“The Translanguaging Reader”: Investigating Primary Education Students’ Reading Strategies

Translanguaging has been placed at the center of the research and teaching activity over the last decade, while teachers seem to promote the use of all the linguistic resources of their students in classrooms with linguistic and cultural diversity. Among the best practices for promoting translanguaging and the flexible use of the students' resources, reading multilingual texts is proposed as an important activity for students who are daily bombarded with a great variety of diverse stimuli. To clarify it more, students tend to come into contact with “texts” in every mode, that are not only offered in their L1 but they usually include and are written in various linguistic codes known or not to them. However, limited research has focused on such issues of reading a text with multilingual wealth, thus this was a major factor and reason behind this research initiative. This paper presents a study that aimed at investigating young learners' reading strategies when approaching a multilingual text. More specifically, 27 primary education students of Greek origin were provided with two different types of multilingual texts and they were asked to complete a specifically designed record protocol reflecting on their reading behavior. At first, the students came across a text, which was given both in another language and in Greek while at a second phase, the students were encouraged to read a text in which different languages were used. Within this context, an attempt was made to identify the strategies of students prior to reading, while-reading and upon reading with the purpose to shed light into the multidimensional framework of reading a multilingual text. Following the processing of the data derived from the multidimensional research, it was revealed that students employed a great variety of reading strategies before they begin to read the text. Nevertheless, they did not seem to use while-and post-reading strategies to a great extent, when a multilingual text is given to them inciting more interest in raising students' reading strategies through implementing educational activities.