Challenging Minority Language Isolation: Translanguaging in a Trilingual School in the Basque Country

Learning two or more languages at school is quite common all over Europe,but languages are often isolated from each other. This pedagogical practice isin contrast to the way multilingual speakers use their whole linguistic reper-toire when communicating in social contexts. These multilingual solitud...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Leonet Sieso, Oihana, Cenoz Iragui, Miren Jasone, Gorter, Durk
Format: article
Publication Date:2017
Country:España
Institution:Universidad del País Vasco
Repository:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/70665
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/70665
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Basque
English
metalinguistic awareness
multilingual education
Spanish
translanguaging
Description
Summary:Learning two or more languages at school is quite common all over Europe,but languages are often isolated from each other. This pedagogical practice isin contrast to the way multilingual speakers use their whole linguistic reper-toire when communicating in social contexts. These multilingual solitudes arechallenged when translanguaging pedagogies are used and multilingual stu-dents are allowed to use the resources in their linguistic repertoire. The specificfocus of this article is to examine translanguaging as a pedagogical tool asrelated to a context wherein Basque is the main language of instruction, but aminority language in society. The article reports the characteristics of a peda-gogical intervention based on translanguaging, which aims at developinglanguage awareness, metalinguistic awareness, and communicative and aca-demic competences in Basque, Spanish, and English. Our findings show thatpedagogical translanguaging can be compatible with the maintenance anddevelopment of a minority language.