The effect of pedagogical translanguaging on foundation phase classrooms in a South African private school

Abstract

Classrooms across the world are becoming more diverse, forcing mainstream teachers to accept responsibility for teaching second language (L2) learners. As a result, pedagogical translanguaging has come to the fore as a potential practice to help L2 learners perform academically. In South Africa pedagogical translanguaging had not previously been studied where teachers and learners do not share a linguistic repertoire. Through design-based research we aimed to determine the effect of pedagogical translanguaging in a private school's foundation phase (FP) classrooms. The results indicate that teachers use pedagogical translanguaging for symbolic, scaffolding, and epistemological functions. While no direct academic benefit was observed for the L2 learners, their classroom participation and confidence improved because of the symbolic function of pedagogical translanguaging. The teachers deemed pedagogical translanguaging appropriate to their context. However, the monolingual mindset proved to be pervasive, despite participation in the study. Work needs to be done at all levels of the education system if we are to use multilingual practices to harness the abilities of all our learners.