Translanguaging and code-switching use within new language teaching approaches

Abstract

I could hardly summarize all the set of knowledge learned in the “MELACOM” master’s degree, but in the present assignment I will try to clarify those aspects that were most significant to me. Throughout my short career as a teacher of different subjects in different schools and backgrounds, I have experienced the English language teaching from different perspectives: as an individual subject, as part of an immersion project and as a complementary item. All this led me to question about many of the myths that are believed even by many foreign language teachers such as: “children are better at learning a second language” (Stern 1984); “the British English should be the only goal in class” or that “classes must be conducted exclusively in English”. Sometimes I used Spanish or Catalan to quickly solve a student’s doubt, felling guilty about that, other times I rejected a correct answer just because it was not formulated in the target language and I noticed that it was not fair. Somehow I suspected that there should be something else behind the use of other languages in the English lessons. When I first heard about the translanguaging phenomena in subjects as “SAY-014 Intercultural communication” or “SAY-016 Intercultural education” I thought that this was what I had been thinking about. Carefully treated and pedagogically oriented, the use of more languages within the English classroom may become a powerful and versatile learning tool that should accompany students during their livelong and prepare them for today’s globalized world. Another of the contributions I was offered in the master through subjects as “SAY-017 Discourse approaches to English language teaching” and “SAY-025 Curriculum design”, was the throughout study of the new classroom’s activities and how to design a fruitful lesson plan. Although I had studied something about before, and some of them seem to be in the forefront of education (CLIL); the use of tasks for the development of foreign language has been one of the items that caught my interest and, for sure, I will continue studying them and putting into practice whenever possible. According with Cummins (2008) and Jessner (1999), teachers are claimed to adquire a research thinking and some train in academic investigation. This research orientations led me to combine both issues of interest to create a teaching proposal that confirmed what theories say about the translanguaging and code-switching used in a task-based approach but first it is compulsory to introduce the topic.