Marked and unmarked translanguaging in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered English classrooms

Translanguaging has gained prominence as a way to understand multilingual practices and draw on these in additional language teaching, but questions remain regarding its application in various educational contexts. This study investigates the significance of translanguaging across instructional settings by comparing discourses of markedness in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered classes taught by the same teacher, where both linguistically majoritized and minoritized students were learning English as an additional language. Data are drawn from four months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a Norwegian upper secondary school and include field notes, video and screen recordings, texts, language portraits, and teacher and student interviews. I found that translanguaging was marked in two largely separate ways: (1) bilingual English-Norwegian practices were more frequently marked in accelerated and mainstream settings, in relation to students’ perceived English proficiency level; whereas (2) translanguaging drawing on minoritized languages was more consistently marked in all three settings as a deviation from majority linguistic practices, thus distinguishing majoritized (English-Norwegian) from minoritized translanguaging. Implications include the importance of analyzing translanguaging in relation to locally salient discourses and contextualizing pedagogical interventions in larger struggles for justice.

Trends and Issues in Content-Based instruction

In the last two decades, content-based instruction (CBI) has grown by leaps and bounds; it appears across educational levels and under various guises. In foreign language education, immersion education and “content-enriched” Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) are popular examples. Sheltered classes and thematic curricula are two variations commonly found in ESL settings. The degree of language and content integration which underlies these various program types is perhaps best captured by means of a continuum.