Translanguaging vs English-only policies
Jonathon Ryan
In this post, I'm continuing a discussion started by Mia Tarau two weeks ago, and followed up by Michael Rabbidge last week.
My first recollection of an English-only classroom policy was at a language school in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I taught English in the mornings and evenings and studied Spanish during the day. There, I had the parallel experience of being subjected to an English-only policy when I taught and a Spanish-only policy when I studied. It wasn't my first teaching job but I was green enough to assume that the rules must reflect some sort of established ‘best practice’. Anyway, one day, at the very start of a new block, I was teaching a beginner class while being observed by the director of studies, so I was on my best behaviour. This included upholding the English-only rule. Near the start, I asked a student what his job was, but I couldn't work out what he was trying to say. We went round in circles for a couple of minutes. Then the director of studies suddenly blurted out ‘¿contador?’ ‘Yes’ the man replied. Uhuh, I thought. An accountant.
Such was her frustration, that the DOS had not only broken ‘the English-only rule’ but had intervened in a class she was meant only to observe. In our debrief afterwards, she brought her customary wisdom, advising me to ignore the English-only rule if it got in the way. What she had observed was a disruption to the flow of the lesson and a squandering of time that I could have more usefully directed towards the lesson objectives. Going round in circles contributed nothing towards what was in the lesson plan. Wise words indeed.
Around the same time, our Spanish teacher had the class absolutely bamboozled with an explanation of how to use the words le and se. We struggled through a frustrating couple of hours and all left dejected and none the wiser. After lunch, I mentioned it to one of my colleagues. ‘Oh, they’re indirect object pronouns’, she said. And suddenly it all made sense. The concept and the teacher’s examples all clicked into place.
For me then, from a purely logical standpoint, it’s the dogmatic inefficiency of English-only policies that I find particularly galling. Why not just quickly translate and move on? What’s worse is the overzealous policing of the policy, which in some hands tends to be domineering and more a matter of control than education.
That said, I will concede that there is a case for an occasional, judicious insistence on more English and less home language. For instance, in mixed nationality classes, too much chattering in an L1 can feel exclusionary and may disrupt the harmony of the classroom. But that rarely happens. More often, the chatter is either on task and helpful to learning, or it seems to be performing some other socially important function, even if just touching base. This positively contributes to well-being, which is surely a precondition to effective learning. I’d also admit that the Spanish-only rule pushed me to take risks and have a go. I had to be more comfortable being wrong and being corrected. Those were all good things.
So there is a balance to be reached, but like Mia and Michael, I’m much more on the permissive side of letting students make use of all their linguistics resources.