Translanguaging in the Colombian EFL classroom, without the guilt

Ask a room of Colombian English teachers whether Spanish belongs in the English class and you will get an argument. Ask the same room whether they use Spanish in class and almost every hand goes up — often with an apology attached.

That gap between what teachers do and what they feel they should do is worth examining, because the research has moved and the guilt has not.

What translanguaging is

Translanguaging is the idea that a bilingual person does not have two separate language systems that must be kept apart. They have one repertoire, and they draw on all of it to think, mean and communicate. When a student works out an English sentence by reasoning in Spanish, that is not interference. That is the mind doing what it does.

Pedagogically, translanguaging means designing lessons that deliberately use the whole repertoire instead of fighting it: reading in one language and discussing in another, drafting in one and refining in the other, letting students explain a concept to a classmate in the language that gets it across fastest.

It is not the same as "just speaking Spanish in class". The distinction is planning. Unplanned Spanish is a fallback. Planned translanguaging is a strategy with an intended outcome.

Why the English-only rule persists

The monolingual classroom is not held up by evidence. It is held up by three other things:

Institutional expectation. Coordinators walk past and hear Spanish, and they draw conclusions. Many teachers ration Spanish for reasons of appearance rather than learning.

Parent and student belief. Families paying for English want to hear English. Students often believe the same thing about themselves — that hearing Spanish means they are not learning.

Teacher self-doubt. Teachers who did not grow up abroad sometimes over-police their own language use to prove their proficiency. This is worth naming plainly: it is a professional insecurity, not a pedagogical principle.

None of these are stupid concerns. They are real conditions of the job. But they are political and social conditions, not evidence about how languages are learned — and it helps to know which is which.

Five ways to start

You do not need to redesign your syllabus. Start with one activity type.

1. Input in one language, output in the other

Students read a short text in English, then discuss it in Spanish in small groups, then write their conclusion in English. Comprehension is not slowed by having to also perform the discussion in a language they do not yet control, and the written output is better because the thinking already happened.

2. Bilingual planning, monolingual product

Let students plan a presentation or a piece of writing in whichever language they want — notes, outline, arguments. The final product is in English. Nobody grades the notes.

3. Translation as analysis, not exercise

Ask students to translate a sentence and then justify their choice. "Why did you use extrañar and not perder?" Translation stops being a mechanical drill and becomes a conversation about meaning, register and culture.

4. Name the language of the moment

Say out loud: "This part is in Spanish because we are figuring out the idea. The next fifteen minutes are in English because we are practising saying it." Students stop guessing what is allowed, and the Spanish stops feeling like a failure.

5. Make room for languages beyond Spanish

Colombia has 65 Indigenous languages, two Creole languages and Romani. In many classrooms, especially in the Caribbean, the Pacific and rural territories, English is a third language, not a second. A student who speaks Creole is not "interfering" — they are bringing an extra resource, and treating it that way changes what is possible in the room.

What to do about the institutional problem

If you are going to teach this way, make the reasoning visible before someone else interprets it for you.

• Tell parents at the start of the year, in one paragraph: we use Spanish deliberately at specific moments to build understanding, and English for production. Most objections come from silence, not disagreement.
• Keep evidence. Save the drafts. Record the before and after. When a coordinator asks, show the writing sample from March and the one from September.
• Bring it to your school. A five-minute explanation in a staff meeting does more than an argument in the corridor.

An honest caveat

Translanguaging can be used badly. If the English part never arrives, or if it becomes a reason to avoid the harder work of production, students end up understanding a lot and being able to say very little. The test is simple: is the amount of student output in English going up over the term? If it is not, the design needs fixing, whatever the theory says.

This is what makes it a professional decision rather than a permission slip. It works when you plan it, watch it, and adjust.

Where the conversation is happening

Translanguaging is one of the most active threads in Colombian ELT right now. HOW Journal's current issue includes work on contra-hegemonic language teaching and the ecology of languages, and recent ASOCOPI webinars have taken on translanguaging design, affect and classroom power. If you want to go deeper than a blog post, that is where the argument is being made carefully.

Keep going

• Search the webinar library for "translanguaging" — several recorded sessions come up.
• Read the current issue of HOW Journal.
• Consider joining a Special Interest Group working on interculturality, literacies or materials development.