Resumen de Teaching English in the 21st century: translanguaging with multilingual adolescents
The present study has multilingualism and multilingual education as the general framework for the acquisition and learning of English as a third language by multilingual adolescents. For a long time, teaching languages in multilingual school contexts has been based on hard language boundaries and on the avoidance of using the students’ prior linguistic knowledge, resulting in a loss of opportunities to make use of the linguistic resources multilingual students have at their disposal. However, current language policies and new methodologies promote cross-linguistic transfer to enhance metalinguistic awareness. The research is in its early stages. It is a classroom-based study centred on the pedagogy of translanguaging. In this pedagogical intervention, classroom activities require students to use two or more languages in order to focus on morphological aspects of language by establishing similarities and differences between the three languages. The participants are multilingual secondary students aged 12-13 years and the intervention will be conducted in school sessions of English in a trilingual secondary school in Valencia. The data collection consist of quantitative and qualitative methods. Before starting the intervention, all the participants will have a pre-test based on a semi-structured questionnaire with introductory questions on their linguistic repertoire. At the end of the intervention, they will also have to face semi-structured interviews and a written post-test with questions strictly related to the pedagogy of translanguaging and the morphological instruction they have received. After the collection, the data from the experimental and the control group will be contrasted. The expected results may show a positive effect of the use of the different translanguaging instructional strategies on the development of the literacy skills of English as a third language together with an enhanced metalinguistic awareness due to the holistic treatment of languages.
