Translanguaging What it is and what to say when you get push backs

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This year, an overwhelming number of teachers have asked to learn more about translanguaging. So, we are very lucky to have ed experts who have accepted to share their knowledge and expertise with us on the various aspects of translanguaging and some related topics.

And to start with, I am very honored to have been able to interview Dr. Owen Chrisfield so we could lay the basics of what translanguaging is, but also to give you some research-based evidence to counter any pushbacks you might get from colleagues and your school if you suggest the idea of translanguaging.

Dr. Chris is a specialist in languages across the curriculum, including ELLL, home languages, bilingual and immersion education, super diverse schools, and translanguaging. She has been an ESL and EIL teacher, department head, curriculum developer, and has worked in several universities in teacher development programs. She currently runs her own consultancy focused on improving language teaching and learning in schools. Her focus is on equal access to learning and language development for all students and on appropriate and effective professional development for teachers working with language learners. She works with families, schools, and organizations around the world and is engaged in research on topics related to languages in education. She's also an honorary fellow at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.

I am sure many of you would love to ask her some questions directly. Unfortunately, she wasn't available to be live during this event. So, if you want to ask your questions, you can type them in the comment section by Saturday, the 4th of October, and I will be able to send them all to her.

By the way, I haven't introduced myself. I'm Yashito Damori, author for Mingo Children, specializing in multilingual literacy. I'm a modern foreign languages teacher and international coordinator in a secondary school in London. And I am honored to be your host for the grammar literacy event. And now, without further ado, let's get into the interview.

Good morning. Uh, it's a great honor to have you as part of the grammar event and thank you very much again for accepting my invitation. Um, this year when I was preparing the event, so I was sent, I was asking my followers what kind of sessions they would like to do or interviews, and there were quite a few teachers who were interested in learning more about translanguaging. But what surprised me is that there were also loads of teachers who knew about translanguaging and they were already integrating these practices in their lessons, but they found it really difficult to spread it throughout their school because of loads of pushbacks that they were having. I thought that this interview could be used to clarify what translanguaging is, but also to provide teachers who are getting pushbacks with evidence-based answers that they could give to help spread translanguaging across their schools.

>> Absolutely. I'm delighted to be able to participate. Thank you for arranging for it to be recorded in advance so that I could.

>> Thank you very much. And so you're a consultant who helps schools, and so can you explain a bit how you help schools and what you help them with?

>> So, I'm an applied linguist, which means that my training was everything to do with how languages are learned and used in the world. It's not like the science of language itself, which is linguistics, but the applications. And so broadly speaking, I help schools with anything to do with language development, language teaching, and language learning. So that may be, for example, in the UK context or in most of the international schools I work with, the development of English as an additional language, where the children are learning the language of instruction. It can be in bilingual or immersion schools. It can be helping schools understand how to develop home language provisions for students, host country language provisions in international schools, and then also just generally work on what in international schools we call world languages, which is called foreign languages or modern foreign languages in other contexts. And so it's everything from reviewing practice and curricula and procedures and pedagogy to developing systems and curricula and pedagogy for any of those linguistic areas.

>> Thank you very much for clarifying. And, um, before we talk about translanguaging, I think it's important to explain what translanguaging is, maybe what it's not as well, because there might be some confusions from people who have heard the term but are not sure what it is. Could you give us an explanation?

>> So, yes and no. The problem with the term translanguaging is it's kind of fallen victim to what we call semantic bleaching. It's been used to mean so many different things by so many different people that it's really actually, I would say, impossible to say translanguaging is this and not that. And so if you were to go and try and read or research about translanguaging, you'll find lots of different practices described under the umbrella. And so what I work with schools on and what I find to be the most useful way of defining it is to go back to the original definition in the Welsh context, which is the use of two or more languages in classes by varying the language of input and output, and I add in processing in that. So it's really, it's a very structured pedagogical approach that allows us to have students learning in one language and producing something in another, or reversing, or processing with same-language peers. But if we bring it down to that kind of quite narrow vision of what translanguaging is, it allows us to think about it as a pedagogical tool rather than in some of the more grandiose ways that it's presented across the spectrum of applied linguistics research.

>> Thank you. So I guess we're going to talk about some examples a bit later. Um, there's another term I would like to clarify. It's the term EAL. Um, so it's English as an additional language, and we hear a lot of, so in schools they call students EAL students because they're learning English, which is the language of instruction. But there are also other schools who prefer the term multilingual. But I've heard as well that it can be confusing to call the EAL students multilingual because there are some who are also multilingual who speak different languages, but maybe the language of instruction. So, for example, English is actually stronger than their home language. So for this interview, could you maybe tell us how we're going to call the different types of students we can have in a classroom?

>> Yeah. So I think that, you know, both of those terms are important, but how we use them is really important. And so, you know, if we look to the work that I did with Jersey on their language policy, we dealt with that question in this way. We have two terms. The term multilingual learner is any student who arrives at school speaking a language beyond the language of instruction. So in English medium schools, it's a child who arrives and they speak any languages plus English, or only any other language. And so the designation itself is a permanent characteristic of this child; they are multilingual. Okay? And it doesn't say anything about their proficiency in English. So they can walk in with fluent English and mediocre Japanese, but they are a multilingual learner. EAL, then, English as an additional language, is a provision that some students receive to support the learning of English. And so it's a temporary designation that is only for students who need to continue to develop the language of instruction, or English. And so you may have students who are multilingual learners who are not receiving EAL, but we still need to know about their multilingualism because when we look at, you know, broadly speaking in the research, there are certain ways in which our classrooms need to respond to multilingualism regardless of the level of English of the students. And that is, you know, celebrating home languages, making sure children get to continue to use them, knowing what they are, and knowing how they influence their English. And that's again, permanent. And then EAL is just this child needs some additional support to learn the language of instruction. They're going to have EAL lessons three times a week for however long. But what happens in schools that used EAL to identify the child is, as soon as they're not receiving EAL support anymore, everybody just thinks they're fine.

And obviously, you know, you might get EAL support for your first six months or a year in school. You might no longer get EAL support when you're still only kind of a low intermediate level. And so, you know, that's what I was seeing in schools is we were losing sight of those children who, all of a sudden, "Oh, they're not EAL anymore." And the classroom teacher going, "Surely they're still EAL," and the EAL teacher saying, "No, they're not EAL anymore." And so, you know, we need that clarification in order to make sure that we know that we have two main jobs. One is to support the development of multilingualism, and one is to support the development of English so that children can learn in our schools. And we have to keep those separate.

>> Okay. Thank you very much. Um, and so, uh, another thing I would like to maybe jump on, because we're talking about the provision of EAL for EAL students, it's, so I see some posts on LinkedIn, etc., saying that EAL students shouldn't be taken out of their core lessons, but they should get provision within the lesson to be able to access the lesson. From my perspective, I have the impression that it's good to have a transition phase because if someone, for example, I was dropped in Germany, I don't speak any German, I would be very happy to get a teacher who could teach me the basics and maybe so maybe I would make friends, etc. But I feel as an adult, maybe I need this transition, and I would imagine that it's the same for children. What's your view on this?

>> Yeah. I think that, you know, that's often kind of it's sold as being under the hat of inclusion. It's not inclusive to take children out of classes. My argument is, you're not necessarily included in a class just because you're sitting in it. If you've arrived with very little English and you're sitting in a Year 5 science class, you're not included anyway. You can't understand anything. And if we think about Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, we have a kind of a similar frame we use in language acquisition called I + 1. So students learn from their level of interlanguage plus one level of difficulty. And so that means you've got to look at the gap between the student's level of language and what's being used in the class to decide if the best place for them is in the class. And you're absolutely right. When that gap is too big, it's better to give them some more intensive provision to help them learn English more quickly, because that will allow them to be included in class more quickly as well. And so it's going to take the amount of time it takes to learn English to the level that will allow you to access the curriculum. If we're just letting them sit in class and not understand anything, it's going to take a lot longer. So they're in the end losing out on more in that model. And so, I structure my EAL model through three tiers. And that tier three support for initial English acquisition, I use the Bell Assessment Framework for Band A and Band B. That has to be in standalone provision because if, you know, maybe not in Year 1, because in Year 1, you know, the level of the class will be more aligned with the students' capacity. But the older kids get, the more they need that structured daily support just for learning English to allow them to develop more quickly, and then they'll be included in learning. And so, you know, I think we need to kind of challenge that thinking about what inclusion means, because it doesn't just mean bums on seats. It means students engaged in understanding and learning. And if you have almost no English, that's impossible in a Year 7 science class, geography class, English class, whatever. And so, we have to look at that balance.

>> And I guess in, for example, a science class, etc., that their prior knowledge can also help access the learning, but if they don't know too much of the language, it would be too difficult to reach the level of understanding of the rest of the class.

>> Yeah. Well, and it's also looking at, you know, what the teaching capacity is, you know, what do the teachers know about supporting students with EAL? Do they know how to scaffold? Do they know how to use Google Translate? Do they know how to use translanguaging strategies? You know, the better your core tier one provision of language scaffolding and language support in the classroom, the more they can be in class. But the reality is that, you know, there's just such a big language gap once we hit kind of Year 5, 6, or 7 that some intensive daily provision for the acquisition of English will allow them to progress more quickly and therefore lose out on less learning overall.

>> Yeah. Okay. And here we talk a lot about the provision for EAL students. Uh, that is TR or translanguaging practices meant to just help EAL students, or is it for the whole class? Can you explain?

>> Yeah. So I guess we go back to those definitions of multilingual learner and student receiving EAL provision. When we think about the needs of students who are still developing English, we often think about translanguaging just as a support to help them access content. So, you're going to read Romeo and Juliet in Polish, and we're going to work on it in class in English. So this way, you understand Romeo and Juliet, and then we can learn to talk about it together in English. And so, at its most basic, it is kind of a scaffold for content learning. But then, if we draw back to what I said earlier about when we have students who are multilingual, we have responsibilities to them. Translanguaging is also a way to make sure that students continue to engage in their home languages in robust and academic ways, and so they'll continue to develop as well. So if our goal is again to support multilingualism and not just English kids as quickly as possible, translanguaging is a really powerful strategy to make sure that they're not starting to lose their capacity in their own language because they're so focused on English. And then the third purpose for me. So the first purpose is to scaffold content. The second is to support language development in English and home languages. And the third for me is about diversifying the curriculum. If we want to enrich a geography unit about ecosystems, we have kids go and research an ecosystem in a different language from a different part of the world and come and talk about those ecosystems together in English. And then we've learned about ecosystems in seven different countries. And that's far richer than everybody researching an ecosystem in an English-speaking country. And so it's that that's how we broaden our view of content and start to include perspectives other than the kind of the normative Anglo perspective.

>> And so all three of those purposes are valuable. And the third one in particular is really beneficial for all students, whether they are English monolingual or multilingual, because they are also diversifying their understanding of the content.

>> And I have the impression there is also this, I guess, pride about who they are when they can research about their own culture and bring it back in the classroom and teach the other children about it. Like I...

>> Absolutely. It's an asset-based approach rather than a deficit-based approach.

>> Yeah. Yeah. See, it reminds me of one of my colleagues in science. So she asked her pupils to, they were doing something about evolution or adaptation to the environment. And so instead of just giving her, giving the animals, she asked the different students to go and look at the adaptation of an animal that was, either, I'd say, an animal that disappeared in time but was very prominent in their country, or that now is very prominent in the country. And loads of different animals. And she said that the students, when they were presenting, they were a lot more confident and wanted to share what they had learned.

>> Yeah. Because, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, students need to connect with the content and the curriculum to be engaged. It's much easier to connect with something that is part of your roots than to connect with some generic thing that's in a textbook that you've never, to a place you've never been, and you know nothing about.

>> Absolutely. And, um, so also a common pushback that I hear about is from, so in schools they said that either colleagues or parents are afraid when there is too much of the home language that's allowed in the classroom because they come from the perspective that they need to be prepared for the exams that are in English, for example. And so if they are, they speak too much of the home language in class, they won't develop the English, so it might be detrimental for the exam results. What do you think about that?

>> So I think there actually, there's kind of almost two answers and not one. Because the first thing, the first answer is, if they don't understand it because their English isn't good enough to help them understand it, if you just persist in doing it in English, it's not going to help them in their exams anyway, because they just don't understand it. And so where we have students who are not going to fully access the content because of their level of English, it's irrelevant. If we push them to use English only, it will still impact their grades in a negative way. And so if we look at that translanguaging cycle I talked about, input, they might be reading Romeo and Juliet in English, and then in class processing and reading extracts and talking about it in English, and then writing about it in English, but they read it in Polish first to enable them to understand Act 1, Scene 1, to be able to talk about it and write about it. And so from the perspective of students whose English isn't strong enough to access content fully, it's never going to be worse for them to learn through their own language than to persist in English and just not understand.

The second piece is that, in my perspective and the way I work with schools, and this is sometimes controversial, I do believe that translanguaging needs to be designed. It can't be let students use whatever language they want to use all the time because you're right, we are also preparing them for English language education, English language exams, most of them English language university. And so for me, the structure of that pedagogical cycle, input, processing, and output, helps us do it in carefully designed ways where we know the purpose and we know the outcome, and we're doing both. We're supporting content and their home language, and we're pulling them towards improving their English through that. And so that requires, it requires a whole school approach where translanguaging is not just a fun thing we do from time to time, because it requires a strong language policy that then comes into the classroom in classroom language policies. Because really strong implementation of translanguaging, where you're doing all those things, requires the students to take agency for their language decisions as well. And so you need classroom language policies to say, like, when the teacher says, "Do this part of your work with your partner in your own language," then that's what you do. But if you're sitting at a table with four people, and three of them speak Korean and one of them doesn't, then you use English. Like, we also have to be a collaborative classroom. And so in order to get that design piece really working well, you do need that kind of top-down language policy and leadership and dedication to really working on it, in the same way you'd work on any other whole school pedagogical approach that you want your teachers to do. I mean, if you want to use Rosenstein's principles of action, that's got to be top-down. If you want to do whatever, and it's the same kind of thing. It's like not an incidental thing. It can be an incidental thing, but incidental isn't where you get the most value, and it isn't where you get that sense of really clear understanding of why you're doing things in the way you're doing it and what the outcomes you're planning for are.

>> Yeah. So, we need to keep in our mind that the aim is to enrich the learning of everyone through different perspectives or different languages. But if, yeah, if we lose that, if we lose sight of it, then it can just be chaotic and not really...

>> Yeah, and then you get kids who group themselves and always sit with somebody and only use their own language, and it becomes a bit exclusive. And that's one of, you know, when I work with schools, teachers' big worry to me is always when kids are using a language that I don't understand, how do I know they're not, you know, making fun of other kids or being naughty? And so, you know, the whole classroom language policy is about being really collaborative with your students. We would like our class to be multilingual. These are the reasons why. But we have to do it in ways that work for everybody. So what are going to be our agreements about how we use languages productively and inclusively?

>> Yeah. Okay. And so there is another aspect I would like to talk about is like the what happens in the classroom, what happens outside the classroom. Uh, because when, or maybe it's just me, but when I hear translanguaging, I have the impression that most of the talk is about what's happening in the classroom, how we can teach with different languages, etc. But the, I think there is like we talked already about the emotional side of how students feel in the school. And so when I go to different international schools, I see that there are loads of posters, projects, all the languages are displayed in the corridors in the school. How much, from your experience, how much would you say, or how important is it to have the languages outside the classroom as well, just in their environment, not just as a tool to teach them?

>> Yeah. I mean, your school linguistic landscape should represent who you are. And so, there's a concept we have in applied linguistics called the monolingual habitus. And the monolingual habitus is when you go into an environment populated mainly by multilinguals who are all pretending to be monolinguals. And that's what happens in a lot of schools. It's what happened, you know, when we moved to the UK and my kids went into a state school, they thought everybody was monolingual because they only ever heard English. And then slowly other, you know, their friends started to disclose to them like quietly, "Oh, I speak German too because my dad's German," or, you know. And so it's that kind of hidden linguistic diversity. And we don't want that because, of course, students who feel their language isn't welcome and valued are not going to value it themselves, and then they'll lose it. And so, absolutely, our linguistic landscape, both the physical landscape and the social landscape, should represent our community. And so if we are having an assembly and, you know, having student presentations, and we have multilingual students, well, why not? If we're having a school concert and we have multilingual students, where are the songs in other languages? You know, it we need to represent our community so students feel a part of it and feel belonging. There's a lot of talk right now in education about belonging. How can you feel belonging if who you are is never seen or heard in your school?

>> Thank you. Um, there's another pushback I would like to talk about. So it's, so for example, when I, I went to visit a few schools. It was in the Netherlands, but the language of instruction was English. And I remember, so I was speaking with one teacher who does a lot about multilingualism in the school, and she told me that, I said, "Oh, you're doing so much, it's great." And she said, "Yeah, it's not always easy because I get sometimes comments from teachers who are saying, like, aren't we doing too much about multilingualism?" And so from the conversation, I understood that in the classes, it's not just people who speak who are multilingual, there are also people who are students who are monolingual who just speak English, and they might be feeling a bit at a disadvantage, or maybe think, see that maybe it's, multilingualism is so praised, but they are just English, so they don't feel that well. So first, is there a, how would you suggest the balance could be taken, or how do we approach things? And yeah.

>> Yeah. So I think again, you know, we have to differentiate international education from state education. In international schools, all students are learning another language, whether they're fluent or not. So those monolingual students in school in the Netherlands, in school in English, they're learning Dutch too. So they have opportunities to use Dutch in their translanguaging, and that's really good for them. And so, you know, international schools tend to be more, I would say, tuned into language. But if we're looking at, you know, any state sector where English is the language of instruction and the language of the community, and you worry about, I do hear that, what about the monolingual kids, it's going to make them feel bad about themselves. And, you know, there's really very, very little research on that. But through the work in Jersey, after we implemented the language policy, which included working with schools on translanguaging, about a year and a half after we implemented, we did a teacher survey. We did a questionnaire for teachers about their kind of their attitudes, their knowledge, and their attitudes and practice around multilingualism and how it's shifted since the implementation of the language policy. And one of the questions I put in because of this was, "Do you feel that the Jersey language policy for education has had an impact on monolingual students?" And if yes, what is that impact? And what was really interesting is everybody who answered that longer form question, "What has the impact been?" Every single answer was positive. And all of the teachers said the monolingual students are getting interested in languages. They're having fun with languages. They are looking at their multilingual peers differently, not just as the child who doesn't speak English, but the child who does speak another language. And when I was doing classroom visits, I went to one school that we'd worked quite a lot with and went into a Year 6 class, and they were all using translanguaging to create bilingual vocabulary lists. So the multilingual children were doing their home language and English, and the monolingual children were doing whatever language they want. And so there's one little boy saying, "I did mine in Korean because I love K-pop, and look at how cool Korean is." And so I really believe that if we want to change attitudes and uptake to languages amongst monolingual populations, multilingualism is the pathway to do that because it's the way for kids to see languages as something that's interesting and fun and vibrant, and it gives me something rather than I'm sitting in a French class. No offense to French. I know you're a French teacher. I've been a French teacher too. But, you know, I'm sitting in a French class in Leeds. I've never been to France. I've never known anybody who's been to France. I couldn't find France on the map. I don't care. Why am I engaged and interested?

But if I've got loads of friends who are Polish, and we learn how to play football in Polish, well, that's a lot better for my language acquisition and my attitudes about language. And so I think that, you know, I understand people's fear about monolingual children feeling left out, but in my experience, I've never seen it happen that way. And I know there are loads of schools in England that do things like languages of the month club. And, you know, you can open it to anybody. I visited one school and they do the, they take the register in different languages, and the monolingual kids were learning enough of another language to do it one week because they just wanted to participate. Yeah.

And so that's how you get kind of, you know, interest and curiosity around languages. It's not going to be through some dry language that the kids don't feel will ever be useful to them. And so I think that actually the potential impact for our monolingual students are just as great as for our multilingual.

>> That's really reassuring. I guess for all the schools that have the majority of their students who are monolingual to see all the impact it can have.

>> Yeah, absolutely. Before you were talking about the importance of having a top-to-bottom, I guess, how do you say, so for the leader, so you said it was important for the leadership team to implement things in the school. What advice would you give to anyone in a leadership position that would be watching this interview?

>> So, do some learning. Develop your own understanding of multilingualism and language development because there's so little understanding. You know, even just the classic kind of things we know from research that it takes two to three years to develop social English, that it takes five to nine years to develop academic English. People in schools don't know that. And so when they've been learning English for three years and they're socially proficient, then they start thinking, "Oh, well, they must have a learning support need." And so that's really important. But also understanding the research about the nature of the relationship between home language development and English, and all of the research that shows the better a student's home language, the better their English. The better a student's literacy in their home language, the better their literacy in English. And so school leaders need to know that research in order to then set about to create a really strong language policy because it's through language policy, and every school should have one, that we can then drive the kinds of structures and practices we want to see. What happens in schools that start bottom-up, and there's a lot of that, because a lot of times it's one teacher or two teachers who know a little bit and think, "Oh, we need to be doing things differently," and if we just try it, and you know, you can get a certain amount of traction. But what happens is then you get a lot of tension because you have in this class, I'm told I'm not allowed to use my home language because I should only use English, and in this class, my teacher's saying, "Why don't you use your home language?" And so you get conflicting ideologies in schools that aren't led by a strong language policy. And those conflicting ideologies trickle down to the students, and they end up wanting the monolingual habitus because it's what feels safest to them. And so you can't really impact students in a systematic way without the language policy driving everybody's professional learning around it and then everybody's practice. And so that means that you'll still have differentiation in terms of how different teachers dig into translanguaging or not. You might have one teacher who isn't quite comfortable or doesn't want to do it. But as long as they know that according to the language policy, I can't ban the use of home languages in my class.

>> Yeah, I guess...

>> It means at least we've got consistency that home languages are welcome and valued. Some teachers use them more than others, and then you can accept that or you can deal with it. But otherwise, you just get, you know, you get teacher turning on teacher, you know, kind of in a staff room where they really disagree in an ideological way about what should be done because they don't share the same understanding of the evidence base. And so we have to share understanding of the evidence base and use an evidence-based language policy to drive school improvement in this area.

>> Yeah. And I see as well that as teachers, we have already so many things we have to do. If it's not a directive from the top that says we need to do this in lessons for multilingualism, then we're overwhelmed. So we might think, "Okay, that's not a priority. I'll leave it for later or when I have time," and we never have time.

>> Yeah.

>> So, yeah.

>> Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we, you know, we've seen the impact over the last, you know, six to eight years in England of having all mention of EAL removed from the Ofsted inspection framework, removed from the framework. And, you know, it's supposed to be under inclusion. But when you remove, when you don't have explicit mention that you have to do these things, everybody looks to what they have to do because there's enough of that to be going on with, and the things that are suggested go by the wayside. And so that's why you get really wildly varying kind of approaches and levels of support for EAL in English schools now. It's because it's no longer mandated by anybody, really. And so it's up to each individual teacher and/or school to decide. And so you need that kind of the strength of it being a whole school initiative. And when I look at your planning, I want to see, here's your learning objectives, here's your language objectives, here's how you're using translanguaging to support these two students who are new to English. Here's how you're using it to, you know, it needs to be just a part of the pedagogical and curricular approaches of the school.

>> Thank you very much. I think we covered a lot of basics. Uh, hopefully, it's going to help loads of teachers who want to spread a bit more translanguaging in their schools and to be more inclusive of everyone. Um, I was wondering if you had any last thought or something we haven't covered that you think is quite important for anyone who is watching this interview to know, whether it's about translanguaging itself or about multilingualism in general.

>> I think really, you know, what I mentioned earlier about multilingualism being the pathway to change approaches to teaching in English schools, teaching language. You know, really looking at the assets of the kids who come in as assets and thinking about how that can inform and improve our pedagogy, our curriculum, and our approaches to language teaching. Because in the schools that are doing that, you just get a different kind of feel to them. You get a feel of inclusion. You get a feel of support. You get a feel of mutual interest. My kids went to a European school for some years. Um, and European schools are by design multilingual. There are five different language pathways plus lots of students doing home languages, plus everybody learns the host country language, and everybody does a second language. And, you know, what was magical was to walk through the hallways and hear all kinds of languages being spoken, and the kids coming home going, "Well, I learned how to say 'kill the pigeon' in Polish today." "Why did you do that?" "Because my friend is really scared of pigeons." We didn't kill the pigeon. But, you know, like all of a sudden, kids themselves start being interested and sharing and learning from and with each other. And when you see that happening, it's not scary like a lot of people think it'll be. You can really see how it lets everybody blossom.

>> Wow.

>> And it gives everybody insight into even how their own language works. So even those English monolingual speakers are learning interesting things from their friends by learning how it would be structured differently in a different language. And so, you know, I think moving away from thinking about language as a problem we need to fix in schools to thinking about languages as resources is really, really important. Every language that is in our school is a resource for diversifying our curriculum, supporting our students, learning about the world. And when we take a resource-based perspective, it really changes how schools think about language.

>> Thank you very much. It was a very, um, inspiring, educational interview. I hope it's going to help loads of teachers out there. And I'm going to put down in the description all the links to your website, your book that you're giving away as well. Thank you very much. Um, and anything we might have mentioned that can resonate with this interview. Thank you so much.

>> Thank you very much.

>> I hope you all enjoyed this interview. As mentioned in the introduction, if you'd like to ask her any question or would like to send her a nice message, please do so before Saturday, the 4th of October, so I can send everything at once to her. During the grammar literacy event, there are seven more interviews related to translanguaging. So, uh, I let you check the program or the translanguaging playlist on my YouTube channel for more details.

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