Perspectives on Translanguaging and Schoolscape : A Case Study of Romani-Speaking Children in a Hungarian School

Abstract

Translanguaging in the classroom is engaging educators’ attention as a practical pedagogical choice to integrate learners’ full linguistic repertoire. This study aims at exploring how teachers, university students, and researchers describe the implementation and effects of translanguaging practices and also their effects on the linguistic landscape (LL) in a Hungarian School in Tiszavasvári, where most of the children use Romani resources as their home language. The research is based on the Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities: Speaking Romani at School project which seeks to investigate the opportunities of incorporating children’s home language in monolingual primary school settings and curricula. To accomplish the study aims, I used one outputs of the project as my data, a video repository, which contains classroom scenes on translanguaging moments and teachers’, students’, and researchers’ reflections on the scenes. In addition, in the data, notes from my research diaries are also included, which encompass reflections on the translanguaging effects on the LL written during my working experience in the project. I employed discourse analysis to examine the transcripts from the videos and learning diaries. The findings reveal that the three groups used various discursive resources, tones, and focus to describe the translanguaging practices and the LL and portrayed them as pedagogical, transformative and beneficial tools. Moreover, the influence of their educational and social backgrounds and experience on their perspective on translanguaging and LL is discussed in relation to the findings. This study demonstrates the significance of identifying project participants’ perspectives to make research findings relevant to improving instructional practice.