What Translanguaging Means To Me

Here’s a topic that’s come up a lot recently again at school and in this online course I’m taking about the use of the mother tongue (L1) in the classroom. It’s something I’ve thought about writing for a while now, and with the course prompting me to think about this topic quite often, I think it’s time I gather my thoughts in a post. The topic today is, translanguaging.

“Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.” – Ofelia García (2009)

I want to add to the definition above, that in addition to maximizing communicative potential, translanguaging can be highly useful in accessing academic content.
But before I dive into that, I want to write about the terminology.

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