Kay: While teaching a Children's Literature course to bilingual Emirati teacher candidates in an Early Childhood Education program in an English-medium university in the United Arab Emirates, I was keen to incorporate a first-language dimension into the course. While the course content and textbook drew upon 'global' literature for children in English, they did not refer much to Arabic (the first language of the teacher candidates in the class) nor to local culture. Thus, I was pleased to partner with a university faculty colleague, Afaf Al-Bataineh, who is fully bilingual and a published author of children’s books, and who was tasked with promoting bilingual education within university courses.

Together we took a course assignment from a Children’s Literature course that required students to create a picture storybook in English for young learners, and recast it as a translingual task wherein Arabic (both standard and vernacular forms) and English were blended together to tell a contemporary story for young bilingual Emirati learners. Translingual books are a particular type of dual/bilingual book wherein two or more languages and varieties are intentionally melded in telling the story, and both languages are interwoven within and between sentences.

Afaf: We encouraged the teacher candidates to be creative in shuttling between languages/varieties, and to build on existing code-switching behavior among young Emirati users. Based on their linguistic ideology and attitudes to translanguaging, the participants produced different 'translingual models', which we are in the process of analyzing to investigate how translanguaging in writing works when two distinctively different languages (Arabic and English) are blended together.

Kay: We found that the teacher candidates were challenged by this creative writing task, owing in large part to the linguistic distance between the two languages. The task also raised sociolinguistic issues about the relative roles of Gulf Arabic, standard Arabic, and English in the UAE. However, the teacher candidates creatively addressed these challenges and produced bilingual story books that were well received by young emergent bilingual learners in a state Kindergarten classroom in Abu Dhabi.

Afaf: Interestingly, although most of these teacher candidates themselves shuttle between English and Arabic in daily speech, they seemed to be opposed to this blending if used in writing and for a target audience of young children, assuming that it would be confusing to young learners. In practice, on the other hand, the young children to whom the stories were read aloud showed no confusion.

Kay: By incorporating translanguaging into the teacher education curriculum, student teachers were enabled to develop a deeper understanding of cross-linguistic pedagogical possibilities, and of the relative linguistic features and sociolinguistic roles of Arabic and English in the UAE. Our conclusion is that there is a valuable role for translanguaging in the preparation of bilingual teachers of bilingual young learners in this region.

For further details, see Al-Bataineh and Gallagher (2018).