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The aim for this presentation is to discuss space for multiliteracies through translanguaging pedagogy in basic literacy education in Swedish for Immigrants (SFI). As argued by among others Baynham (2020) and Canagarajah (2011), multilingual pedagogies are important for student voice, and according to King and Bigelow (2020), this is particularly important in settings such as SFI, study path one, as multilingual practices help bridge between school and everyday life and thus enhance learning. The material used consists of video- and audio-recordings from classrooms together with field notes, photographs, and other artefacts. The analysis uses Hornbergers’ continua of biliteracy (2003), since it allows the analysis of power issues related to linguistic diversity and the use of varied linguistic resources, including multimodality. In these classrooms, teachers not only encourage students to draw on all their linguistic resources, but they also engage themselves in learning vocabulary from students’ diverse languages. In their multilingual pedagogy, they explicitly stimulate students to translate between languages and they give space for interaction in diverse languages. Preliminary findings show that by shuttling between linguistic resources, students draw on their earlier experiences and engage in interaction that allows the development of both oral and written language skills in the target language Swedish. 

References

Baynham, M. (2020). Comment on Part 1: Collaborative relationships. In E. Moore, J. Bradley, & J. Simpson (Eds.), Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. 15-22). Multilingual Matters.

Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(iii), 401–417. 

King, K. A. & Bigelow, M. (2020). The hyper-local development of translanguaging pedagogies. In E. Moore, J. Bradley & J. Simpson (Eds.), Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. 199-215). Multilingual Matters.