A Word of Caution about Translanguaging:

 

Williams (as cited in Lewis et al., 2012) cautioned “that translanguaging is more appropriate for children who have a reasonably good grasp of both languages, and may not be valuable in a classroom when children are in the early stages of learning and developing their second language. It is a strategy for retaining and developing bilingualism rather than for the initial teaching of the second language” (p. 644). In a review of the research on translanguaging and what they term crosslinguistic pedagogy, Ballinger et al. (2017) also caution that “when learners are encouraged to draw on features from the majority language during class time allocated to the minority language, this practice can replicate, rather than resolve, an existing societal language imbalance. In effect, it can create a subtractive learning environment for learners from minoritized language backgrounds because it reinforces the dominance of the majority language. . . . The question of what role the majority language should play in immersion classrooms must be considered carefully as part of a broader discussion of how to manage differences in the societal status of languages in bilingual programs” (pp. 46–47). They go on to suggest that “the majority language play only a minor role, if any, during instructional time allocated to the minority immersion language” and that “providing minority-language instruction without recourse to the majority language, avoiding concurrent translation, and maintaining a separation between languages should be deployed in ways that serve to avoid the very societal language imbalance that immersion programs are often designed to redress” (p. 47)

Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education 3rd edition (p.51)