More Than Just English: Embracing Translanguaging in The Classroom

 

Ms Melitta

 

In the hustle and bustle of our English lessons, my students and I have a fun metaphor: "Let’s change our settings and switch to the English channel." This practice—where we ask questions, share ideas, whisper secrets, and tell lame jokes all in English—is a vital part of language learning.

But does this mean Cantonese is banned? Absolutely not. My students and I live in a Cantonese-majority region, and significant parts of our culture, identity, and inner world would simply cease to exist if the language were to be erased from our repertoire. Furthermore, English plays an influential role in our students’ lives as they spend more and more time connected to the online world. Trying to constantly compartmentalize and translate between several languages, both spoken and written, just to express a single thought or feeling can become exhausting and counterproductive.

Since reading and writing about translanguaging during my Master's studies in applied linguistics, I learned to recognize my students', and my own, highly fluid languaging practices not as a limited collection of separate skills, but as a radically creative, higher-order communication skill. The traditional notions of separating and compartmentalizing languages in the process of language learning simply makes no sense in a city as dynamically multilingual as Hong Kong.

Thus, my classroom language policy has evolved to acknowledge students’ full linguistic repertoire (Cantonese, English, Putonghua, etc.) and to encourage them to tap into all of their linguistic and cultural resources in the process of developing reading, writing, listening, speaking, and cognitive skills in the medium of English.

Embracing this flexibility doesn't just reduce cognitive load; it boosts our ability to use language resources effectively. For example, I've observed students using English metalanguage (grammar terms such as "past continuous tense") to support reading comprehension of a Chinese text by identifying how a Chinese particle indicated past tense. In a reading task, students struggled with a challenging text about polar animals until one of them realised the answer to where polar bears live was embedded directly in the familiar Chinese name, 北極熊. In another activity, students eagerly explained how the pronunciation of the number 4 in Cantonese (sei2) is linked to the tradition of missing rooms and floors around the city.

These moments powerfully demonstrate that our linguistic resources are interconnected. We must learn to see the incredible value in the practices and skills that we have developed simply by the good fortune of growing and living in this unique, vibrant city called Hong Kong. By embracing translanguaging, we affirm our students' whole selves and give them the confidence to be highly effective communicators, regardless of the "channel" they start on.