Globally, there is an increasing focus on the critical role a child’s mother tongue/home language plays in cognitive and linguistic development. It has also become a growing concern in international schools, with new research supporting the need for international schools to improve or develop provisions to ensure that all students continue using their mother tongue for learning at school, in systemic and systematic ways.
The issue for international schools then, is not if they should support the mother tongue languages of their students, but a more complex how should they support them. Given the diverse and super-diverse nature of most international schools, this question has no easy answer. An area of research and practice that has been increasingly of interest in this discussion is translanguaging. Bringing translanguaging into the spotlight as an ideology of multilingualism is a step forward in understanding normative multilingual practices, but bringing it into the classroom as a vehicle for integrating mother tongue languages requires more than ideology. This session will look at the practical aspects of planning for translanguaging in international schools, in particular looking at the structures of the PYP as a framework for understanding effective translanguaging pedagogy. Participants will leave will a clear vision of why we should translanguage in international schools, as well as how we plan for effective use in the classroom.
