Translanguaging mediating reading in a multilingual South African township primary classroom

Monolingual oriented practices that largely dominated reading instruction in most multilingual African contexts in the twentieth century are increasingly being challenged in this century. Despite this, there remains a dearth of research on the concurrent use of more than one language during reading instruction in these contexts. In this qualitative study, we examined the reading practices of multilingual learners and one teacher in isiZulu and English in a Grade 3 classroom in an urban township primary school in South Africa. We adopted translanguaging as a theoretical lens through which we studied the reading events in the two languages. Data collection included classroom observations, audio recording of lessons, and semi-structured interviews with the teacher and the learners. Findings show that through translanguaging, the teacher and the learners were able to tap into a range of their communicative and linguistic resources and also drew on their social and cultural worlds to make sense of the texts. In addition, we found that despite this, there were constant conflicts and tensions between the teacher’s discourses and actual practices. We conclude by recommending official recognition of multilingual pedagogical practices and multilingual policies that valorise learners' and teachers' multilingual practices.