Acceso usuarios
Napapat Thongwichit, Mark Bedoya Ulla, Jayson Parba
Translanguaging pedagogy serves as a strategy to scaffold students’ learning and functions as a language education philosophy that challenges the relationships between students, teachers, and the curriculum in schools dominated by entrenched monolingual bias. This study explores the perceptions and practices of seven language teachers regarding translanguaging in multilingual university classrooms in southern Thailand, specifically paying attention to translanguaging’s social justice dimension. Utilising a qualitative classroom ethnography with observation and interviews as data collection tools, the findings reveal that teachers are willing to create and nurture translanguaging spaces to make learning more meaningful. Our findings also show that teachers exercise some agency amidst institutional and administrative pressure to use English only. These teachers prioritise learning and understanding over an exclusive focus on English usage in their classrooms, adopting a transformative stance towards translanguaging to disrupt oppressive monolingual ideologies and pedagogies. We argue that when the teachers themselves translanguage in their classroom practices, the students are in some way empowered to leverage their multilingual abilities to learn, potentially mitigating linguistic bias often present in assessments that measure students’ knowledge only in English or in a standardised language.
