Translanguaging in the Classroom (Workshop)

Translanguaging is the practice of letting multilingual students draw on their full linguistic repertoire, all the languages they know, as a single integrated resource for learning, rather than keeping those languages rigidly separate or insisting on English only. The idea, developed by Ofelia García and others, rests on how bilingual minds actually work: a multilingual person does not have two separate language systems switched on and off, but one unified system they draw from fluidly. Translanguaging pedagogy puts that reality to work. A student might read a text in English, discuss it with a peer in their shared home language to clarify the hardest ideas, make notes in whichever language captures the thought fastest, and then produce the final work in English. The home language becomes scaffolding for understanding rather than an obstacle to remove. The evidence is that this deepens comprehension, raises engagement, and affirms students' identities and families, while, importantly, still developing English; translanguaging is not a retreat from English but a route to it that uses everything the student already has. Done deliberately it is more than tolerating home language when the teacher is not listening; it is designing moments where students are invited to use all their languages for a purpose, bilingual partners, multilingual word walls, home-language brainstorming, cross-language comparison, with the teacher setting clear purposes for when the target language is the goal. It takes a stance shift for many teachers, from seeing other languages as interference to seeing them as assets, and that shift is the heart of the workshop.

The research: Translanguaging theory and classroom pedagogy (García, Kleyn, and others).