an interview with Professors ‘Sena’ and ‘Nur’
What is translanguaging?
“Translanguaging” is one of the most exciting concepts in the field of linguistics since Universal Grammar. First theorized in the 1980s by Welsh bilingual educator Ben Williams, it has really gained traction in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the Cuban-American professor of sociolinguistics and education, Ofelia García. Translanguaging has become a hip, cutting edge methodology in the tool box of the next generation of foreign language educators.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, here’s a simple explanation:
Traditionally we have always thought of different languages as just that – different. You’re either speaking English or you’re speaking Spanish. This assumption has influenced the way language teachers and students approached learning a new language.
When you come in the Spanish class, speak Spanish only please!
But of course, anyone who has spent a few days on the streets of an international metropolis can tell you that the lines between languages are not so much clear boundaries as a sliding spectrum. Think of the frequent usage of “Spanglish” from Texas to New York City. Languages are not discrete entities; they’re constantly flowing and interacting river corrientes of meaning. In any context where more than one language exists (basically every public space in the 21st century), each individual is part of a dynamic interaction with the community around them, recruiting their own multilingual spectrum to understand and communicate messages.
Once we’ve acknowledged that, it makes sense to dramatically rethink how we approach teaching new languages. In the old days, the goal was to “learn proper English” (or French, German, etc.), which meant that eventually the learner would “speak like a native speaker” and not carry any marks of the other languages they know into the target language.
However, today language teachers are waking up to a new idea:
Encourage students to use every linguistic resource in their repertoire to achieve the objective of effective communication. The gloves are off now. This isn’t a closely regulated boxing match, this is a linguistic street fight with no rules. We can do whatever we need to get our message across, even if it includes Spanglish, sign language, and Google Translate.
There’s more to it, but that’s a simplified version of “translanguaging” in layman’s terms.
My search begins
I was curious to see if this exciting new methodology had made its way to the English foreign language classrooms here in my city of Istanbul, Turkey, so I reached out to the School of Foreign Languages at a top private university in Istanbul (who asked that they not be mentioned specifically). This university has a reputation for being progressive and international, and is one of the more expensive universities in the city. I was surprised and thankful for what I found there.
I reached out to the Director of the School of Foreign Languages and the Teacher Coordinator. They very graciously and kindly gave me the opportunity to interview two instructors of English as a Foreign Language: ‘Nur’ and ‘Sena’.
This is where I really lucked out: Professor ‘Sena’ completed her PhD in translanguaging at a Turkish university in the Turkish Thrace region, and Professor ‘Nur’ is currently conducting a pilot study as part of her Master’s degree thesis at a university in Istanbul about the impact of translanguaging pedagogy on EFL learner’s writing competence. I interviewed both of these educators to find out how translanguaging was making its way into the Turkish academic environment.
Strict enforcement of English Monolingual Instruction (EMI)
Professor ‘Sena’ remembered, “When I first learned English in school, we didn’t even use our Turkish names. Everyone was Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Using Turkish in the classroom was a taboo. If someone caught you speaking Turkish in the English class, you had to drop one lira in the penalty jar.” In Turkey, starting in primary school EFL classes on through university level instruction, EMI (English Monolingual Instruction) is not only encouraged, but enforced. For example, when university students fill out their end of term Faculty Satisfaction Surveys, they are asked to report if one of their instructors ever used Turkish instead of English.
I speculate that this has some interesting historical roots in the context of modern Turkish culture. Since the foundation of the republic in 1923, strict language controls have been enforced by the government as a way to solidify national unity and cultural identity, starting with a federally mandated shift from Arabic to Latin alphabet in 1928. In the first 10 years of the republic, the Turkish Language Foundation (TDK) was instituted with the goal to “protect its language from the oppression of foreign languages” according to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, father of the modern Turkish Republic (Anadolu Agency, 2015). For decades the TDK fought a battle to replace commonly used loan words with purely Turkish vocabulary. (Such policies are not unique to Turkey: the governments of France, Iceland and Quebec all have recent historical examples of official battles against loan words.) More recently, Kurdish language was prohibited from all use in public spaces as part of the long-running conflict between Ankara and Kurdistan. Although the ban on Kurdish was lifted in 1991, it has remained a controversial subject up until present times.
This historical context is relevant to explain the philosophy towards languages in this region: “language purity” is a means to create and enforce cultural unity and suppress dissent. Ironically, this attitude seems to be a two-edged sword, discouraging the use of Turkish language in certain academic environments within the country of Turkey itself (or “Türkiye” if you prefer).
Translanguaging in a monolingual system
In such an environment, it was quite challenging for Professor ‘Nur’ to get permission to experiment with translanguaging methodologies in the classroom. Many administrators and colleagues in her department were open and interested in the idea, but they are literally not allowed to try it due to the constraints of national education standards from the Ministry of Education. ‘Nur’ had to cut through significant red tape just to get permission to speak limited Turkish in her classroom and use bilingual dictionaries (generally only English-to-English dictionaries are allowed).
In this context, ‘Nur’ must be very precise and strategic about how and when she uses translanguaging. She is very clear with the students about when and why they are allowed to use other languages besides English during specific times and activities, and she still conducts half or more of her instruction time as “English only”. Rationing the usage of other languages in the classroom seems to have several positive benefits, including:
- Students are very conscious and deliberate about what communicative objective they are achieving.
- Students do not have the temptation to over-rely on their first language.
- Students also carry the bias that using their first language in the English classroom is somehow “wrong”, and might feel like they’re not being taught appropriately if they’re allowed to use their first language too often.
Professor ‘Sena’ echoed this sentiment, noting that “It’s all about context”; students should be aware when and why it’s appropriate or not appropriate to recruit specific linguistic resources. For example, it may be perfectly suitable to talk in “Turklish”, use body language and Google Translate to communicate with a taxi driver who doesn’t speak your language, but it would be quite inappropriate when delivering an academic presentation.
Some concrete strategies Professor ‘Nur’ is implementing include:
- parking lots: a specific desk in the corner of the classroom is a space where students can go to ask questions and get explanations in their own language from their peers
- graphic organizers: such as Frayer Models and mind maps
- color coded strips to highlight specific parts of speech and sentence structures (more details about how this works later in the article)
- allowing students to use semiotics (like ad hoc sign language or emojis) and bilingual dictionaries
Professor ‘Nur’ was very clear that, while translanguaging methodologies may be used as the student learns a new concept or prepares to complete a task, the final goal is always output in English.
As Professor ‘Sena’ does not have official permission to use other languages besides English in the classroom, she is much less explicit about when and how she uses translanguaging, but she does find ways. She may give time for partner work in which students can help each other understand concepts in any language they choose, occasionally distributes take-home resources in the students’ first language, and (scandalously) might not strictly enforce the prohibition against bilingual dictionaries.
Despite the official obstacles to translanguaging, it happens naturally all the time. ‘Nur’ gave this example: an Iranian student, living in Istanbul, studying English as a foreign language. As she observes him taking notes, sometimes he writes in Farsi, but when he’s doing group work with his classmates, he writes in Turkish, but when he’s listening to a grammar lecture, he takes notes in English. Nobody taught him to do that or gave him permission. It’s just his default setting.
Translanguaging best practices for instructors
Through trial and error, both professors have discovered a few best practices for using translanguaging. ‘Nur’ finds translanguaging to be more useful at the emerging levels and believes it should be gradually reduced as the students progress to more advanced proficiency. She is also very clear about explaining her theory of practice to the students at the beginning of the course, so the students know the justification and application of the method. By doing so, she goes beyond just allowing students to use bilingual dictionaries; she invites them to explore their own inner grammar and cognition and “learn how to learn”.
‘Sena’ noted that it’s not necessary but quite useful if the instructor understands some of the students’ first language, which she learned through experience during her student teaching placement in Spain. There, even a B1 level of Spanish gave her a great advantage as an EFL teacher compared to her colleagues who didn’t speak any Spanish. If the instructor has knowledge of the student’s first language, it can help them understand the grammar challenges a specific student might face, as well as simply build rapport with the learners.
Benefits of translanguaging
I asked both professors what benefits they had observed. The effect of translanguaging can be broken down into two areas:
- a more efficient pedagogical method which creates better speakers of the target language
- a change in perspective which delivers deep human benefits in the way students understand their own mind and the diverse cultures around them
Here’s an example of the second area:
Earlier I mentioned that Professor ‘Nur’ uses color coding exercises to explain how grammar works. ‘Nur’ puts two sentences on the board, one in Turkish and one in English.
“Yesterday, I ate in my house.”
“Dün evimde yemek yedim.”
She highlights “ate” and “yedim” in red. This is the past tense verb. Students will notice it comes at different places in the sentence (English is an SVO language, Turkish SOV).
She highlights 1st person possessive adjective “my” in blue, then preposition of place “in” in yellow. She draws an arrow to the noun “house”, which they modify.
Then she highlights the 1st person possessive infix “-im-“ with blue and the suffix of place “-de” with yellow. Students note they are connected to the base noun “ev”. In this way, students grasp that Turkish has an agglutinating structure while English has an analytic structure.
The benefit is that students, often for the first time, become cognizant of the rules of grammar in their own language as well. (This is a common phenomenon among foreign language learners. Personally, I never really thought about verb conjugation or possessive pronouns in English until I learned Spanish). By doing so, students gain new insights into how they organize the world on a subconscious level, and how that might be different from native English speakers. They don’t just learn a language, they learn to learn, and learn about themselves in the process. This, in turn, develops inter-cultural fluency.
Regarding the first area:
If translanguaging is really a measurably more effective way to create better foreign language speakers, then it’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion at this time re: the efficacy of the pilot study for two reasons:
First: it has only recently been tried at an experimental level and the data is still being collected and analyzed.
Second (and more complicated): how student success is currently measured and defined might not be the best way to prove or disprove the functionality of translanguaging.
For example, Professor ‘Sena’ shared that, in one assessment, students work in pairs to prepare and perform a role play. Students have a few hours to work together to create and practice the role play, and then perform it for the instructor. The grading rubric for this assessment specifically mentions that students will lose points if the instructor hears them using any language besides English during the preparation stage.
Professor ‘Nur’ mentioned a broader challenge across the department. “Of course we try to use communicative teaching and collaborative tasks as much as possible, but in the end, our students’ success is measured by if they pass the standardized proficiency exams”, she said. Therefore, both professors noted the necessity to rethink how assessment is conducted. “Objectives are key”, ‘Sena’ said, “So if the student can complete the objective, why should they be penalized if they used another language to get there? One language isn’t superior to any other”.
Rethinking success, rethinking language
Translanguaging has obvious and well-documented advantages for creating communicative competence, especially in our age of unprecedented globalization and super-diversity. It’s nothing new really. Academicians have simply found a fancy term to identify what taxi drivers and corner store owners have done since the Stone Age. But for translanguaging to effectively thrive in the classroom, two things must happen:
First: we must rethink how we assess student success and measure progress.
Second: we must recognize that no language belongs to any one culture (especially English as the 21st century global lingua franca). Like Professor ‘Sena’ said, “Nobody owns English. It’s everyone’s language. We aren’t all Mr. and Mrs. Brown anymore.”
As a Mr. Brown myself, I find that quite inspiring.
References
Anadolu Agency. (2015, July 15). Playing with words: Turkey’s language watchdog. Daily Sabah. https://www.dailysabah.com/feature/2015/07/15/playing-with-words-turkeys-language-watchdog
Simeon Brown 