Literacy Voices

The History of Translanguaging 

In this video, Vivian Pratts explains the concept of translanguaging, which was coined by Welsh educator, Cen Williams. He developed a pedagogy for his students for receptive and productive use and how to deepen and extend their bilingualism.

Pratts shows a diagram of students’ full linguistic repertoire that illustrate both Spanish features and English features. As bilinguals, linguistic features include phonemes, morphemes, syntactic rules, and discourse rules that people draw on to communicate. Bilinguals and multilinguals have linguistic repertoires from features that are used in one or more than one language. Furthermore, Pratts goes on to further dissect the internal and external views of social-cultural reality.

Click the link below to learn more about Translanguaging Pedagogy in the follow-up video.

In this video, Vivian Pratts discusses the translanguaging pedagogy. The pedagogy itself is a teaching practice that is culturally responsive, such as dual-language programs, which help students develop simultaneous biliteracy. Furthermore, translanguaging pedagogy helps increase comprehension of texts and concepts learned in the target language and helps extend and support the students' linguistic repertoire.

Translanguaging Pedagogy in the Classroom 

Pratts emphasizes that translanguaging in the classroom is not random, rather strategic, planned, and intentional. It is not code-switching nor is it a free-for-all. Additionally, translanguaging is not a concurrent translation because translanguaging is planned and intentional.

Pratts also speaks on the idea of paired literacy instruction, which capitalizes on students' strengths in both their languages. English literacy instruction is not delayed while students are learning to read and write in Spanish. The educator wants to continue both languages because if you seize Spanish instruction, it is no longer a dual-language program. Instead, the program becomes more of a late-exit or early-exit model where you are transitioning and replacing one language with the other. In a dual-language program, we want to continue building both languages together.

Click the link below to watch the follow-up video on Cross-Language Connections with Vivian Pratts.