As part of the program I’m working on this summer in Palestine, we organized a WhatsApp chat for all of the students so that we could communicate with them. Well, maybe I should have foreseen this, but this group chat of 75+ teenagers quickly took on a mind of its own and this morning I woke up to 1875 WhatsApps. The students literally chatted all night. I did the math and there was at least one message sent per minute for the entire evening.
Although I was initially shocked to see the number of notifications I had when I woke up, when I scrolled through the messages, I noted that I saw a lot of English. The conversation for the whole evening was translanguaged English and Arabic, with students constantly switching back and forth. Given that one of the goals of this program is English language acquisition, I couldn’t help but be pleased that students were using English outside of camp hours. Informal engagement with peers is a great way to practice a new language, so feeling pretty happy about this accidental pedagogy.
I’m also taking this as a sign that students are developing comfort with the pedagogy of translanguaging. This is quite a different approach than standard foreign language education, and while this all-night conversation is not something I had imagined, this level of comfort with moving fluidly between languages was what I had hoped for. I’m feeling hopeful about this approach that supports students’ agency in practicing the language they are acquiring when they can and relying on the language assets they already have when that’s a better choice for them.