PARTICIPATORY TRANSLANGUAGING AS A PEDAGOGY FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN CHALLENGING CIRCUMSTANCES: A DRIVE TO SOCIAL JUSTICE

Having to flee their countries, cross borders, live in camps, and be resettled into a new environment, refugees and asylum seekers experience stress, anxiety, and PTSD. These experiences could negatively impact language learning, as research shows that trauma directly affects language learning through decreased self-confidence, difficulty in beginning new tasks, and inability to concentrate (Kerka, 2002). In such circumstances, depriving vulnerable learners, such as refugees, from using their first language while learning a second or foreign language disadvantages them and adds to their stress. In EFL settings, English-only appeals to the proponents of monolingual ideologies that view languages as separate entities and undervalue home languages. These ideologies are prevalent in some NGO settings that help refugees (Capstick & Ateek, 2021). This orientation to a monolingual ideology goes against social justice and the psycho-social aims of establishing a contract among learners which values and respects all of their views and opinions but not, it would seem, all their linguistic resources. The effectiveness of these practices has been questioned in the last decade or so, and alternative pedagogical approaches have been proposed. Translanguaging, which recognises that linguistic and semiotic resources can work as a whole, enables learners to move across language boundaries for meaning-making and knowledge construction (Busch, 2012; Jonsson, 2019). Using relevant literature and examples from previous research, this paper examines the effectiveness of translanguaging as a participatory, transformative pedagogy to promote social justice in classrooms that include language-minoritised and vulnerable learners.