My favorite subject is lengua because the teacher es un crack: translanguaging in CLIL student writing

Abstract

We interpret CLIL as bilingual education inasmuch as it can help create bilinguals; and we are interested in the behaviour of emergent bilinguals. We also subscribe to the idea of holistic linguistic repertoires instead of separable languages. In this article we describe research we conducted partially replicating studies conducted by Celaya (2008) and Agustín-Llach (2009) in order to explore instances of translanguaging in CLIL writing. We focus on borrowing, translating and foreignizing. Although these instances of L1-infused language have frequently been treated as errors, we suggest teachers could more usefully consider them as naturally occurring communicative strategies: snapshots of emergent bilingualism in their students. We compare two datasets of student writing gathered at a 3.5-year interval and discuss the evolution of the students’ competence as evidenced in the texts they produce.