A multilingual pedagogies initiative in higher education

ABSTRACT The research reported on in this article examines the attitudes towards student linguistic diversity and multilingual pedagogies of 30 university lecturer participants enrolled for an accredited short course on multilingual pedagogies at a South African institution. The aim of the course is to support lecturers in helping students gain access to their disciplines using multilingual strategies including translation and translanguaging. Staff from a range of disciplines drawn from 8 faculties formed the first cohort of participants. Within a postmodern research paradigm, an interpretive approach was used to understand and analyze data collected from questionnaires, language histories and a language portrait exercise. We discuss findings on staff perceptions of translanguaging in their teaching; their knowledge of and sensitivity towards their students’ linguistic repertoires, their own language backgrounds and the challenges they face in catering for linguistic diversity in their lectures. We also present participants’ examples of multilingual pedagogies based on what they had learned from the MP course.