Preparing teacher candidates to support multilingual learners with translanguaging for critical multilingual language awareness

• In Event: Addressing Issues of Equity Through Critical (Multilingual) Language Awareness in Teacher Education

Abstract

Teacher education programs need to equip teacher candidates (TCs) with opportunities to critically examine how language hierarchies and ideologies are reproduced in classroom pedagogy and policy to create equitable educational opportunities for multilingual learners. Research has suggested that many teachers still enact translanguaging uncritically by treating it merely as the acknowledgment or use of students’ first languages, a scaffold for learning the dominant language, or a proxy for translation (Deroo, Pontier, & Tian, 2022; Li, 2023; Van Gorp et al., 2023). To recenter the critical dimensions of translanguaging, this study brings together translanguaging and critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) (García, 2017) to examine how TCs prepare to support multilingual learners in elementary classrooms.The authors propose bringing together CMLA with a translanguaging pedagogy–which entails challenge inequalities and promote linguistic diversity, inclusion, and social justice in classrooms–as as a way to support pre-service teachers in examining the underlying beliefs, ideologies and systems which influence their teaching practices, and actualizing the critical and transformative potential of translanguaging.
Data were drawn from four TCs in a pre-service teacher education course on supporting multilingual learners in Ontario, Canada. Research questions guiding this study were: (1) What are TCs’ stances toward translanguaging, and what factors shape their developing translanguaging stance?; (2) How do TCs plan for translanguaging in their lessons?; and (3) What are the challenges/limitations to TCs’ planning for translanguaging? Data sources, which included TCs’ unit and lesson plans, course assignments, reflections, and interviews were analyzed deductively to identify themes through a CMLA lens related to their translanguaging stance, and how they planned for translanguaging in their coursework.
The findings demonstrated that TCs’ language learning experiences, challenges and identities were factors that shaped their developing translanguaging stance. For example, TCs were able to empathize with multilingual learners and understand their challenges and needs better when they themselves had experienced what it was like to move to a new country, to be in ESL programs, to be multilingual, to be racialized, and to learn a new language. TCs incorporated many translanguaging strategies and resources to support learners’ socioemotional wellbeing and language learning, but perceived translanguaging as a temporary scaffold rather than a way to de-center the hegemony of English in curriculum and assessment. The findings indicate that while TCs learned about translanguaging practices and linguistically inclusive approaches during the course, they were not consistently implementing them during their practicum placements either because they had limited time with multilingual learners, or their associate teachers did not demonstrate translanguaging pedagogies during the practicum.
The study highlights the necessity for TCs to be provided with specific learning opportunities that support them in developing a pedagogy for MLs based on translanguaging and CMLA. Our study offers a theoretical contribution to scholarship by showing how combining translanguaging and CMLA approaches can support TCs in developing a critical awareness of how languages are valued or marginalized in different contexts. The findings provide implications for how teacher educators can foster TCs’ critical engagement to disrupt linguistic hierarchies and democratize the classroom.

Authors

• Jennifer L. Burton, Concordia University

• Shakina Rajendram, University of Toronto - OISE

• Wales Wong, Toronto District School Board