Translanguaging in the Polish educational context: Lessons learnt from IB schools

Abstract

Poland’s foreign language teaching and language policy have been affected by tremendous changes in the last decades. Not only bilingual sections in secondary schools have mushroomed, but also international schools with instruction in a foreign language, mainly English, within the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) started their existence in 1993. This paper draws on the translanguaging pedagogy as used in the selected secondary schools with IBDP. The schools provide evidence for the stance that most students, if not all, are multilingual in such teaching environments. Therefore, they apply multiple strategies to benefit from their linguistic repertoires. In addition, the teachers perceive such practices as positively affecting the students’ performance and allowing them to more rapidly acquire the imparted content as well as further develop their linguistic proficiency. The overriding aim of this study is to identify the situations when the students translanguage and analyze their linguistic behaviour as well as explore the functions of students’ translanguaging practices.