Jasone Cenoz will be giving this week's colloquium. Her talk is titled "The Basque language in education: between isolation and translanguaging". The talk will take place Thursday, May 11 at 3:30pm in Rosenwald 301.
The Basque language in education: between isolation and translanguaging
The isolation of languages in the school curriculum has been regarded as positive for the survival of Basque so that it does not get “contaminated” by majority languages. The idea that nowadays a minority language such as Basque can be isolated in a globalized world can be considered unrealistic. Moreover, there is a strong trend in the study of language acquisition and multilingualism to soften the boundaries between languages and to consider the learner’s whole linguistic repertoire. In this lecture the situation of the Basque language in society and education will be presented and then the concept of translanguaging will be discussed both as a threat and an opportunity for Basque as a minority language. Translanguaging was developed in bilingual schools in Wales to refer to pedagogically oriented strategies that used both Welsh and English in the same class (Williams, 1994) and was adapted to the situation of EnglishSpanish bilinguals in the US (García, 2009; Seltzer & García, 2019). Nowadays, translanguaging has become an umbrella term that can be understood in different ways. Cenoz & Gorter (2017, 2021) highlight the importance of distinguishing between pedagogical translanguaging and spontaneous translanguaging. Unlike spontaneous translanguaging, pedagogical translanguaging is planned by the teacher and can refer to the use of different languages for input and output or to other planned strategies based on the use of students’ resources from the whole linguistic repertoire. Pedagogical translanguaging emphasizes the development of metalinguistic awareness by using resources from the learner’s whole linguistic repertoire. It allows for breathing spaces for the minority language and can be regarded as sustainable translanguaging for learning Basque in school contexts.
References
Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2017). Minority languages and sustainable translanguaging: threat or opportunity? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 38, 901-912.
Cenoz, J & Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
García, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. WileyBlackwell.
Seltzer; K. & Garcia, O. (2019) Sustaining Latinx Bilingualism in New York’s Schools: The CUNY-NYSIEB Project Informes del Observatorio / Observatorio Reports. doi: 10.15427/OR048-02/2019EN
Williams, C. (1994). Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog. Unpublished PhD. Thesis, University of Wales, Bangor