Abstract
Background: The unequal learning outcomes and achievement gaps in language and literacy, particularly affecting poor and working-class children in South African schools, are longstanding issues. These disparities were highlighted once again in the poor literacy results of PIRLS 2021, indicating systemic challenges within the education system.
Objectives: This article emanates from a Languaging-for-Learning (L4L) project, which holistically used approaches to integrate isiXhosa home language and English to validate and engage with the learners’ linguistic repertoires to open more opportunities to learn and read multilingually.
Method: The research was conducted in two Western Cape township high schools with bilingual isiXhosa and English-speaking teachers and emergent bilingual learners. Five Grade 9 teachers’ English First Additional Language (EFAL) lessons were observed and recorded in 2023. The case study focused on shifts in teachers’ take-up of translanguaging strategies in EFAL lessons and their effective pedagogical use, especially in written form.
Results: The findings revealed that bilingual teachers creatively incorporated teaching practices that allowed learners to transition between languages while learning EFAL. The study further indicates that bilingual education has the potential to be a valuable pedagogical strategy in contexts where exclusive use of English impedes effective learning.
Conclusion: Yet again, the findings of this study accentuate the importance of incorporating and utilising learners’ home languages into the education process. A bilingual or multilingual pedagogical approach not only enriches the learning experiences but also acknowledges the linguistic diversity within the classroom, thereby making way for more effective and inclusive education practices.
Contribution: This study contributes to the understanding of how a bilingual or multilingual teacher intervention can impact English teachers’ classroom practices positively. It emphasises the importance of recognising and embracing the language resources that learners bring to the classroom, highlighting the value of a bilingual pedagogical approach in promoting effective learning outcomes.
Keywords: Bilingual education; English First Additional Language; isiXhosa as a resource; language and literacy; multilingualism; presentational talk; translanguaging.
Introduction
In South Africa, English First Additional Language (EFAL) is taught to learners who come from diverse homes, where official African languages (isiXhosa, isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, South Sotho, siSwati, Xitsonga, Tshivenda and isiNdebele are spoken) are their home languages. This linguistic diversity presents learners and teachers with opportunities to use the languages present in their classrooms to make meaning of what is being learnt. This opportunity can be used effectively when African languages like isiXhosa are no longer ‘smuggled’ into the classrooms, as Probyn (2009) once highlighted in a discussion of the tensions among teachers who used African languages in their classrooms.
This research takes a socio-cultural approach (Vygotsky 1962), in that teachers’ and learners’ backgrounds are viewed as resources for teaching and learning. This approach is based on the premise that language interactions, culture and the social environment all influence cognition (Vygotsky 1962). Furthermore, socio-cultural theory resonates with this article as it reports on the shifts in EFAL teachers’ beliefs about translanguaging, the use of translanguaging in presentational talk and written work, and the development and use of translanguaging resources.
This article emanates from a Languaging-for-Learning (L4L) project which supported Grade 8 and Grade 9 teachers to improve teaching of EFAL and to teach mathematics and science bilingually in isiXhosa and English. The main participants were a cohort of Grade 8 and Grade 9 mathematics, EFAL and general science teachers from each of the 10 participating schools in two education districts in the Cape Town area. The schools were all Quintile 1, thus no-fee schools, and were identified as well-functioning by education district officials. All the schools had a majority of bilingual isiXhosa and English-speaking teachers and emergent bilingual learners. The L4L project started in 2022 with a teacher professional development short course over six weeks on a Saturday morning, with follow-up in the form of practice-focused workshops and classroom-based support from mid-2022 through 2023.
The short course drew on a text-based approach (Mohlabi-Tlaka, De Jager & Engelbrecht 2017) to introduce flexible multilingualism in the classroom, focusing on meaning and understanding content across the curriculum. By way of illustration, some of the workshops used factual texts, such as a report, to explore reading and writing across science and EFAL, while mathematics teachers engaged with talk-aloud and writing prompts to encourage learners to share their solutions to problems, or sticking points. During the project, teachers and researchers together developed innovative ways to legitimate the use of isiXhosa as a resource in the classroom which included creating multilingual posters for key science and mathematics terms, and charts with multilingual writing frames for genres such as narrative and report.
The data for this article come from two high schools in the Western Cape. In both schools, we observed and recorded selected EFAL lessons of five Grade 9 teachers during 2023. Our research questions were:
How do EFAL teachers and learners use translanguaging in presentational talk and written work? How does translanguaging as a pedagogical approach promote the learning of English and how does it enhance learners’ confidence and participation in the classroom?
To answer these research questions, we examined selected instances of five Grade 9 EFAL teachers’ and learners’ translanguaging across 45 lesson observations and interviewed the teachers about their classroom pedagogy, language practices and beliefs. This article reports on the use of translanguaging in presentational talk and written work as demonstrated by the learners and its effectiveness as a pedagogical approach to promoting the learning of English, and in enhancing learners’ confidence and participation in the classroom.
Literature review and theoretical perspectives
As stated above, deeply unequal learning outcomes and achievement in language and literacy, with poor and working-class children being the worst off, have been a feature of South African schooling for many decades (e.g. Macdonald 1990) and persist into the present, worsened by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdowns (Shepherd & Mohohlwane 2021). This occurs against the backdrop of South Africa’s progressive language in education policy of 1997, which promulgates mother tongue-based bilingual and multilingual education, where learners learn through their mother tongue and other languages as additional languages.
The learners and teachers in most South African classrooms move between at least two languages during learning and teaching (Probyn 2009; Setati et al. 2002). Much research (e.g. Ngubane, Ntombela & Govender 2020; Probyn 2009; Setati et al. 2002) attests that the teaching of EFAL benefits from translanguaging approaches as an effective pedagogical strategy, where learning and participation of learners is encouraged because they can use their diverse linguistic repertoires.
Translanguaging and linguistic repertoires
In a classroom context, Baker (2011) has defined translanguaging as:
The process of making meaning, shaping experiences, understandings and knowledge through two languages. Both languages are used in an integrated and coherent way to organize and mediate mental processes in learning. (p. 288)
Fang, Zhang and Sah (2022:306) develop this definition further, distinguishing between spontaneous and pedagogical translanguaging in a classroom setting, and also contend that translanguaging recognises learners’ full linguistic repertoire, rather than separate first or second languages or dialects.
Pedagogical translanguaging has further been investigated internationally, particularly by Canagarajah (2011), who outlines the concerns and benefits of translanguaging pedagogy in the classroom. What is interesting in Canagarajah’s research is that the translanguaging among learners occurred ‘behind the back of the teachers in classes’ (Canagarajah 2011:8). In certain proactive situations, teachers will hold the spaces for learners and enable their multilingual repertoire to organically emerge as these are resources learners bring into classrooms (Canagarajah 2011). To echo these sentiments, Blackledge and Creese (2017) view translanguaging as a transformative tool, where it bears the potential to remove language hierarchies and practices that see some languages as more important than others.
Busch (2012:7) proposes linguistic repertoire as ‘a space both of restrictions and of potentialities’. Expanding on Gumperz’s (1964) initial view of linguistic repertoire as the observable linguistic behaviour of an individual or community, Busch draws on Derrida (1998) and Butler (1998) to argue that a subjective perspective needs to be added to the linguistic repertoire, one that can encompass individuals’ lived experience and the affective dimensions of perception, desire and beliefs about language. Busch (2012:16) suggests that ‘a linguistic repertoire is not a static thing but rather is achieved situationally in communicative interaction with others’, in much the same way as translanguaging is understood in this article.
Empirically in South Africa, the educational value of translanguaging has been studied either in mathematics and science lessons at high school level (Probyn 2015; Sapire & Essien 2021; Setati et al. 2002; Tyler 2023), in language lessons (Krause & Prinsloo 2016; Makalela 2016), or in more informal language and literacy third spaces (Guzula, McKinney & Tyler 2016). Translanguaging pedagogy, specifically in language lessons, is of relevance. Makalela (2015:6) in his analysis of translanguaging in a primary school language classroom setting found that ‘[w]hen more than one language is used to access the same content, the learners develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter’. Ngubane et al. (2020) in their study of EFAL writing lessons at five high schools found that translanguaging encouraged learners’ participation and enhanced their understanding of an EFAL writing concept such as an RSVP. Research documents many instances of spontaneous translanguaging by teachers, as well as pedagogical translanguaging (the conscious, deliberate, planned process) envisaged by Baker (2011), Cenoz and Gorter (2017) and Fang et al. (2022).
Krause-Alzaidi (2022) investigated languages prominent in EFAL lessons in a Khayelitsha primary school. Similarly to Blackledge and Creese (2017) who hold that translanguaging has transformative potential to challenge language hierarchies and practices, Krause-Alzaidi argues that there is a Khayelitshen languaging which is not the ‘named languages’ (e.g. monolingual isiXhosa or monolingual English) that is prominent in classrooms during teaching and learning. In her work, Krause-Alzaidi demonstrates that learners and English teachers use relanguaging to traverse complex spatial repertoires with diverse linguistic resources, ultimately shaping English into a coherent, teachable, and learnable entity.
Talk and learning
In a socio-cultural approach to understanding the purposes of classroom talk, Barnes’s (1992) distinction between exploratory and presentational talk also offers a useful insight into the possible purposes of translanguaging in South African classrooms. According to Barnes’s research in a monolingual English school context, exploratory talk was informal and conversational, and occurred in small groups when learners were actively involved in addressing a problem or clearly defined task. Through exploratory talk, they share their understandings, ask questions and clarify ideas. Presentational talk, on the other hand, was formal, grammatically accurate and used for whole-class report-backs and assessments. Reviving the work of Barnes more recently, Edwards-Groves, Anstey and Bull (2014) explicate the procedural display of presentational talk where learners focus on content and where information is shared with the teacher and some sort of assessment takes place. As South African research (referred to earlier) shows, exploratory talk often occurs bilingually, while presentational talk and assessment tends to be mainly in English, especially in high school. In our research, we were interested in exploring whether the use of translanguaging also extended to the more formal domains of presentational talk and oral and written assessment.
Methodology
The main purpose of this article is to show how teachers used translanguaging effectively as a strategy to increase learners’ confidence and participation in EFAL classrooms and enhance their learning of English as the subject. It also reports on learners’ use of translanguaging in presentational talk and written work. The participating teachers and learners utilised isiXhosa and English to learn EFAL, with isiXhosa being their home language and the dominant language in the area. This qualitative case study emanates from the L4L project, which holistically used approaches to integrate isiXhosa and English to expand teachers’ language practices and to validate and engage with the learners’ linguistic repertoires to open more opportunities to learn.
Thus, in the process, bilingual materials were collaboratively produced between the learners and teachers and sometimes researchers. The study entailed classroom-based support from the researchers, which meant that there were classroom observations followed by feedback from the researchers. During the classroom observations, field notes were taken using observation methods, some lessons were audio-recorded, and chalkboard notes, selected learners’ work and wall charts were photographed. In these observations, the researchers were looking for instances of both teachers’ and learners’ translanguaging and the use of isiXhosa while learning EFAL. From a total of seven Grade 9 classes and five EFAL teachers in two schools that participated in the study, in which the authors were placed for teacher support and research, a sample of selected classroom lessons of four teachers was selected.
The four research participants were all EFAL teachers: Teacher M, who was also a Head of Department for EFAL, while the remaining three Teacher F, Teacher T and Teacher L taught Grade 8 in 2022 and Grade 9 in 2023. The work draws on Grade 9 lessons in 2023 taught by these teachers. The lesson excerpts chosen exemplified teachers’ conscious translanguaging pedagogy by encouraging learners’ exploratory and presentational talk. Also included are learners’ translingual writing practices.
Both researchers worked at universities in teacher education in applied language and literacy studies. They were part of the L4L team that participated in teacher education workshops on materials development activities, lesson planning, teachers’ language ideologies, as well as mentoring in multilingual and text-based pedagogies in the classroom. Sometimes the researchers became participant observers, read and commented on learners’ drafts of writing tasks and helped learners to better understand the assessment tasks.
Findings and discussion
This study aimed to demonstrate how teachers and learners utilised translanguaging in the classroom. In particular, we sought to document whether learners used translanguaging in their exploratory talk as suggested by Barnes (1990, 2010) and whether such talk also crossed over into the written domain on the chalkboard or in learners’ workbooks. We were also interested in seeing how the teachers and learners developed and used bilingual charts to create print-rich classroom walls and to grow their vocabulary.
All the teachers we observed used and encouraged flexible translanguaging to create classrooms that are ‘safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, [and] knowledge’ (Pratt 1991:34). Since they are EFAL teachers, this required a shift in their ideologies with regard to translanguaging and using isiXhosa in their teaching. As the quote below shows, translanguaging between English and isiXhosa presented a complex paradox for EFAL teachers for whom English is both the subject content that needs to be taught and the medium of instruction, whereas isiXhosa, while it is learners’ home language, is also a separate subject in its own right:
To start with, at the beginning, I had an attitude because I didn’t understand it, how can you teach … How can [you], as an English teacher, be expected to use isiXhosa which is two languages, as a subject. So, but as I was attending the workshops, I could see that it is working because at the end of the day the learners understand their home language more than English, so it’s easy for them. If they understood something in their own language, then they can just translate it to English. So, I found it helping more than I thought it would. (Teacher M, EFAL Head of Department, Teacher Grade 9A, Interview 20 August 2023)
The shift in this teacher’s attitude meant that in her classroom practice as an EFAL teacher, she legitimised and encouraged learners’ use of isiXhosa, rather than translanguaging very much herself. She also acknowledges the learning potential of translation with learners encouraged to translate from isiXhosa to English. As Ferreira and Mendelowitz (2009) note, the complex challenge for EFAL teachers is to:
Provide access to English … in a way that is both sensitive to the multilingual identities of our students and, while wanting to avoid a negative construction of English, nevertheless encourages a critical orientation towards its hegemonic power. (p. 40)
Teacher M demonstrates precisely such sensitivity to learners’ multilingual identities here, enabling a space where the learners were able to translanguage in an EFAL classroom with confidence, as the following sections demonstrate.
Teachers’ and learners’ classroom language practices
Varying instances of translanguaging occurred as the Grade 9 learners and teachers tackled a literature study task which required learners to read and summarise a drama of their choice (e.g. comedy, tragedy, romance) in the form of a poster, and then to analyse the drama using guiding questions on the worksheet. Some learners requested their teacher if they might select an IsiXhosa drama to summarise and analyse, to extend the alternatives available to them. (Teacher M, Gr 9A, Interview 16 August 2023). Their teacher (Teacher M) created the space for isiXhosa to enter the English classroom and allowed them to do this, displaying the confidence to be more flexible that she alludes to in the interview. Several groups chose the drama, Hamba Nam Ndipheleke [walk with me or accompany me]. The poster in Figure 1 demonstrates how the learners worked between English and isiXhosa. The play the learners had read and analysed was in isiXhosa, as an image of the cover of the play shows. In addition, one of the headings, number two, is in isiXhosa, uMelumzi Buso and uMhizana: the main characters’ names are prefixed by ‘u’ as would be expected when listing names in isiXhosa. The rest of the poster and their oral presentation of the poster was in English.
In dealing with the second part of the same task, questions on the worksheet asked learners:
- Make an evaluation of this type of drama. Do you like it or not?
- Is it important for us to have this kind of drama in 2023?
- Give two reasons for your answer.
In answering this challenging, higher-order question, many learners turned to Google, using their cell phones, as the school has quite reliable Wi-Fi. A learner sitting close to one of the researchers, had the following answer about the purpose of the chosen drama, a comedy. That ‘comedy is to make people laugh and show triumph over adversity’. The researcher asked this learner to explain this formulation. The first part ‘comedy is to make people laugh’ was easy, but the learner was uncertain of the second part. The learner focused on the unfamiliar word ‘adversity’, a word of Latin etymology. The learner translated it into isiXhosa as ‘into enzima’. The researcher then asked the learner to back-translate this into English, which the learner identified as ‘difficulty’. Using contextual clues to decipher the meaning of this new word was the key to his working out the rest of the term ‘to overcome difficulty’, accurately in English (Teacher T, Teacher Grade 9H, Interview 16 August 2023). This interaction demonstrates that translanguaging practices need to expand with the complexity of the context. In this instance, a high school learner inserted a quote directly from an internet source, without acknowledgement or necessarily understanding the meaning of the new word central to the answer he provides as his own. Yet, with some prompting and the use of exploratory talk, he could draw on his home language to decipher the meaning of ‘adversity’.
This vignette adds to the evidence that most South African learners are far from the curriculum vocabulary targets (Stoffelsma 2019). It also shows, as Corson noted in his seminal study (Corson 1985), that words of Graeco-Latin origin, which form an increasing part of the Senior Phase vocabulary, pose a particular challenge for most English language learners, whether as a home or additional language.
In another Grade 9 class (Teacher L, Female, Teacher of Grade 9, Interview 02 April 2023), learners were given a task where they had to research gender-based violence. The questions of the task were quite easy and required the learners to provide answers based on their general knowledge. The teacher was quick to say the learners could use Google to do their research and answer the following questions:
- What is gender-based violence?
- Who is affected by gender-based violence?
- How can we help those who are affected by gender-based violence?
The learners were supposed to present their answers orally, and they were assessed on this task. During their research, some learners used a combination of isiXhosa and English to write their presentations and some used English only (as reflected in the extract below). For those who used both languages, it was easier for them to present, and they would speak with confidence and demonstrate their understanding. This confidence and clarity were realised as the learners were presenting. The presentations were further supplemented with isiXhosa where there were doubts and the italicised extracts in the text below were the learner’s verbatim presentations, translated by the researchers. We deduce from the utterances below that in their presentations learners were using what Barnes (2010) describes as presentational talk. They also made terms like ‘gender’ and ‘gender-based violence’ familiar by ‘Xhosalising’ them (Plüddemann 2007), attaching the isiXhosa prefix ‘i’. In answering each question, the learners would read aloud the question in English first and then provide their answers.
Posing the first question: what is gender-based violence? one learner responded:
Ngokwam ukuqo nda … in my understanding gender-based violence is … mmh impatho gadalala yoomama namantombi okanye ukutrita umntu based on igender yakhe. [mmh mistreating women and girls or treating a person based on their gender.]
The second question: who is affected by gender-based violence? another learner stated:
And ke igender-based violence affects all of us ayikhethi. [And gender-based violence affects all of us it does not choose.]
A learner answered the third question: how can we help those who are affected by gender-based violence? as follows:
We can help those affected by igender-based violence ngokubakholelwa kuqala, nento abasixelela yona … We can mmh siba-enkhareyije to speak when they are ready. [We can help those affected by gender-based violence by believing in them and what they tell us. We can mmh we encourage them to speak when they are ready.]
Teacher L was intentional in her comments and offered feedback to each learner. Her feedback focused on learners’ language use and presentation skills. In her feedback, she would summarise the presentations and comment on the presentation skills. As much as the learners were translanguaging, using both English and isiXhosa, the teacher summarised their points or gave feedback using English only. This modelled the use of English for the learners, confirming and reminding them that the class was for EFAL, and the aim was to grow their English proficiency.
These extracts demonstrate the transformative potential of translanguaging. Translanguaging afforded learners opportunities to construct and explore meanings between isiXhosa and English while participating confidently. We further deduce that translanguaging was used proactively by the teacher as she held the space for learners to use their multilingual repertoires organically in the classroom (Canagarajah 2011). As Creese and Blackledge (2010) contend, the learners and the teacher gave each other spaces to explore and learn. Teacher L’s pedagogical stance opened a space for the learners to participate by drawing on their full linguistic repertoire without either language being a hindrance or setback. This is the translanguaging in the conscious manner that Baker (2011) described.
Classroom print resources
Another set of data emanates from the workshops with the teachers. During workshops and on their own, teachers developed isiXhosa-English bilingual posters to create print-rich classroom walls to improve learners’ vocabulary and support teaching different genres. The first three posters were created during a workshop to explain the structure of a narrative bilingually and introduce some vocabulary to improve writing of this genre (Figure 2), the structure and some useful vocabulary for writing a diary (Figure 3), and steps towards summarising (Figure 4). The fourth poster explaining punctuation (Figure 5) was created by the teacher. (Teacher F, Male, ……)
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FIGURE 3: Genre conventions of a diary entry. |
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FIGURE 4: Bilingual writing frame for a summary. |
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Both Figure 2 and Figure 3 depict bilingual posters made as classroom resources for teaching writing during the workshops in 2022. In line with the aims of the L4L project, the workshops focused on curriculum content, specifically what was specified in the Annual Teaching Plans, and what the teachers would be teaching next. The genres of narrative, diary and the skill of summarising are taught and assessed in the Senior Phase and beyond, so these translations are relevant not only to the Grade 8 and Grade 9 classrooms but across grades and curriculum content.
In Figure 2, the left-hand column explains the genre conventions of narrative, with parallel English and isiXhosa versions. Narrative as a genre is foundational to school literacy yet it is often taken for granted, even though its structure is far from simple. Thus, it is an important genre to explicitly focus on in order to foster a deep understanding of narrative structure and conventions among learners. The list of key genre terms in English with isiXhosa equivalents, in the left-hand column, enables learners to draw on all their linguistic resources to understand important genre terms such as exposition and rising action and to then use these structural features in their writing. The right-hand column is a schematic writing frame, a fairly generic base from which teachers could refine and customise their own narrative writing frames.
Figure 3 explains the structure of a diary entry. The teachers chose to make a poster supporting this genre because it is one of the short written pieces in the curriculum and it is a genre unfamiliar to most learners. Two aspects of the current era of social media, which is the learners’ most common reading experience, make the purpose and conventions of a diary entry quaint and unknown. Most social media platforms are inherently more visual, with immediate posts, are typically short and limited to a specific number of characters, can be changed or deleted in an instant and are shared with an audience of possibly hundreds of friends or followers. The sort of reflective, permanent, confessional writing of a diary is utterly different. Further, the idea of writing only for oneself would be foreign to most Grade 9 social media writers and readers.
So, while the information on the poster in Figure 3 may appear quite basic, the genre terms it explains are central to developing learners’ understanding of the unfamiliar purpose, audience and content of a diary entry. Unlike the two fictional genres discussed above, the poster in Figure 4 sets out the steps for summarising, a form of writing essential to learning that cuts across the curriculum.
This bilingual poster seeks to capitalise on learners’ full linguistic repertoire. There is a clear demonstration and explanation of the steps for writing summaries in both isiXhosa and English. Writing a summary can form part of the language examination paper and is an assessed form in Grade 8 and Grade 9. Details in both English and isiXhosa are indicative of the confidence of the teachers that both languages are seen as beneficial to make meaning. As the poster is displayed on the classroom walls, the learners are encouraged to work together with their teachers to create other posters that address different aspects of language learning. The poster in Figure 5 was one teacher’s own inspiration.
Punctuation is an area of grammar seldom explicitly taught in the Senior Phase. The essential basics of punctuation such as capital letters, full stops and commas tend to be taught in the Foundation Phase and Intermediate Phase. Yet it is precisely in the Senior Phase that punctuation signs beyond the basics enter the texts that learners read and need to produce. Some of these are associated with longer, complex sentences (colon) and incorporating quotations into one’s own text (quotation marks). This bilingual poster would therefore be a useful reference for learners of grammatical terms that cut across the two languages that are taught in school and effectively across the curriculum and are therefore important to realise in both English and isiXhosa.
The extensive reading programme
Finally, we highlight how teachers used the classroom libraries that were curated and donated as part of the L4L project. Mid-way through 2022, as part of the intervention, teachers were given classroom libraries, a wheelie box of 60 books, an equal number of fiction and non-fiction, about 80% English and 20% isiXhosa. As part of the teacher development programme the books were covered in protective plastic, and teachers were shown how to number the books to create an accession register and a borrowing register. They were then encouraged to make time for their Grade 8 learners to read for pleasure. The aim was for the reading programme to continue in 2023 when the learners were in Grade 9, and then to be available for successive Senior Phase learners.
Several contextual factors made it difficult to continue the reading project into Grade 9: many of the Grade 8 teachers did not teach Grade 9 the following year, and those who did found that the keenest readers had read all the books mid-way through Grade 9 and were keen to read new books. While for some teachers the reading programme was short-lived, several others set aside a dedicated time slot once per week in their timetables for reading for pleasure, either half an hour at the end of a period or an entire period. During this period, teachers legitimised learners’ use of their home language to ask and answer questions about the books they had read or to share their oral reviews in isiXhosa of the mainly English books that they had read. As mentioned elsewhere in this article, one of the aims of the intervention was for teachers to create multilingual classroom resources such as posters. As part of the reading programme, teachers encouraged learners to create multilingual word banks, stemming from the books that they read. Figure 6 portrays a word bank created by the learners in one class as well as an accompanying table to compensate for the problematic legibility.
As can be seen, this word bank lists a combination of fairly common words (e.g. poverty, swaying, disgusted), and more unusual words of Graeco-Latin origin (e.g. inspirational, wistfully, ludicrous, phenomenally). There are English explanations and isiXhosa translations of the first 10 words, repeating and reinforcing their meaning. But the word bank is incomplete because the remaining 10 words (pantry, ludicrous, tremendous, phenomenally, subtly, vulnerability, disgusted, hazed, fumbling, fragility) have no explanations or translations. Learners will complete these and add to them as they encounter new words in their reading for pleasure. As research into vocabulary has consistently shown (e.g. Nakata 2017), repetition is key to the acquisition and active learning of new words. The bilingual writing of this word bank and the possibility to check the chart at will as it is displayed on the classroom walls provide learners with repeated opportunities to acquire and learn these new words.
Conclusion
Our data analysis shows the EFAL teachers employing or, more commonly, enabling their learners to employ translanguaging in different ways. However, common to all is the use of both isiXhosa and English, translanguaging more readily than before the intervention. Most teachers agreed that they were no longer ‘smuggling the vernacular’ (Probyn 2009) into their classroom practice but were consciously and more confidently drawing on their own and their learners’ full linguistic repertoires. As much as we observed EFAL learning, we infer that any target language cannot be taught in isolation from the other languages a learner knows, especially their home language. Thus, the bilingual exploratory and presentational talk and writing were seen to be useful when used in the L4L project.
Our case confirms that teachers were legitimising learners’ translanguaging not only in the spoken domain, which has been standard practice in South African classrooms for decades (Madiba 2013; Makalela 2014; Setati et al. 2002) but also in writing, or working with written texts, and assessment, which is a more recent development (Hendricks & Fulani 2018). To this effect, the presented data show the planned, deliberate use of translanguaging in written learning materials produced by teachers and learners. Furthermore, the use of isiXhosa in EFAL assessment (in the literature task based on a play, described above) represents a significant shift in classroom pedagogical practice and offers a teachable strategy of translanguaging.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the contribution of Margaret Probyn and the teachers as co-researchers on this project reported on in this article.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.
Authors’ contributions
M.H. and S.X. both contributed equally to this research article.
Ethical considerations
An application for full ethical approval was made to the University of the Western Cape, Ethics Committee. Ethics approval was received on 13 April 2022. The ethics approval number is HS22/2/10. Furthermore, permission to conduct the study was sought and obtained from the Western Cape Department of Education, and the district as well as the schools. All the relevant ethical adherence documents such as consent forms for teachers, consent forms for parents and assent forms for learners were given out in both isiXhosa and English and explained in detail to all the participants. Willing participation from all the parties was advised and teachers could withdraw anytime from the study, without negatively affecting them. In addition, a draft of the article was given to the teachers to do a member check to verify the accuracy of our transcriptions and interpretations.
Funding information
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Data availability
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are the product of professional research. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.
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