Background: While the concept of translanguaging has gained significant traction in education in multilingual contexts, it is also debated and contested. Claims are made about what translanguaging can and cannot do, how different it might be from code-switching, whether it arises from a single repertoire of language resources or from use of…

Background: Our article argues that the role of translingual instruction in mathematics classrooms is under-recognised in South Africa, as policymakers, teacher educators, teachers, learners, and parents assume that mathematics is just about numbers and calculations and not language. This is despite findings on the value of using children's…

Background: South Africa's "Language-in-Education Policy" (LiEP) provides for bi/multilingual education, but schools are only supported to choose monolingual English language policies from Grade 4 and ignore the learners' home language or languages as resources for learning. Many teachers translanguage orally, using the learners' home…

This article describes the design and implementation of a project from a translanguaging pedagogical stance. The research presented seeks to understand how translanguaging as a multimodal practice shapes the experiences of students in a traditional English Language Arts 8th-grade classroom and how students leveraged their multimodal semiotic…

The majority of learners in South African schools are African language speakers, yet the dominance of English in the political economy has meant that schools choose to switch to English medium instruction by Grade 4, before learners have the necessary English proficiency to access the curriculum, with negative effects on learning. This paper…

Although South Africa is a multilingual country with 11 official languages, English dominates as the language of teaching and instruction in almost all schools. In addition to this, the Natural Sciences teachers at the school of study were cautioned not to use code-switching because the school policy states that the medium of instruction should be…

Language usage in US K-12 classrooms and beyond continues to be an issue of equity (Navarro Martell, 2021; Palmer et al., 2019). Teachers expect racialized students who appear to be Latinx to know and perform as if their native language is Spanish, mientras a otros se les celebra sus intentos de usar el espan~ol; otro idioma colonizador. Some…

We seek to understand how bilingual adolescent students leverage multiple languages and modes in digital composition. Using a translingual and multimodal perspective of composition, this study reports on the distinct communicative affordances associated with four students' multimodal codemeshing practices. Through analysis of students' digital…

This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their access to…

Being up front with students about Standard English as "the language of power" allows them to learn valuable lessons about Standard and non-Standard English dialects. In this article, the author describes an eighth-grade language unit that helps students understand the value of dialects and standardized English. The author concludes that the…