Challenging Minority Language Isolation: Translanguaging in a Trilingual School in the Basque Country

Abstract

Learning two or more languages at school is quite common all over Europe,but languages are often isolated from each other. This pedagogical practice isin contrast to the way multilingual speakers use their whole linguistic reper-toire when communicating in social contexts. These multilingual solitudes arechallenged when translanguaging pedagogies are used and multilingual stu-dents are allowed to use the resources in their linguistic repertoire. The specificfocus of this article is to examine translanguaging as a pedagogical tool asrelated to a context wherein Basque is the main language of instruction, but aminority language in society. The article reports the characteristics of a peda-gogical intervention based on translanguaging, which aims at developinglanguage awareness, metalinguistic awareness, and communicative and aca-demic competences in Basque, Spanish, and English. Our findings show thatpedagogical translanguaging can be compatible with the maintenance anddevelopment of a minority language.