Developing cognate awareness through pedagogical translanguaging

Abstract

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as plannedinstructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in amultilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognateidentification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingualprimary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identificationof cognates in three languages is related to linguistic factors and toteaching. The relationship between teaching cognates andmetalinguistic awareness is also explored. Half of the participants tookpart in an intervention based on pedagogical translanguaging usingmultilingual resources from the students’ own repertoire while theother half followed regular classes. Participants completed abackground questionnaire and a cognate recognition task. Informationwas also gathered by means of a think-aloud protocol and an interview.The results indicate that the identification of cognates is connected tothe linguistic characteristics of cognates but not to having Basque orSpanish as a first language. Participants who had taken part in theintervention showed a higher development of cognate awareness butthere were no significant differences between the groups in cognateidentification. The results are exploratory but they indicate that usingthe languages in the students’ whole linguistic repertoire can createmore opportunities for language learning.