Breaking African Language Boundaries: Student Teachers Reflections on Translanguaging Practices

Abstract

The notion of translanguaging has recently attracted attention in bilingual educational contexts worldwide. Noteworthy, however, is a paucity of studies that have assessed its effectiveness as a teachable strategy in complex African multilingual classrooms. This study investigated metacognitive reflections of 15 (n=15) student teachers towards their use of discursive language practices in learning Sepedi as an additional language in a teacher education programme. During classroom interactions, the participants’ community (home) languages were permitted to offset linguistic fixity often experienced in monolingual classroom contexts. The results of the study revealed a heightened cross- fertilisation of transcultural identities and fluid communicative repertoires that extend beyond traditional linguistic codes. Using a translanguaging framework, I extend its scope as an effective strategy to renegotiate African language boundaries based on an ubuntu worldview (i.e., one being incomplete without the other) and highlight cognitive, pedagogical and social advantages of the languaging phenomenon. Pedagogical implications and areas of further research on translanguaging are considered at the end of the paper.