Exploring teachers’ perspectives on the implementation of a translanguaging pedagogy in two superdiverse Viennese classrooms
Abstract
This article discusses the implementation of translanguaging in two superdiverse school classes and their teachers’ understanding of translanguaging. Translanguaging as a theory and a transformative pedagogy has recently captured scholars’ interest from all over the globe, but also earned critique for its transformative claims and ongoing expansion of the term (Jaspers, 2018, p. 2). Through a triangulation of ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews, analysed with thematic coding and linguistic text analysis, this study shows that the teachers’ translanguaging pedagogy is strongly characterised by reoccurring elements, such as translation or reading tasks. The data also reveals teachers’ strong beliefs concerning translanguaging and a gap between the terminology of teachers’ everyday experiences and the terminology used in research, which both turn out to be resistant to change.
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Publication history
Table of contents
In Educational Linguistics, translanguaging has recently captured scholars’ interest from all over the globe. Empirical studies on teaching concepts which use pupils’ multilingual backgrounds as a resource play an important role for research as well as for education. In the Austrian school system, pupils who primarily use other languages than German in their families are confronted with a variety of educational challenges described below. Regarding those challenges, the current National Report for Education in Austria (Nationaler Bildungsbericht, 2021, p. 261) highlights the small number of said group of pupils in AHS-type schools – the type of school that provides the easiest access to higher education (comparable to British grammar schools). These pupils have to repeat classes more often or they are more often assigned to schools for children with special education needs. As a consequence, the Austrian educational policy explicitly promotes the fostering of the language of instruction only, i.e. German, even though ‘intercultural learning‘ and ‘multilingualism‘ are mentioned as didactic principles in the Austrian educational curricula for primary and lower secondary schools (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, 2012, p. 10,11). There is broad consensus in research that the promotion of multilingualism leads to cognitive advantages (i.a. Bialystok, 1988, p. 567), in some cases a better content understanding (García & Sylvan, 2011, p. 396), and the perception of equal language prestige (García & Kleyn, 2016, p. 21). According to mentioned advantages of promoting multilingualism, Haukås (2016, p. 3) states that in the context of schooling, teachers usually share positive beliefs about multilingualism, hence they often do not act according to these beliefs and do not make use of their pupils’ family languages in their own classrooms. As claimed by García, teachers often struggle to negotiate between school language policies and the pupils’ language practices (García, 2023, p. xvii). Basturkmen (2012, p. 291) also observed that situational constraints hinder teachers to act according to their beliefs in their classrooms. In addition, teachers further share strong beliefs about language separation as they usually tend to avoid interactions between languages (Blackledge and Creese, 2010, p. 104). This practice differs from the language practices of multilingual speakers outside school (García & Sylvan, 2011, p. 391). Menken and Sánchez (2019) show that the implementation of a translanguaging pedagogy in schools can combat such ideologies and thereby lead to positive change. Therefore, the present article points to teachers understanding of translanguaging and its implementation into everyday schooling in that it discusses the implementation of a translanguaging pedagogy in two school classes (one in the primary and one in the lower secondary school sector) for one school term (six months) in Vienna and their teachers’ understanding of translanguaging. In this framework, the purpose of this study is to explore the teachers’ perspectives on translanguaging and how they implement it into their teaching practices as the scholarly understanding of translanguaging is extensively discussed as shown in the following chapter, whereas there is a gap in research on teachers’ understandings and conceptualisations of translanguaging. In the present study, the two schools were selected using convenience sampling as, first, their interest in the project was perceived as a precondition for cooperation as not all teachers are open about the implementation of multilingual pedagogies into their teaching and second, Viennese schools share a linguistically superdiverse student population: 59% of pupils in primary school (age 6–10) and 77% of pupils in middle school (lower secondary sector, age 10–14) primarily use other languages than German in their family surroundings (school year: 2020/21, Statistik Austria, 2021). In both school classes, translanguaging was implemented by all classroom teachers, covering all subjects. In the primary school, this was one main teacher and two so-called assistance teachers, whereas there were seven teachers in the middle school. The two following research questions served as guidelines for the focus pursued in this article:
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