Enacting translanguaging in a Ghanaian multilingual classroom
Code choices in minority language classrooms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36950/lpia-01-01-2025-7Keywords:
translanguaging, multilingualism, bilingual education, semiotic and linguistic resources, Santrokofi, GhanaAbstract
The present study addresses translanguaging as a theory that unravels the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources for communication by monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals. Secondly, it explores translanguaging as a linguistic practice with unique characteristics and functions. In the multilingual classroom, translanguaging has been used strategically or spontaneously as a pedagogical tool for effective instruction and other educational ends. The present case study is conducted in Santrokofi in Ghana and sought to examine translanguaging as a pedagogic tool in a multilingual classroom that is constrained by a bilingual education policy. Using classroom observation, interviews, and focus group interviews, the present study highlights the nature and the functions of translanguaging that takes place in the multilingual classroom. The findings of the study affirmed earlier findings that the multilingual classroom is an important site for translanguaging. Again, translanguaging practices that were observed in the classroom included translation, code-switching, repairing, and deployment of a cocktail of linguistic and semiotic resources and modalities to enhance understanding, explain concepts, and facilitate home-school cooperation. The study also identified negative attitudes of teachers and the marginalization of learners’ mother tongue as constraints to effective translanguaging and proposes a reexamination of Ghana’s language-in-education policy and teacher reorientation and training as ways of reversing teachers’ negative attitudes in order to maximize translanguaging in the multilingual classroom.
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Copyright (c) 2025 David Dankwa-Apawu, Yvonne Agbetsoamedo , ELVIS RESCUE
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