141Language Arrangements
within Bilingual Education
1
Bryn Jones and W. Gwyn Lewis
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of language arrange-
ments observed in bilingual primary and secondary schools. The languages
of a bilingual education curriculum can be arranged ‘either by strictly sepa-
rating them or by using the two languages flexibly’ (García, 2009a: 291). This
chapter will focus on different types of language arrangements with particu-
lar emphasis on translanguaging as bilingual pedagogy in one specific bilin-
gual community – that of the Welsh-English community in Wales. It begins
with a brief outline of the origins of translanguaging in Wales, and how it
has developed as a key concept in current bilingual and multilingual class-
rooms and communities. It will share the results of a three-year research
project regarding language arrangements in the bilingual classrooms of
Wales. The chapter concludes with a discussion of key issues regarding the
implementation of translanguaging pedagogy in the bilingual classroom.
For the purpose of this chapter translanguaging is used according to the
translanguaging pedagogy developed by Williams (1994, 1996), who coined
the term for the planned and systematic use of two languages within the
same lesson. The input (reading and/or listening) tends to be in one lan-
guage, and the output (speaking and/or writing) in the other language, and
this can be systematically varied. Translanguaging can be defined as a pro-
cess of establishing meaning, shaping experiences, understandings and
knowledge through the use of two languages. Both languages are used in an
integrated and coherent way to organize and mediate mental processes in
learning (Baker, 2011).
Code-switching occurs often in conversation and in this study is
defined as the ‘process of going back and forth from one language to the
other’ within ‘the same speech act’ (García, 2009a: 49). Different types of
code-switching observed in this study included examples of intrasentential