners’ language (and cognitive) repertoires. Although translanguaging occurs spontaneously with learners and practitioners in a multilingual world, pedagogical translanguaging encompasses a theoretical and practical approach in the context of multilingual education aimed at multilingualism via integrating languages and counteracting language separation. However translanguaging occurs, it constitutes an indispensable part of the present-day world and education, and aims at enhancing people’s linguistic and academic development. It is within this framework that this chapter offers a systematic review of the research studies on translanguaging, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of its current status and teachers’ and students’ perceptions and attitudes towards it. In doing so, it seeks to provide a map of the practice of, and research on, translanguaging for language education practitioners and students of applied linguistics. Results indicate positive perceptions of both teachers and students towards translanguaging, in addition to a number of pedagogical implications that may help determine current and future practice.