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00:00:02 

[Will Rixon] 

Hi, how are you?

[Taylor Benyahia] 

Hello, I'm doing so well. How are you?

[Will Rixon] 

Very well indeed. Very well indeed.

Feeling good? Feeling revved?

[Taylor Benyahia]

I'm feeling great. I'm excited.

[Will Rixon] 

Good.

As am I. So Taylor, you are a sociolinguist specialising in bilingualism. What took you there? How did you end up at that?

[Taylor Benyahia] 

My goodness.

Oh, it's quite a story. But the short version is that I was raised by a parent who was a receptive bilingual. She could understand her language but had trouble speaking it. I was very curious about that as a kid. I was in an international ballet school, everyone speaking a different language.

I had to know more about that. I ended up in France. I did my master's and my PhD, and I just couldn't get enough of the topic and travelled all over the world to find out more.

[Will Rixon] 

That sounds like, wow, an international-speaking ballet. That sounds like a challenge.

[Taylor Benyahia] 

That sounds like it was a challenge. I was— when I spent more time trying to learn my friends' languages than revising for my ballet exams, I said, hmm, Perhaps that means something for my future.

00:01:03 

[Will Rixon] 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds good. Well, I'm glad you had that experience, Taylor.

Otherwise you wouldn't be here today, perhaps. So have a great session and I'll be back in about 15 minutes.

[Taylor Benyahia]

Wonderful. All right. Thank you so much.

Now, all right, putting my timer on so I can make sure we get enough time. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here with everyone. And before we get into this topic of translanguaging today, I think I already know the answer, but I would love to know if you are bilingual. Could you put a plus sign in the chat box if you're bilingual, if you speak a second or even a third language, if you're trilingual?

I'd love to know. I have a feeling it's going to be a lot of pluses. Okay, I'm seeing a ton already. We are clearly a very bilingual, a very multilingual group. So if you are bilingual, trilingual, or if you've even tried to learn another language, I would love for you to think for just just a minute about how your languages work in your mind.

00:02:06 

When you use those languages, do you feel like they're in separate boxes in your brain, or do you feel like they're working together? For example, do you ever start speaking one language, you start a sentence in one language and you finish it in the second language? Or maybe you feel like, hmm, I want to use this word, but there's not this perfect translation that I'm looking for. So I see some people saying they feel like their languages work together, and That's a great answer because that's exactly what psycholinguistic research tells us. That's the research about how languages are working in the brain.

So what we know is that for a bilingual, trilingual person, multilingual person, their languages are not stored in separate places. So in my brain, for example, I don't have a French box, an English box, an Algerian Arabic box, a Polish box. I have all these languages working together as an interconnected system, right? So today we're gonna talk about translanguaging. In this session, as a classroom practice, as a pedagogical practice, where we're going to think about this idea of languages being interconnected, and we're going to think about how we can help our students use their languages as one flexible system instead of separate boxes, because that's what's actually happening in the brain.

00:03:23 

Translanguaging can have a lot of applications, a lot of big meanings, but today we're going to focus specifically on its classroom use. And I'm gonna give you 5 kind of tasks, activities that you can do without any prep in your day-to-day lessons that use this idea of translanguaging and languages being interconnected, how to help students tap into the skills they already have in their home or heritage language and transfer that to the target language, to English. Okay, now whenever I talk about translanguaging, I always get this big scary question. Does that mean I need to speak every classroom language? If I have a student that speaks Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Portuguese, Spanish, Darija.

Do I have to speak their language? Do I have to know how it works? And the good news is that these techniques, this idea of translanguaging, they can be used with any language pair. You don't need to speak that language or even necessarily understand how the language works. All you need to know is how to have students collaborate and work together, how to use language resources or multimedia resources.

00:04:28 

So I want to reassure you, I'm not asking you to learn 12 new languages before the start of school year, but just to have an open mind about how we can use your students' what we call linguistic repertoire, basically all of the languages that they know. So I'm going to talk about 5 of these tasks, activities, and we're going to start with the first one, which is the language passport. Now, all of these things that I'm showing you, that I'm talking about, have a lot of background in research. They've been tried and tested, and this one particularly comes from the Council of Europe and from SUNY, a university in New York City. They have a whole translanguaging program, basically.

And one of the things that works really well, especially in the beginning of the school year like this, if you're starting fresh, is this idea of a language passport. And there's a couple of different ways that you can make this passport or portfolio. So this first one here comes from the Council of Europe, and as you can see, it asks students to identify the different languages that they speak, but also that they understand, maybe that they can read, that they use in their community, right? And this does so many things for you as an educator. It gives you this really rich idea of the languages that are a part of your students' daily lives.

00:05:45 

Like a simple intake form that just asks, "What language do you speak at home?" might miss a lot of these things. In France, we really don't even ask anything about a student's home languages. So this gives you a lot of depth, and you can see what students might be able to help each other and work together. We'll talk about that more later. And it also helps you just understand the skills that your student has, right?

Because they might understand the language, but not be able to read and write it. But we can still use that in an interesting way for some more activities. Now, here is another example of how I use this in a classroom. This was with the younger students, and we made these beautiful flowers. They put their name in the middle, and then each petal, each color represented something like, this is a language I'd like to learn.

This is a language I already speak. This is a language I understand that I find interesting. As you can see, it looks quite beautiful, and it was something we could also display in the classroom because translanguaging is not just about language activities, but also about creating this classroom environment that's really welcoming to students' languages. So if they see all of that visually, they feel really great. So that's our language passport.

00:06:52 

Now, the language passport is gonna be very useful in helping us find who might be our student expert or ambassador or helper. You can choose a title that you feel like best represents your classroom. So this is something that I've tried and tested in a lot of different classrooms, especially with kids, and they really love it. Here was on the poster. This was in some work I was doing in France.

So we had student ambassadors who spoke Thamizh, English, Romanian, Mandarin Chinese, and their parents even came in and helped us a little bit with this. So here is the way it works. If you've done the language passport and you have a good idea maybe of the languages your students speak, maybe if you don't have always the same groups, maybe the same language families, you can invite a student to be an ambassador or helper or expert, and they will help the other students in their group or language family and kind of facilitate some learning and some understanding. This doesn't mean that they're going to be translating the whole class, but they are there to be a helper. For example, they might help the students in their group learn how to use the dictionary to look up a new word, or if you're using an online tool, how to type it in, how to find the word they're looking for.

00:08:11 

It might also look like if you're talking about some very metaphorical language, a metaphor, a simile, "It's raining cats and dogs." It can be so helpful to have a student who can break this down in the other student's home or heritage language and just make sure that things are really clear. Again, their role is to facilitate not to take over the whole class, right? They just step in and then step back once things have been understood. What I love with this is to use a lot of props. I have a microphone with a little auto-tune feature.

My students always love doing this, and they love being the helper that gets to use the microphone and give a new word. I also have shown clips of interpretation in the UN. They wanted to use big headphones. We didn't connect them to anything, but they just like to wear them and have these props. It gives them a great sense of agency as well, and a lot of independence.

00:09:02 

Love using the student ambassador or expert again just to help facilitate that understanding of new vocabulary, new phrases. And you can also rotate as other students get a little bit more confident. They get to be the expert and they love that feeling. So you've got your, uh, language passport that kind of builds understanding of how the different languages are working in the classroom. And then from that, your ambassador, expert, or helper who can step in and facilitate that a little bit.

Now, something else that can be a lot of fun is a little bit of, let's say, a pre-workout. Now, I don't know if any of you like to go to the gym, like to exercise, or maybe you've just heard of this idea of pre-workout or a protein shake, something you take in the beginning that gives you a little bit of extra energy before you dive into the main event, to the main exercise, right? So this idea of a little translanguaging pre-workout. Is something you can do with any activity, any exercise. The idea is just that students are allowed to discuss in their home or heritage language for just 2 to 3 minutes the prompt that they're working on, the exercise, the topic, just to get their ideas out, to exchange with each other, to think critically, and then they come back and share the rest of their work in English, right?

00:10:26 

So the idea is kind of that think, pair, share. They're going to come together in their pair, in their group. They're going to think, they're going to talk, and then share with everybody. So here, for example, again, this was in a French classroom, but we were discussing the idea of how words move and come to be. Basically, we're talking about the word orange, as you might have guessed.

And so I had students working together speaking different varieties of North African Arabic. And in that same group, a student who also spoke Farsi. I had a student work— some students working together that spoke Spanish and Portuguese. There was a small Armenian group, and so they talked about how the word— what it sounds like in their language, or if they had similar language families, was it the same, was it different, was the writing similar or different, how they thought it came to be. They got to talk through all of their theories, make these comparisons, which builds great metalinguistic awareness, awareness about language.

00:11:22 

Then we came together and we made our beautiful document explaining how all of these words got their origin. So again, this works with any topic. Allow them to have that discussion point because they might have those skills in their other languages that we're working to transfer into our target language and into English. Now, this also works very well with what I like to call the multilingual story or multilingual story mash. So here we were working with Little Red Riding Hood.

There was a version in créole from Guadeloupe, in Algerian Arabic as well, and And again, this works in any language pairs. You can have the students work together in their small language groups. They get the story. Everyone has the same story, but in their language. But the key is the ending is missing, so they plan what they think is going to happen in their own language.

00:12:17 

They try to predict, and then they're gonna write that ending together in English with smaller students. If— or if you don't have students that speak the same languages in those groups, here I am working with with a really tiny group. And you can see maybe on the board we had a student that spoke German, so we're comparing the words in German and English, some of the keywords like wolf and house, and we talked about do they sound the same, do they sound different, building that metalinguistic awareness. And they have so much fun with this. You get to work on prediction and so many things.

So multilingual story, always a big, big hit. And lastly, with this idea of some multilingual writing, is the idea of having a multilingual first draft or kind of a free journal. And the idea is that the students get to have a first pass at their writing activity, or if you're working on journaling, and they get to write how it comes to them. If there's some code mixing, code switching happening, they can put that down on the paper. They can look up the words they need later.

00:13:17 

They're gonna take another pass at correction. They're just gonna work on getting their ideas out and being as creative as possible. This was a student who was— just came from Afghanistan a few weeks prior, and we were doing a poetry workshop. We had so many ideas, was really frustrated, and I said, write your ideas in Dari and we'll find a solution. We'll get a dictionary, we'll look things up.

And when I tell you the idea started flowing, we all collaborated, we worked together to take a pass, then to rewrite it in English. And when I tell you, it was the most beautiful piece of poetry. What I think of what we would have missed out on had he not had the chance to take that first pass in Dari and get those ideas out and work on the correction and refinement all in that kind of second step. So you get to split the cognitive load part, get the content out, get the writing, and then work on the form, the correction, even switching each other's work and helping with that, you know, correction without the fear of writing. So just to get everyone super excited about writing.

00:14:21 

So those are your 5 ways to get translanguaging going in your classroom. And I would love to know of those ideas. Maybe you want to tell me in the chat which one you think would be most useful that you would be excited to try. So is it the language passport, the student expert, a little translanguaging pre-workout, a multilingual story? I would love to know.

So we've got, okay, working a little pre-workout. I'm a big fan of that one too. The story, I love the story. I love a good story. Wonderful.

Okay, I see lots of different ideas. So I hope that was helpful to you all. And I just want to say thank you so much. If you want to connect, if you want to reach out, I'm basically everywhere at Dr. Taylor Banyaha. I'm all over Instagram and LinkedIn.

00:15:15 

You can email me. I love to talk about this, really. I just can't stop. So don't hesitate to reach out. And there's a whole bunch of references if you want to read more and get all the research.

That's where all the good stuff is. And yeah, thank you so, so much.