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ABSTRACT
Translanguaging is both a concept and an attitude towards language and languaging in a world of super - diversity where it becomes a resource for, or an expression of, decolonisation in interactions for multilingual spaces. Created by the multimodal resources, life experiences, and various perspectives that participants bring to the scene, it includes gestures, postures, types of knowledge, familiarity with certain traditions, and ways of acting. It is linked to the possibility of talking back, which is deeply submerged in a culture of silence since human beings arc not built-in silence but are moved in/with word, work, and action-reflection. In this article, we discuss how, through translanguaging practices and stances during additional language classes, learners can gradually perceive, become conscious of, and critically deal with personal and social reality and its contradictions. This pedagogical article presents our reflection on a set of English classes for impoverished Brazilian adults who learn how to participate in an election process through a syllabus organised by social activities materialised through language. This reflection suggests that participants expand their repertoire and develop mobility to join different social activities by using all available resources in the translanguaging classroom.
KEYWORDS
Translanguaging, engaged multiliteracies, social activity, English teaching, and learning.
1. INTRODUCTION
This article discusses how, through translanguaging practices and stances during additional language classes, learners can, as Freire (1970) suggested, gradually perceive, become conscious of, and critically deal with personal and social reality and its contradictions. It is based on an extramural project from the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP), The Multicultural Project, which was developed as part of the research funded by The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq - Grant number: 301512/2019-1) and the Research Incentive Plan of PUC-SP (PIPEQ) in Brazil. This project aims to provide language teachers with initial training in a translingual and multicultural perspective to create spaces in the classroom so that the participants can use their entire repertoire to make meaning in the world.
The organisation of the project is based on a view of language teaching through social activities instead of teaching language by language items or functions, such as the GrammarTranslation Method, the Communicative Approach, or the Audiolingual Method, among others. Working with social life activities (Liberali,...