THE USE OF TRANSLANGUAGING IN A LEBANESE MULTILINGUAL SCIENCE CLASSROOM TO ENACT COGNITIVE, SOCIAL, AND TEACHING PRESENCES

Abstract

In many countries around the world, and some in the Arab region, such as Lebanon, science is taught in a foreign language (e.g., ‎often English or French) rather than in students’ home language (Arabic, in the Arab region). The use of a ‎foreign language as the language of learning and teaching is assumed to be one of ‎the major reasons for students’ underachievement in science not only in the Arab world ‎‎(BouJaoude & Dagher, 2009), but also in Africa (Reddy et al., 2016) and the United ‎States (Thomas & Collier, 1997). Translanguaging (TL) has been suggested as a ‎pedagogical strategy to support multilingual learners (MLLs) more than two decades ago; however, it is under-researched in the science classrooms, particularly in the Arab world. This study aims to explore how TL is used in a Lebanese ‎multilingual science classroom and what functions TL plays in the ‎enactment of the cognitive, social, and teaching presences as characterized within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. A multilingual middle school physics classroom at a low SES Lebanese private school with an official English-only policy for the teaching of science was recruited for this study. ‎Data was collected from several sources: video recordings of physics sessions over a ‎period of four weeks, teacher and students’ responses to the CoI survey, and semi-structured interviews. The video recorded sessions ‎were fully transcribed and coded at three levels: the category indicators of each ‎presence type within the CoI framework, the language(s) used (English-only, Arabic-only, or ‎Mixed), and the speaker (teacher or student). Then, the percentage of the ‎instances of occurrence of each presence, its categories, and indicators were determined. The ‎percentage of the language(s) used at the level of each presence indicator was also ‎calculated. Survey results were used to calculate the average occurrence of each ‎presence as perceived by the teacher and the students using a Likert scale from 1 to ‎‎5. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed. The ‎findings illuminate an alignment between the findings of the different data sources. Teaching presence dominated the learning environment in the studied classroom. ‎TL was spontaneously used by both the teacher and the students ‎as an agentive resistive act to the English-only school policy. For each presence type, TL ‎appeared to serve several functions. For instance, TL was found to be crucial for students’ enactment of the three presences. For instance, for cognitive presence, TL was found to promote the engagement in higher-order thinking skills, such as reflection. The teacher and students translanguaged, primarily using their home language, to enact their social presence through affective expression, interpersonal relationships, and group cohesion. As for teaching presence, the teacher translanguaged for various purposes, primarily to support students’ conceptual understanding of abstract physics concepts, eliciting his agentive and resistive response to the prevailing English only school policy. In accordance with these findings, the teacher and the students ‎emphasized the importance of deploying TL in the physics classroom. They posited that TL was the preferred, resourceful, just, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. As such, the study concluded that TL can potentially promote the manifestation of cognitive, social, and teaching presence. Recommendations were suggested for future research, practice, and policy.