Bilingual education teachers and learners in a preschool context: Instructional and interactional translanguaging spaces

Abstract

This study explores how bilingual education teachers' flexible delivery of instructional translanguaging within a bilingual preschool in the predominately monolingual context of Turkey could provide children with a space for bilingual interaction. The research aim is to analyse the children's use of translanguaging in relation to translanguaging pedagogy of the teachers. These flexible practices involved two levels of translanguaging. One was teachers' design of the teaching materials, assigning either Turkish or English to each task as the instructional and interactional languages. The other was the facilitation of children's unenforced flexibility to alternate and shuttle between Turkish and English. Six co-teachers were interviewed online about their bilingual teaching experiences and their journals containing children's translanguaging utterances were obtained. Implications for teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers in bilingual education contexts are discussed.