Topic: Young Learners | Leveraging translanguaging strategies
Presenter: Nirajana Bardhan
Presentation details
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is widely used in language education as both a “shared roadmap” for language learning and an assessment framework that goes beyond test scores to measure progress. Viewing language as a means to access opportunities across academic, professional, and social domains, it aligns with the Council of Europe’s commitment to inclusive education for all citizens. Accordingly, the Council promotes the CEFR as a tool for facilitating plurilingual education that fosters “democratic citizenship”, and “intercultural dialogue” (CEFR, 2020).To support this, it offers descriptors on plurilingual competence based on the view that plurilingual learners draw on a “single interrelated repertoire” combined with various strategies to accomplish tasks (CEFR, 2001).
However, while the CEFR includes a section on plurilingual competence, descriptors across other sections remain largely monolingual in orientation, limiting their ability to account for the strategic use of L1 in L2 learning.
This paper draws on a classroom-based intervention with upper-primary ESL learners in a low-resource Bangla medium school in West Bengal, India. It focuses on planning, a subdomain within CEFR’s production strategies. Although the CEFR provides no descriptors for planning at the A1 level (implying learners’ inability to plan before production), and expects A2 learners to only “recall and rehearse phrases”, participants in this study, broadly placed at A1-A2 (English) proficiency level, planned their stories more effectively using translanguaging tools, such as idea banks (Mukhopadhyay, 2022), guiding questions, and drawing (Espinosa et al., 2016).
By foregrounding planning as a cross-linguistic cognitive process, this study calls for adapting CEFR’s planning descriptors to better suit bi/multilingual ESL learners or expanding plurilingual competence descriptors that currently prioritise spoken interaction and product over process. It also offers practical translanguaging strategies for prewriting and challenges fixed notions of proficiency regarding young emergent bilingual ESL learners.
About the presenter
Nirajana Bardhan is a research scholar in the School of English Language Education at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India.
Currently in her fourth year of doctoral studies, her research explores the role of translanguaging strategies in supporting the development of ESL writing skills among young bilingual learners in the context of low-resource schools in rural Bengal.