Heteroglossic practices in a multilingual science classroom

What is it about?

This paper examines how a multilingual teacher and students practice translanguaging strategies during science lessons. These practices are viewed from Bakhtin's heteroglossic lens. It is argued that these translanguaging or heteroglossic practices validated students experiences, disrupted the dominant initiation, response, feedback discourse pattern and provided students with cognitive tools to produce new knowledge. Thus, translanguaging is seen to hold promise as a means of mitigating linguistic challenges in multilingual classrooms.

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Why is it important?

This article illuminates practices in an area where there is stable multilingualism. Although multilingualism is the norm in these settings, monolingual policies constrain and restrict use of home languages at school. The outcome is often silence and safe talk as reported in research. This study shows the potentiality of translanguaging practices to increase participation in the classroom and also allow students to access literacy as they learn an additional language.

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