The Emergence of Translanguaging Pedagogy: A Dialogue between Theory and Practice

My goal in this paper is to contribute to the process of bringing practice and theory into active dialogue. Initially, I review some early instructional examples of crosslinguistic pedagogy involving emergent bilingual students. I then focus on more recent examples from the Canadian context that illustrate the emerging role of classroom teachers as knowledge-generators. Through their practice, these educators have challenged the assumption that schools serving multilingual students have no option but to be English-only zones. Finally, I explore some of the ways in which these instructional innovations illuminate theoretical understandings of translanguaging and crosslinguistic pedagogy more generally.