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Republic Act No. 12027 has recently taken effect. While allowing its optional usage in monolingual classrooms, the mother tongue is no longer used as a teaching medium from Kindergarten to Third Grade. Furthermore, the medium of instruction will revert to Filipino and English with regional languages to serve as auxiliary media of instruction until otherwise provided by law. This resulted in clamors and concerns from different walks of life, but we can no longer change it because it is now a law. I would therefore like to foreground translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in a multicultural society like the Philippines as a veritable alternative.
In order to promote flexible multilingualism in the classroom and help students develop their linguistic fluidity, dexterity, and identity while broadening their linguistic repertoire, language educators and researchers in the Philippines could start looking into the usage of translanguaging techniques. The teaching and learning approach known as translanguaging involves having pupils switch between two or more languages in order to acquire experiences, knowledge, and understanding which in my humble opinion works well with children. In translanguaging, we do not just view somebody as ‘first language user’ or ‘second language user’; we view an individual as somebody who uses two or more languages and who smoothly shifts from one language to the other. Also, we do not simply refer to the process of using languages as code-switching; instead, individuals maximize their linguistic repertoire as a resource for learning. Ofelia Garcia, a notable educator and researcher in the field of bilingualism and bilingual education, forwarded that the premise of translanguaging is ‘action’ and ‘practice’ rather than a discrete collection of skills or a straightforward system of structures. She added that translanguaging as pedagogy means that the teacher actively and flexibly uses the students’ linguistic repertoire to educate them, knowing that it extends beyond the language activities in the classroom. A translanguaging classroom considers a visual space and its organization, whereas a translanguaging teacher employs scaffolding and differentiation to deliver rigorous instruction while focusing on student-centredness, language and material, and offering opportunities for discussion, reflection, and debriefing with classmates.
Overall, I have simply provided snapshots of how translanguaging could be a veritable alternative. Further research and application are still necessary to test its effectiveness in lieu of the Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education.