Försök till transspråkande undervisning

Abstract

Today many classrooms in Sweden are multilingual, characterized by a diversity of linguistic, cultural and epistemological resources available for teaching and learning. Handling this diversity puts certain demands on teachers in order to provide all students equal learning opportunities in a context where the language of instruction is Swedish. As a response to this, local school development projects based on multilingualism as a resource have been initiated. This study focuses on two such projects with the aim to deepen the knowledge about how translanguaging teaching practices can be developed. To make visible what characterizes as well as enable and constrain translanguaging teaching practices under development, the theory of practice architectures is used. Three different practices are identified The Multilingual, The Ambivalent multilingual and The Monolingual teaching practice. The practices are formed by differing cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Above all, cultural-discursive arrangements such as norms and ideas affect the differences between the three practices. Existing norms and ideas affect how material and economic resources, mostly identic in all three practices, are used. Furthermore, monolinguistic norms seem to form hierarchical relations. Thus, we argue to develop translanguaging practices multilingual norms are important to develop.

Keywords

• multilingualism
• multilingual teaching practices
• practice architectures
• study guidance in the mother tongue
• translanguaging