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TitleA Pedagogy of Translanguaging
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From https://www.languagemagazine.com/2018/09/10/a-pedagogy-of-translanguaging/

A Pedagogy of Translanguaging
by Laura Hamman, Emeline Beck, and Aubrey Donaldson
September 10, 2018

One day at recess, a distraught five-year-old approached me and proclaimed angrily, “Fulanito me tagó.” Confused, I attempted to understand her meaning: “¿Te tocó?” (“He touched you?”) She shook her head. “¿Te atacó?” (“He attacked you?”). No again, thankfully. Frustrated, the student replied, “Me taGÓ, like in tag, Maestra.”

In that moment, I realized I had only been activating half of my linguistic repertoire, while my student had been leveraging all of hers, converting the English verb tag into a grammatically correct “Spanglish” phrase to express her outrage that a classmate had tagged her in the playground game. In this moment of clarity, I began to wonder about the real risks for my students if they were never exposed to the benefits of translanguaging as a resource for their language and literacy learning.

In this reflection, Aubrey reveals a tension that many dual-language educators face when planning for language in their classrooms. On the one hand, teachers are tasked with upholding the program’s language allocation polices, which generally endorse strict language separation as a means to “protect” the minoritized language.

On the other hand, teachers recognize that their emergent bilingual students exhibit a range of dynamic bilingual languaging practices not often represented in classroom instruction. Thus, many are left wondering: Can a bilingual classroom embrace more flexible language practices while still privileging the minoritized language? And, if so, what would such practices look like?

We—two teachers and one teacher educator—have grappled with these questions and, in response, have developed a framework for designing and integrating more flexible language pedagogies into the bilingual classroom.

Read the full article for the principles of this framework and specific examples with students: https://www.languagemagazine.com/2018/09/10/a-pedagogy-of-translanguaging/

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