Students' Attitude Towards Translanguaging Practice in Indonesian EFL Classes

Fransiskus Dinang Raja, Suparno Suparno, Ngadiso Ngadiso

Abstract


The multilingual world demands educational stakeholders to adjust by embracing multilingual pedagogies. Translanguaging is deemed a prominent language practice to be implemented in educational settings, especially in the EFL class. However, the practice still obtains criticisms. Many scholars point out challenges in implementing classroom translanguaging. Therefore, studying attitudes, specifically students' attitudes, becomes significant at this point because it helps to reveal how students' feelings and thoughts of translanguaging practice are based on their learning experience. Further, their attitudes can be considered in the classroom decision making whether to translanguage or not to translanguage. The present study will generally continue what previous scholars have done but in a new context and methodology. This study investigated students' attitudes towards student- and teacher-directed translanguaging in Indonesian EFL classrooms. The participants were 40 grade VIII students from two EFL classes of a private boarding school located in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The data was collected using online questionnaires consisting of close-ended and mainly open-ended questions. The result showed that most students expressed negative feelings toward students-directed translanguaging. Meanwhile, teacher-directed translanguaging was more acceptable indicated by most students who had positive feelings towards their teachers' translanguaging. Students' arguments and comments were also interesting to be noticed. These findings shed light on a multilingual pedagogical practice and further research, which we would like to discuss further within this article.


Keywords


Students' attitude, Translanguaging, EFL Classroom

Full Text:

PDF

References


Adamson, B., & Feng, A. (2014). Models for Trilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China. In D. Gorter, V. Zenotz, & J. Cenoz (Eds.), Minority Languages and Multilingual Educations: Bridging the Local and the Global (Vol. 18, pp. 29–44). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7317-2_3

Baker, C. (2001). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 3rd Edition (3rd ed.). Multilingual Matters Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.21.3.11fer

Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01207.x

Catherine, C. S. K. (2014). A New Model of Bilingualism for Singapore: Multilingualism in the Twenty-First Century. In D. Gorter, V. Zenotz, & J. Cenoz (Eds.), Minority Languages and Multilingual Educations: Bridging the Local and the Global (pp. 65–84). Springer.

Cenoz, J. (2017). Translanguaging in School Contexts: International Perspectives. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 16(4), 193–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2017.1327816

Fang, F., & Liu, Y. (2020). ‘Using all English is not always meaningful’: Stakeholders’ perspectives on the use of and attitudes towards translanguaging at a Chinese university. Lingua, 247, 102959. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102959

Galante, A. (2020). Pedagogical translanguaging in a multilingual English program in Canada: Student and teacher perspectives of challenges. System, 92(May 2014), 102274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2020.102274

Garcia, O., & Flores, N. (2012). Multilingual Pedagogies. In The Routledge handbook of multilingualism (Vol. 25, Issue 2, pp. 232–246). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2016.1239366

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385765

Hardigree, C., & Ronan, B. (2019). Languaging and Translanguaging for English Language Teaching. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58542-0_16-1

Jacobson, R. (1990). Allocating Two Languages as a Key Feature of A Bilingual Methodology. In R. Jacobson & C. Faltis (Eds.), Language Distribution Issues in Bilingual Schooling (pp. 3–17). Multilingual Matters Ltd. https://doi.org/10.2307/328839

Jones, B. (2017). Translanguaging in Bilingual Schools in Wales. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 16(4), 199–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2017.1328282

Lewis, G., Jones, B., & Baker, C. (2012). Translanguaging: Origins and Development from School to Street and Beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18(7), 641–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2012.718488

Maher, J. C. (2017). Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1603235

Mbirimi-Hungwe, V. (2021). An Insight into South African Multilingual Students’ Perceptions about Using Translanguaging during Group Discussion. Applied Linguistics, 42(2), 252–268. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa012

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook (3rd Editio). SAGE Publications. Inc.

Moody, S., Chowdhury, M., & Eslami, Z. (2019). Graduate Students’ Perceptions of Translanguaging. English Teaching and Learning, 43(1), 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42321-018-0019-z

Rasman. (2018). To translanguage or not to translanguage? The multilingual practice in an indonesian EFL classroom. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(3), 687–694. https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v7i3.9819

Rivera, A. J., & Mazak, C. M. (2017). Analyzing Student Perceptions on Translanguaging: A Case Study of a Puerto Rican University Classroom. How, 24(1), 122–138. https://doi.org/10.19183/how.24.1.312

Ticheloven, A., Blom, E., Leseman, P., & McMonagle, S. (2019). Translanguaging challenges in multilingual classrooms: scholar, teacher and student perspectives. International Journal of Multilingualism, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1686002

Vaish, V. (2019). Challenges and directions in implementing translanguaging pedagogy for low achieving students. Classroom Discourse, 10(3–4), 274–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2019.1628790

Wang, D. (2016). Translanguaging in Chinese foreign language classrooms: students and teachers’ attitudes and practices. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1231773

Wang, D. (2019). Researching Classroom Translanguaging. In Multilingualism and Translanguaging in Chinese Language Classrooms (pp. 97–106). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02529-8

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods (Sixth Edit). SAGE Publications. Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1177/109634809702100108

Zhang, Q., Osborne, C., Shao, L., & Lin, M. (2020). A translanguaging perspective on medium of instruction in the CFL classroom. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 0(0), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2020.1737089




DOI: https://doi.org/10.35445/alishlah.v14i1.1149

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Fransiskus Dinang Raja, Suparno, Ngadiso

Al-Ishlah Jurnal Pendidikan Abstracted/Indexed by:

    

 


 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.