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At the University of the Basque Country, in northern Spain, the internationally renowned research group DREAM, or Donostia Research Group on Education and Multilingualism, conducts research on different facets of multilingualism in education.
As these topics are central to the MULTIWRITE project, we sat down with former leader of the DREAM group, professor Jasone Cenoz, to learn more about her seminal work in the fields of multilingualism and multilingual education.
In this episode, you can learn more about her thoughts on why teachers should focus on using students' whole linguistic repertoire and how they can draw on the different languages students know in order to help them develop their language and literacy skills.
So, stay tuned!
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Mari Wesenberg: Kaixo Jasone!
Jasone Cenoz: Kaixo, egun on!
Mari Wesenberg: Ongi etorri MULTIWRITE podcast-era Jasone, eta eskerrik asko gaur gurekin egoteagatik.
Jasone Cenoz: Eskerrik asko zuri, eta oso pozik nago podcast honetan egoteagatik.
Mari Wesenberg: Oso ondo, eskerrik asko. So, for listeners who did not understand any of that, this was a little greeting in Basque–or rather, it was Jasone speaking Basque and I was trying to speak Basque–because we are now in the Basque country with Jasone Cenoz, who is an expert on topics such as multilingualism and multilingual education, especially in the Basque context. And Jasone, could you perhaps start by telling us a bit more about your background and what sparked your interest in multilingualism?
Jasone Cenoz: I think I have always been interested in multilingualism. I come from a background with the Basque language and Spanish, and then I started to learn English quite early, and I had a lot of contact with English because I had some relatives in the UK. So, I think I have always been interested, but another thing could be to be interested in research on multilingualism, and I think that came later. I was a secondary school teacher of English in the Basque country, and I had some classes that were Spanish medium and others were Basque medium. And the Basque medium, of course, they could also speak the majority language, Spanish. So, they were bilingual. And the ones in the Spanish medium were monolingual. And I could see the difference when teaching English, that there were more possibilities, more references, more possibilities of referring to other languages when they were bilingual. And they did better. I wanted to work on that as a researcher, so I went into that in my PhD already many years ago.
Mari Wesenberg: Thank you. So, some of our listeners might not be familiar with this specific linguistic context. Maybe you could also just briefly describe the Basque context?
Jasone Cenoz: Yeah. Part of the Basque country is in Spain and part of it is in France. The majority language on the Spanish side is Spanish, everybody can speak Spanish, and on the French side it is French, and everybody can speak French. But then Basque is spoken only in the Basque country, and it is spoken by about 30% of the population. There are important differences depending on the areas, and those are related to the use of Basque at school, mainly, and in other institutions as well. But Basque is a minority language in the Basque Country. And we also have Spanish, and then most students learn English. But the level of English is lower than in Norway, I must say. It's much lower than in Norway.
Mari Wesenberg: Right, okay, thank you so much. So, moving on. With Dirk Gorter, you have introduced a new perspective within the field of multilingualism, which you have called Focus on Multilingualism. Could you tell us some more about that?
Jasone Cenoz: Well, for many years, for example when teaching English, there has been a focus on “forget all your other languages and let's focus on English only”. We go against that, and we think that multilingualism should be the point of departure. So, Focus on Multilingualism looks at the students as multilingual speakers, or at least they can be emergent multilingual speakers, and we focus on the repertoire they have. We want to know which languages they know. And we also consider the social context. So that's our focus. The main thing would be to start teaching and doing research with a focus on all the languages that are known by the speakers, by the students.
Mari Wesenberg: Right, thank you. And you often talk about using the whole linguistic repertoire of the learner, right? Can you elaborate a bit on that? What does that mean?
Jasone Cenoz: Well, “the whole linguistic repertoire” is the languages that learners know. And you can use them at different levels. It doesn't mean that you are going to use them intensively, if you have a class of students who speak 20 different languages at home. But you can at least refer to those languages. And when they are languages that are taught at school, you can refer to them more intensively, and they can be a tool to improve the learning of other languages.
Mari Wesenberg: Absolutely, yeah. And in your research, you also discuss hard and soft boundaries between languages, monolingual versus multilingual views...?
Jasone Cenoz: There are different views about languages. There are even some views nowadays that languages are just social constructs and that languages almost don't exist. I think that languages exist, because they are psychological realities with speakers. Even with very young children, research shows us that there are differences, that children can make differences between languages when they are early bilingual or multilingual. So, I think that they do exist, but we have had boundaries between languages, mainly in education, when teaching languages, teaching content... They have been very hard. And we propose to make them softer.
Mari Wesenberg: Mm. So, a topic that is closely linked to multilingualism and that you have focused extensively on in your research is what you call pedagogical translanguaging. Can you tell us a bit about what pedagogical translanguaging is?
Jasone Cenoz: Okay, we start with translanguaging, which is a term that was used for the first time in the context of bilingual education with Welsh-English in Wales, in the UK. And it was just called translanguaging. This was a pedagogy inside the class, a theory and pedagogy inside the class that was planned so as to use both Welsh and English inside the class. And it was mainly for the input and the output. So, the input–for example, if there was a text in English, or a video in Welsh–to discuss it in the other language or to summarize it in the other language. Later, translanguaging has been used in other contexts a lot, and it has been extensively used in the US, for example. And it has been used also, let's say, as our Welsh colleagues say, it went “from the school to the street”. So that means that it was used, not necessarily at school, but to refer to the way multilinguals and bilinguals use their languages. That they use elements from both languages or two languages or more languages, that they use them to communicate, right? I mean, we all do that. I do that mainly when I'm using WhatsApp or whatever with friends or family. You sometimes use elements from different languages because... You know, it is efficient to communicate that way. But we call it pedagogical translanguaging because we want to make the difference between pedagogical translanguaging and spontaneous translanguaging. And in pedagogical translanguaging, the key word is that it is planned. It is planned by the teacher. When to use one language or the other language, or if you have two or more languages. It is planned by the teacher. That's the idea. And it is very close to the original use of translanguaging in Wales. And the difference is that we include more languages. I mean, it's not only as it was with Welsh and English, but we include, for example, in our context, we include Basque, Spanish, English, and sometimes we also refer to the other languages spoken at home by immigrant students. So, we use more languages, and we use more activities, more practices of translanguaging. Not just the input and the output, but it could be other work as well, other exercises. But using resources from other languages, from different languages, but they have a pedagogical value that has been designed, has been planned.
Mari Wesenberg: Mm. Fascinating. So, when speaking about using the learner's whole linguistic repertoire, which is a part of pedagogical translanguaging, do you think that bilinguals or multilinguals have any advantages over monolinguals when learning an additional language?
Jasone Cenoz: Well, we've been working on that for very long. In my doctoral thesis, that I referred to before, it was quite clear that bilinguals had advantages and in different... I mean, there were all the abilities, when measured–reading, writing, speaking, listening–and they had advantages. There has been quite a lot of work showing that they have advantages in general when other variables, other factors, are the same. I mean, what I want to say here is that multilingualism can be important, and bilinguals can have advantages, but on the other hand, if you don't work at all, if you are not motivated, if your teacher is not motivated or interested, it's not enough to be bilingual. If in the other class there are monolinguals who work harder, are more motivated, have a better teacher, or whatever... I mean, so, those factors are more important than bilingualism. That's why sometimes, I mean nowadays, we see students who are in situations that are not as ideal as they could be, I mean because the learning at school is very often linked also to social backgrounds, social educational background. Those variables can have more weight than being bilingual, and it also depends a lot on whether your languages have been developed or not. If you are bilingual but you only use a first language at home and only orally, I mean, perhaps you don't have so many advantages. So, it is one of the factors, it's not the only factor. That's why nowadays, that there are more studies in Europe with immigrant students, for example, we see sometimes that these advantages are not shown. But of course, those students sometimes have problems also with mathematics, or they have problems with science or whatever, because they are not in the same situation as the local students.
Mari Wesenberg: Of course. So, when there are advantages, what can these be? What kind of advantages can some bilinguals and multilinguals have?
Jasone Cenoz: Advantages have mainly been related to metalinguistic awareness. So, the idea that if you know more languages–and there have been studies for a long time showing this, even with children–you realize that the word table and the object is not the same thing because you have another way to call that table as well. So, you are more kind of ready to understand how languages work. And in that sense, most advantages have been linked to metalinguistic awareness. There are different ways to say things, also in language use, there are different ways, and you can have advantages because of that, mainly.
Mari Wesenberg: So that means that having a broader linguistic repertoire gives you some prior linguistic knowledge that can help?
Jasone Cenoz: Yeah. But what we try to do with pedagogical translanguaging is to activate that prior knowledge, because you can have prior knowledge, but don't realize that it's there. It happens very often to us with Basque, because Basque is a language that is not European, its different syntax and morphology are really interesting for linguists because they are very different from Spanish. But of course, Basque has been in contact with French and Spanish for many centuries. So, in vocabulary, for example, even if words have changed over the centuries, there is common vocabulary. And of course, many words are completely different, but some you can have... Sometimes also, even in some syntactic aspects, but mainly in vocabulary, students realize that “oh, it's similar, also in Basque!” Because they know and they have been told that Basque is completely different, and they don't realize that they can use their own resources when learning, linking prior knowledge to new knowledge, to new information.
Mari Wesenberg: Mm, absolutely. And connected to this sort of prior linguistic knowledge is also prior experience with language learning, right?
Jasone Cenoz: That also. I mean, it's not only... It's also the process of learning. What you have been learning because of learning another language. Then, when you learn a third language, an additional language, you can use strategies that you have developed when learning a second language.
Mari Wesenberg: Mm. Very fascinating. So, as a part of your research, you have tested a range of different pedagogical translanguaging strategies in classrooms. Any particularly hot tips to educators in multilingual settings? Any strategies that you have found to be especially effective or engaging for students?
Jasone Cenoz: Well, for example... I could refer to two. One is with vocabulary–for example, cognates. I mean, if we take a text that is sometimes... We find this in a CLIL class, in science, for example, and it can be in primary school, or it can be in secondary school. And if we look at the more technical words there, we find that they are similar in many cases. I mean, if we have a text in, even in Basque, we can find that they are related in many cases to Spanish and English, for example. So, we would say to students “try to find and underline the words that can be similar in other languages you know”, and then they can find which words they are, they can say them in the three languages. And we also usually add a fourth column of what other languages you know, or your home language, because it could be that they also use it in other languages, and then it's a way to recognize that those languages are also useful, mainly when we have so many other home languages nowadays. So, cognates work quite well. It can also be used with compounds and so on in different languages. And another area that works very well is, for example, in discourse. So, we are talking about writing a composition, for example–here we talk about MULTIWRITE. And the way we organize a composition in terms of content and structure. Talking about languages, even if we think they are very different, we know that basically to write a description, or to write an argumentative text... The content and the structure of the text can be the same in different languages. And sometimes, what we found that we were doing, having three languages at least, sometimes we also have four with French as a fourth language... What we are doing is that you give some instructions, for example in primary school, to write a description in one language and then, a few months later, in another language, and the instructions are not exactly the same, because they come from a different textbook or a different material. And then you have a short description also in the third language, in English, and the instructions are again different. I mean even if the level is different, and you can have more simple compositions when you write in your third language than in your first language, the structure can be very similar for the same type of text. And that works very well when it goes across the languages. That works really well.
Mari Wesenberg: Mm. That's of course very relevant for us in the MULTIWRITE project! So, you mentioned writing, of course, and also using cognates. And you have also carried out studies using pedagogical translanguaging in terms of transferring morphological aspects. Could you perhaps give a specific example of such a strategy?
Jasone Cenoz: Yeah, with morphological aspects we have been working mainly with compounds and derivatives. And there it was very interesting for students to realize that when you say, for example, something like “flower shop” in English, the structure was the same as in Basque. And that was surprising for them because Basque is supposed to be completely different from everything else. And in these cases, I mean, when you have this type of structure, it's the same. So that was very interesting for the students. And we were doing this in the fifth and sixth year of primary school, and they were also reflecting on that, and they were saying that they were learning more when they could compare. They could use the resources in the three languages. They could learn more than when it was only in English and not relating to what they already knew. So, that was on derivatives, for example if you say “teach” and ”teacher” in in one language, how do you say, the “ER”? It works sometimes in Basque and in Spanish–I mean, with another ending, of course–and sometimes it doesn't work, but how do you see that? But also, what was interesting was, for example, to realize that you have the “ER” of “teacher” or “farmer”, that you have this ending, so that when they look at a text and they don't know a word, they can develop the strategy of seeing if it can be divided into different parts. And that has been useful also, and the students were very happy with that.
Mari Wesenberg: Yeah, yeah, interesting very interesting! So many of our listeners will of course be Norwegian teachers, and the Norwegian context of course differs somewhat from that of the Basque country. What would you say are the implications of your research for teachers in other contexts? For instance, in Europe and perhaps especially in Norway? What do you think are the most important takeaways?
Jasone Cenoz: Well, I think that for Norwegian teachers, of course there is the context of multilingualism nowadays, also with Norwegian and the two varieties of Norwegian, and English and then other languages. I think that what is very important is to realize that Norwegian is a Germanic language, and that English is a Germanic language, and you all have Norwegian and English at school. Everybody has Norwegian and English. They can have other languages as well–in many cases, there are other foreign languages, second foreign languages. And that can be extremely useful to look at vocabulary level, or structures, syntax, for Norwegian and English. It's very, very important. Because they can be linked in many cases because of the origin, even though there are different branches of Germanic. But they can be linked. And then also if there are some other languages like French or Spanish, they can be linked also. Mainly in, for example, CLIL, and you go into teaching through the medium of English, many connections can be made. But also when you learn Spanish in a class or French, you can make many connections still. And not only, as I said, at the vocabulary level, but you can go also into... Apart from discourse, that I already mentioned, also, for example, into pragmatics. With pragmatics, you can see, for example... If you say something... How do you greet in one language? How do you apologize in one language? Or how do you make a request? There are some differences there, and there are common points, but then you can make quite a lot of progress if you consider that–to go from the known to the new information.
Mari Wesenberg: Absolutely. And, I mean, even though Norwegian and English are Germanic languages and, for example, Spanish and French are not, there are still many, many similarities.
Jasone Cenoz: Yeah, yeah, sure. There are many.
Mari Wesenberg: Thank you very much. So, we are almost at the end of our interview, but I would like to ask you one last question: if you could give one last piece of advice to educators in multilingual settings, what would that be?
Jasone Cenoz: I think that it is important to focus on prior knowledge. And what I mean by this is also to get to know what students know. I mean, we've been working on pedagogical translanguaging in schools, and then you realize that when these teachers get to know which languages students speak at home, they get to know their students better, and then they can use that knowledge in class. So, it's to focus on what students as multilingual students, or emergent multilingual students, bring to the classroom, and to try to make the most of it.
Mari Wesenberg: Thank you so much. What a great way to conclude the interview. So, that's all we had time for today, but thank you very much, Jasone, for joining us and sharing your knowledge and insights with us.
Jasone Cenoz: Thank you very much, eskerrik asko, and all the best for Norwegian teachers!
Mari Wesenberg: Thank you so much! Agur!
Jasone Cenoz: Agur!
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