”All that Danish as a second language stuff is not really for me”: Towards a translanguaging stance in Danish L1 education

Many Danish L1 classrooms are characterized by a diverse and multilingual student body whose command of the national language can vary greatly. This variation has intensified in the past 15 years, as national language policies increasingly push municipalities to shut down ‘reception classes’ for newly arrived students, and instead integrate them directly into mainstream education (Kristjánsdóttir 2020). Teachers in L1 mainstream classrooms are challenged by these societal changes, as they often have not been taught the competencies to teach such linguistically diverse student bodies.
However, these challenges also create a valuable opportunity for L1 pedagogies to become better attuned to the diversified student body and to consider how teachers can tap into pedagogies that utilize linguistic diversity as a strategic learning tool that benefits all students. Literacy studies show that not only multilingual children’s, but all children’s early literacy development can be strengthened by pedagogic synergies between school and home literacy practices (Kelly et al. 2007). Inspired by this research and incorporating a translanguaging perspective – i.e., embracing all students’ diversified linguistic repertoires (Garcia et al. 2020) – this paper asks how teachers in mainstream classrooms can create agency and learning opportunities for a diversified student body.
We answer this by exploring and comparing data from two cases. The first is from a reception class where synergies between school and home literacies are an inherent part of classroom routines, the other is an L1 mainstream classroom where teachers involve such synergies for the first time. Our preliminary findings indicate that when teachers in L1 mainstream classrooms include home literacies in school activities they tend to employ translanguaging as a more permanent feature in classroom routines.

Garcia, O., G. Aponte & K. Le. 2019. Primary Bilingual Classrooms, Translation and Translanguaging. In S. Laviosa & M. González-Davies (Eds): The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education. London, Routledge.

Kristjánsdóttir, B. 2020. Fagene Dansk, Dansk som Andetsprog og Minoritetsmodersmål: Status og Hierarkier. Nordand (2)15.

Kelly, C., E. Gregory & A. Williams. 2007. Home to School and School to Home: Syncretised Literacies in Linguistic Minority Communities. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 61.