Translanguaging Practices in Secondary Education

Dr. Piotr Romanowski

Translanguaging Practices in Secondary Education:
Lessons Learnt from an International Schools in Poland

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Poland’s foreign language teaching and language policy have been affected by tremendous changes in the last decades. Not only bilingual sections in secondary schools have mushroo-med, but also international schools with instruction in a foreign language, mainly English, within the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) started their existence in 1993. This paper draws on the translanguaging pedagogy as used in the selected secondary schools with IBDP. The schools provide evidence for the stance that most students, if not all, in such teaching environments are multilingual, and therefore, they apply multiple strategies to benefit from their linguistic repertoires. In addition, the teachers perceive such practices as positively affecting the students’ performance and allowing them to more rapidly acquire the imparted content as well as further develop their linguistic proficiency. The overriding aim of this study is to observe the situations when the students most frequently translanguage and if their linguistic behaviour can be further classifiable. Hence, what is under scrutiny is the systematic use of the students’ talk in classroom interactions to envisage the functions translanguaging practices perform. The teachers’ perceptions of the tranlanguaging pedagogy and its facilitating role in language teaching and learning constitute an integral part of the study.

Piotr Romanowski, PhD is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw, Poland. He authored over thirty scholarly papers. He has published one monograph and (co-)edited five other volumes. His background is in language education (TESOL), hence his academic interests evolve round multilingual education (recently translanguaging) as well as sociolinguistics, intercultural communication in foreign language teaching. He is a member of Editorial Boards of several international scholarly journals. He has lectured in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, the UK, Iceland, Spain, Portugal and Malta. He participated in over thirty international conferences. He is the founding member of MultiLingNet – a network grouping scholars investigating multilingualism and multilingual education.

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