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: Foundation Phase teachers in the South African Department of Basic Education system daily encounter a challenge with learners struggling to read with understanding. This motive was displayed and made available to readers and authors by the recent Progress in International Reading Literacy 2021, which articulated that learners in the…

Background: The article critiques the monoglossic ideologies that dominate current educational practices in South Africa, which often marginalise indigenous African languages and fail to facilitate the dynamic multilingual realities of learners. It examines the impact of English language pedagogies in multilingual settings, particularly in South…

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.…

In this position paper we highlight language as a perennial factor contributing to compromised meaning-making in multilingual primary school mathematics classrooms. We note use of the term 'translanguaging' in discussions around mitigating this meaning-making challenge. The paper argues that, while much work remains to be done towards clarifying…

Pedagogical strategies intended for monolingual classes may not adequately address the educational needs and aspirations of culturally and linguistically diverse learners, as multilingual and bilingual learners differ from monolinguals. This article sought to understand multilingual teachers' pedagogical approaches to helping non-speakers of the…

Classrooms across the world are becoming more diverse, forcing mainstream teachers to accept responsibility for teaching second language (L2) learners. As a result, pedagogical translanguaging has come to the fore as a potential practice to help L2 learners perform academically. In South Africa pedagogical translanguaging had not previously been…

The scope of the paper is to analyse Namibian mainstream primary teachers' practices in the multilingual context they work in. As teachers have a central role in implementing language policies, their practices either support or impede learning as well as learners' multilingual identities. Multilingual practices entailing rich scaffolding and…

The language used as a medium of instruction (MOI) has implications for learning outcomes. In most African classrooms, an international language is solely or dominantly used as an MOI. There is a debate about how this practice is associated with students' learning outcomes. This study uses Zambian PISA for Development 2018 data and school fixed…

Background: South African literacy-as-social-practice theoreticians, language-in-education experts, educational linguists, and language policies advocate multilingual pedagogies to acknowledge and cater to diverse multilingual learners' literacy development. Universities purport multilingualism to provide for the multilingual norm, students'…

This paper focuses on the issue of language of instruction, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and considers the persistent preference for monolingual learning environments in multilingual societies. The perception that the use of African languages in education interferes with the acquisition of a global language is shown to be incongruous with…

The primary goal of language teaching is to afford learners, proficiency in communicating in the target language, self-development as well as intercultural understanding of languages in the learning process. The teacher is therefore charged with the task of selecting appropriate strategies to effectively achieve his pedagogic goals, one of which…

After apartheid, English became the lingua franca in South Africa and African-language speakers continued to be marginalised despite laws attesting to the equality of African languages. This article describes an attempt to rectify the effects of this marginalisation using translanguaging to improve students' academic literacies and pass rates at…

There is an urgent need for more ethical and equitable approaches to reading instruction for young emergent bilingual children in English medium classrooms. Translanguaging pedagogies are one approach that may address this issue as they encourage emergent bilinguals to use all of their linguistic and semiotic resources during reading. This study…

Background: Making predictions on how events might unfold when reading a text improves comprehension. Research on reading and making predictions tends to focus predominantly on the effects of making predictions as a reading strategy in monolingual contexts. So far, there is a paucity of research on the effects of reading development strategies in…