Translanguaging pathways to higher education:a transition program for highly educated refugees

The paper focuses on translanguaging practices of highly skilled refu- gees in a transition program in Dutch higher education. The pathways for refugees to enter higher education are full of obstacles. Acquiring the new language at a university level is one of the biggest challenges. Many institutions offer ‘transition programs’ to prepare refugees for their studies. These are mostly focused on acquiring language skills and general basic skills in subjects such as Mathematics and Cultural Diversity. The Dutch transition program described in this paper was specifically developed to make use of students’ multilingual repertoires. The resource-oriented pedagogy of translanguaging is used to give space to all languages, leverage students’ resources and contribute to their academic and language development. In this research, data from one year of the Dutch transition program was collected to study a) how teachers engage in official translanguaging practices during instruction and b) to what extent teachers develop other practices to engage with their students’ multilingual repertoires. Results from interaction analysis show that the teachers, although mainly using the language of instruction (Dutch), did use a variety of translanguaging practices, and created other ways to encourage students’ multilingualism, such as engaging in language comparisons and raising language awareness

Including multiple languages in secondary education:A translanguaging approach

This article presents recent developments around multilingual secondary education in the officially bilingual province of Friesland, the Netherlands. As in other European contexts, schools in this region face the challenge of a growing language diversity due to migration. Despite this larger variety of languages in society, schooling is still mainly through the national language (Kroon & Spotti, 2011), based on the idea that immersion in each of the target languages triggers the best outcomes, thus leading to language separation pedagogies. Also, in teacher training programmes, pre-service teachers are educated with a pedagogy of language separation. This is in contrast with research that has repeatedly shown the importance of using all language resources of multilingual pupils in optimizing learning (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Cummins, 2008). Against this backdrop, recent developments for multilingual secondary education within the province of Friesland focus on a. less separation between the three instruction languages (Frisian, Dutch and English); b. creating bridges between foreign languages in secondary education (German and French); c. valorising and including migrant languages in mainstream education. The Holi-Frysk project (holistic approach for Frisian and language education) was set up as an answer to these issues (Authors, forthcoming). In this pilot-project three secondary schools of different types developed, implemented and evaluated multilingual teaching approaches to include all languages present in the school in teaching. Teachers were trained through workshops and school visits and the activities were video recorded, transcribed and analysed on their translanguaging practices. The article will first of all present and discuss a few examples of the pedagogical activities and secondly zoom in on its effects at the interactional level by focusing on moments in which different functions of pedagogical translanguaging (Garcia & Wei, 2015) appear. Finally, suggestions are given how these findings could be integrated in the teacher training programmes to prepare our pre-service teachers for today's multilingual and multicultural classrooms

‘Red is the colour of the heart’:Making young children’s multilingualism visible through language portraits

The increasing occurrence of multilingualism in the educational sphere is challenging teachers to deal with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present paper presents the analysis of language portraits as a tool to make students’ multilingualism visible by using colours to represent their multilingual repertoires. Through a mixed methods design, our research analyses 570 language portraits and sociolinguistic surveys, as well as 21 semi-structured interviews with children aged 6 to 13 in order to investigate the ways in which pupils represent and reflect upon their multilingual repertoires. Using a qualitative content analysis, we have classified the most common patterns within pupils’ choices of colours and placement of languages on their portraits, later analysed through a semiotic approach. Results show three recurring patterns of colour choices: colours of national flags, associations with life experiences, and associations with feelings. As for language placement, results show two recurring patterns: structuring languages according to linguistic skills, and according to body functions. The analysis also revealed a tendency among participants of representing their languages through a “monolingual lens” (García and Flores) and draws implications for the implementation of multilingual education