“Now talk to your partner in Chinese” – A tyrannical dictator’s journey along the cline of L1 (in)tolerance (Part 2)

by Nick Roll

In my Part One blog I confessed to my shifting position from a somewhat narrow-minded “English only in the classroom” policy to a more flexible approach to the use of L1 in the classroom. This was partly based on the idea that emergent bilinguals and multilinguals naturally use translanguaging strategies in their real lives – therefore, I asked why we shouldn’t occasionally harness this outside literacy practice into our pedagogy when appropriate and possible to do so.

 

Here’s a summary of further claims mostly put forward by Garcia and Li Wei (2015), most of which I’ll leave here exposed and hanging teasingly for those who wish to follow-up.

 

Advantages of translanguaging for (emerging) bilinguals:

• Normal social practice – and evidence of learners’ self-regulation and autonomy
• Deeper cognitive processing
• Creativity & multi-perspective criticality
• Promotes new ways of being, knowing and doing
• Creative, all-embracing dynamic bilingualism therefore leads to affirmation and co-construction of new identities –  transformative.
• Empowerment and social equality –  inclusive practice that gives learners “agency to negotiate their linguistic and meaning-making repertoires” (Gracia & Li Wei, 2015, p.229) thereby enabling their positioning, or meaningful participation
• Differentiation and scaffolding – researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of systematic and purposeful “pedagogic translanguaging” (Probyn 2015) that is “strategic, dynamic…woven through the presentation of academic content” (Mazak and Herbas-Donoso, 2015).

 

Some potential pedagogical tweaks in a British University context

Apart from the fact that translanguaging seems to be a naturally occurring social practice amongst most of our emerging bilingual students, there could be further reasons to judiciously allow some legitimized L1 “space”.

Firstly, simply acknowledging the existence of students’ first language thereby affirming part of their identity can have a positive affect (yes with an “a”) and promote student agency in the classroom. Similarly, in a “think, pair, share” sequence acknowledging, accepting and sometimes encouraging the inner speech “think” stage to be in L1 if helpful, especially with challenging new content would be a change of teacher mindset to the presumption that to “think in English” will always lead to greater understanding and performance. By extension, “codemeshing” and “shuttling between repertoires” (Canagarajah, 2011b) can be used as strategies for activating prior knowledge as long as all members of the class are able to participate (at least two students per L1).

Another classroom activity which could be done individually if necessary, would entail learners identifying lexico-grammatical differences between languages by, for example, analysing the difficulties of translation. Structural differences, distinctive meanings with differing connotations and collocations could be explored and explained to the class heightening awareness of some of the unique characteristics of English compared to other language systems. Perhaps more controversial in a mixed nationality class would be a tolerance to students referring to L1 sources or even to accept levels of “creative”,  critical pluralized academic writing. Indeed, Canagarajah (2011a, p.23-24) suggests that students can “negotiate academic conventions to bring in their repertoires for voice” and calls for the “eventual pluralization of academic literacy and classroom discourse” while Li Wei (2011, p.1223) defines creativity as “the ability to choose between following and flouting the rules and norms of behaviour, including use of language”. Radical stuff. Or is it?

Inconclusive yet revealing translanguaging experiment:

In the 2017 summer pre-sessional I undertook a simple mini-research experiment using my main class (11 Chinese, 1 Korean,  pre-Masters). Since they had struggled to understand and respond to a weekly content lecture, one week I asked them to carry out the following experimental, translanguaging procedure:

1. Record immediate thoughts of the lecture (within minutes of leaving the lecture hall) on phones in L1. This could include a summary of what they understood, a reflection on what aspects were difficult to understand and a critical response to the content
2. Compare (mostly) English notes with a partner and make a collaborative attempt to orally reconstruct the lecture content in English.
3. Participate in a whole class discussion seeking clarification and giving opinions and reactions.
4. Record a short oral summary on phones in English.
5. Homework – write a summary/critical response using notes and recordings.
6. Complete surveymonkey questionnaire reflecting on this process and use of L1 in the classroom.

Feedback for this sequence of activities was very positive with the vast majority of responses describing it as “useful” or “very useful”.Of course this mini “research” experiment was very limited: one class of open-minded Arts & Humanities and TESOL/Education students who were keen to experiment, probably wanted to please the teacher and gave positive impressionistic responses to a hastily constructed survey.

Despite this, some interesting observations emerged; for example, some students pointed out how much quicker they were summarising in L1 with the English recordings being substantially longer due to thinking time hesitations even though similar points were made. This suggests a significant cognitive load despite the attempted scaffolding steps. Another interesting finding was that nearly all students agreed that a policy on the use of L1 and L2 in the classroom should be negotiated rather than imposed by the teacher, institution or learner.

 

Blissful conclusion?

Ultimately, my little experiment that followed some initial interest and research has raised questions for further investigation. It has already resulted in a change in my position on the cline of L1 (in)tolerance from neo-fascist classroom practitioner wielding out fines towards a more flexible, contingent approach.  While I still mostly encourage all interactions to be in English, not least because it is clearly the class lingua franca and the language of their assessments, I am now more open to students negotiating moments of “translanguaging space” if it can support their learning and, as some of the literature suggests, help promote creativity, criticality and agency. I’d be interested to know if others have made “use” of their learners’ L1 in a British or other English-speaking University context and where EAP practitioners generally stand on the “cline of L1 (in)tolerance”.

 

References:

Bialystok, E., Craik, F.I. and Luk, G., 2012. Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(4), pp.240-250.

Canagarajah, S. (2011a) ‘Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy’, Applied linguistics review, vol.2, no.1, pp.1-28.

Canagarajah, S. (2011b) Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging, The Modern Language Journal, vol. 95, no.3, pp.401-417.

Canagarajah, S. (2004) ‘Subversive identities, pedagogical safe houses and critical learning’, in Norton, B. and Toohey, K. (eds) Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 116–137.

Forman, R. (2008) ‘Using notions of scaffolding and intertextuality to understand the bilingual teaching of English in Thailand’, Linguistics and Education, vol.19, no.4, pp.319-332.

García, O. (2011) Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. John Wiley & Sons.

García, O. and Wei, L. (2014) ‘Translanguaging and Education’, In Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (pp. 63-77). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

García, O. and Wei, L. (2015) ‘Translanguaging, bilingualism and bilingual education’, in Wright, W.E., Boun, S. and Garcia,O. (eds) The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education, John Wiley & Sons,  pp.223-240.

Grosjean, F. (2010)  [online]. Myths about bilingualism. http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/myths_en.html (Accessed 10 October 2017).

Li Wei, (2011) ‘Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 43, no.5, pp.1222-1235.

Li, W. and Zhu, H. (2013) ‘Translanguaging identities and ideologies: Creating transnational space through flexible multilingual practices amongst Chinese university students in the UK’, Applied Linguistics, vol. 34, no.5, pp.516-535.

Lynch, M. (2016) [online].  Why bilingual education should be mandatory https://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-lynch-edd/why-bilingual-education-s_b_6168638.html (Accessed 10th October 2017).

Marian, V., Shook, A. and Schroeder, S.R., 2013. Bilingual two-way immersion programs benefit academic achievement. Bilingual Research Journal, 36(2), pp.167-186.

Mazak, C.M. and Herbas-Donoso, C. (2015) ‘Translanguaging practices at a bilingual university: A case study of a science classroom’,  International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, vol. 18, no.6, pp.698-714.

Ofelia Garcia (n.d.) [online]. Available at  https://ofeliagarcia.org/ (Accessed 5 June 2017).

Probyn, M., (2015) Pedagogical translanguaging: Bridging discourses in South African science classrooms. Language and Education, 29(3), pp.218-234.