Translanguaging Practices in Science Education
Summary
Translanguaging in science education entails the dynamic and strategic deployment of learners’ full linguistic repertoires to facilitate sensemaking, participation and equity in science classrooms. Rather than treating languages as separate and bounded systems, translanguaging recognises how students draw upon multiple languages, dialects and semiotic resources to negotiate scientific concepts, pose questions and construct explanations. This approach challenges deficit-oriented views of multilingualism by valuing learners’ home languages as epistemic tools and by reframing language diversity as an asset for cognitive development. In practice, translanguaging may involve code-switching during group discussions, permitting responses in students’ native languages alongside the language of instruction, or employing bilingual glossaries and visual representations to scaffold understanding of subject-specific terminology. The global significance of these practices lies in their potential to broaden access to science for emergent bilinguals, foster deeper conceptual engagement and support culturally sustaining pedagogy. Educators are encouraged to design tasks that build on students’ linguistic strengths, integrate multimodal resources and cultivate collaborative learning environments in which all language varieties contribute to disciplinary learning.
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Translanguaging Practices in Science Education publication trend
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Technical terms
Translanguaging: The process by which multilingual individuals draw on their complete linguistic repertoire to make meaning, learn and communicate.
Multimodal resources: The array of representational tools—such as gestures, diagrams, images and written text—in conjunction with spoken language.
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): A theory of language that analyses how linguistic choices enact social and cognitive functions, often employed to assess meaning-making in educational contexts.
References
- Language Views for Scientific Sensemaking Matter: A Synthesis of Research on Multilingual Students’ Experiences with Science Practices Through a Translanguaging Lens. Educational Researcher (2023).
- Multidimensional Assessment Performance Analysis: A Framework to Advance Multilingual Learners’ Scientific Equity in K-12 Contexts. Education Sciences (2024).
- The continuity of learning in a translanguaging science classroom. Cultural Studies of Science Education (2019).
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