Translation and Translanguaging Pedagogies in Intercomprehension and Multilingual Teaching

Since 2007, California State University, Long Beach has developed and offered courses that highlight students’ pre-existing linguistic repertoires in English and in the Romance languages. These courses are unique in that they build upon a multilingual base for the acquisition of new languages through the method of intercomprehension. As an approach that moves among languages, Intercomprehension places learners in conditions that are conducive to translanguaging and translation. This paper discusses the role of translation and translanguaging in Intercomprehension as a pedagogical approach in these courses. Since our students are constantly moving between English and one or more Romance language(s), they actively bring the other Romance languages they are learning into the translingual repertoire they already practice through the multilingual learning strategies deployed in intercomprehension.


Introduction and background
The presence of Spanish in any number of urban landscapes across the United States bespeaks a unique set of geo-historical contexts characterized by conquest, displacement, return, migration, and geographical proximities, such as those that prevail in borderlands -that is, the current highly fraught situation on the Mexican-U.S. border. The confluence of so many factors in the mapping of Spanish and its vitality today in the United States constitutes a veritable language geography whose contours have become increasingly visible and mainstream, indeed, the condition of new language geographies that Simon (2012) has spoken about in Cities in translation: Intersections of language and memory to describe "topographies of language and their power to mark the urban landscape" (p. xix). Throughout the United States and to some extent Canada as well, Spanish has become an element of a new language geography that is changing the linguistic landscape of every sector of life and culture. Certain areas of the United States, such as some sectors of California, Florida, and New York, can be considered both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking in equal measure. The ways in which new language geographies generate new language practices has been at the forefront of García's research. Her observations of children in multilingual contexts revealed their unified language repertoire and their natural movement within it. Designated as translanguaging, echoing the work of Williams (1994), this movement among languages in one's repertoire has established a new paradigm for the study of language acquisition, which has engendered a highly nuanced terrain for innovative research as the contributions to this volume demonstrate.
In this article, we relate our work on the use of translation and translanguaging pedagogies in language acquisition among multi-and plurilingual learners (García, 2007). At California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in Southern California, a geographical region where growing numbers of students in educational institutions at every level are emerging English-Spanish bilinguals, we have developed teaching pedagogies that work in tandem with a student's entire linguistic repertoire to teach languages that are typologically similar to Spanish, in this case, French and Italian. This article focuses on the courses we have developed -"French and Italian for speakers of English and Spanish," and "Intercomprehension among Romance languages" -as well as the materials we have used, and those we have created for teaching in multiple languages. Data from the teaching of the intercomprehension course at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York is also included.

The emergence of new perspectives and opportunities for a growing audience
As keynote speaker at the 2011 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Mary Louise Pratt delivered the lecture "Globalization as linguistic force field," in which she offered several examples from hip-hop and rap music where the multiple languages of the artists formed translanguaging texts widely embraced across North America (Pratt, 2011, p. 6). Pratt referenced the dissemination of this urban, multilingual, and multicultural music as the bellwether for global music. Indeed, what was a trend in 2011 has become a solidly entrenched new paradigm for music in 2019. The bilingual phenomenon has continued to evolve in urban music to such a point that the English and Spanish musical markets are destined to become unified, as increasing numbers of English-language singers produce music in Spanish for the burgeoning Spanish-language market, and Spanish rap artists and rhythms, such as Reggaeton and Latin rap continue to garner audiences and emulators worldwide. 1 Some fifty years following the British invasion in music, we witness now the Spanish-English invasion, where a translanguaging rap version of "I like it like that" (Pabon & Rodriguez, 1967) reached number one in 2018. Its signature feature resides in the ability of the three rappers, Cardi B, J. Balvin, and Bad Bunny, to rap seamlessly in Spanish-English, a talent that many artists, including Justin Bieber and Rihanna, seek to replicate in their own work. The success of bilingual music over the last few years demonstrates the power of new language geographies to create and disseminate cultural products that reflect the reality of an expanded linguistic repertoire for greater numbers of citizens. News outlets had been reporting on the demographic shifts for some time. In April 2014, CNN sparked media attention after featuring an article entitled "California's Hispanic milestone" (Ruben, 2014) announcing a major demographic shift in the state of California, where the Hispanic population would soon become predominant. A year later, the New York Post noted that the United States accounted a higher number of Spanish speakers than Spain (Perez, 2015). Indeed, the Post's article reported the results from a study conducted by the Instituto Cervantes that estimated an all-inclusive Spanish speaking population of 56.2 million people (including native, heritage, and academic speakers), thus placing the United States as the second most populated Spanish speaking country in the world after Mexico (121 million speakers) but more than Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million).
Yet, the socio-linguistic shift which is palpable on the streets and on university campuses is largely ignored in educational institutions, which still consider as problematic the use of any language other than English as the educational point of reference. Particularly in the language classroom, bilingual and multilingual students are asked to forget that their linguistic repertoire includes languages other than English. In this context, Hispanic-serving institutions such as CSULB -which reports a student body that is over 40% Hispanic (California State University, 2019) -seek ways to better integrate students with bilingual and bicultural profiles by presenting them with teaching and learning strategies that allow them to work from these linguistic profiles as points of strength. Thanks to the favourable demographic conjuncture  in the university's Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literature, the support of the Services Culturels du Consulat de France à Los Angeles, and a three-year National Endowment for Humanities grant, we were able to address the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking students in pedagogically inclusive ways in our French and Italian classes. The most immediate objective was to offer bilingual students introductory-and intermediate-level curricula specifically tailored for speakers of English and Spanish. In this endeavour, French and Italian courses were adapted to the students' existing linguistic knowledge as well as their metacognitive (translingual) awareness as experienced bilinguals. While we will discuss both points in the next two sections, in this section, we would like to survey the considerable evolution of research in the United States and internationally that has shed light on multilingual teaching for multilingual students. Acknowledging the existence of learners with new linguistic and cultural backgrounds was a turning point in the advancement of research and the development of educational and pedagogical projects (Kramsch, 2009;Kramsch & Zhang, 2018).
In many instances, promotion of such projects remains complicated to implement in American institutions as Gramling and Warner described in 2015: "[a]s a field, critical multilingualism studies has to rely on intergroup, interlingual, transnational, and international research communities. . . . Participants in these communities often operate in knowledge domains that are 'structurally obscured in Anglocentric institutions' " (p. 3). In the case of L3 education in Europe, Portolés and Martí (2017, p. 64) note that multilingual education still abides by monolingual principles. Lemke (2002) remarks that political and ideological pressures render the development of multilingual education more complicated than it needs to be. Furthermore, pushed by ideological, sociological, or political norms, research and instruction alike have developed a tendency to regard multilingualism as a series of parallel monolingualisms (Bailey, 2007;Grosjean, 2010) which fit nationalistic language archetypes. However, such archetypes contradict the actual linguistic reality of multilingual speakers who, even when influenced by ideological, social, or political messages about monolingualism, nevertheless experience their language repertoire as whole, no matter how many languages exist within it.
Language policies that are unfriendly to multilingualism weigh heavily upon many potentially multilingual teaching contexts throughout the world. Such cases have been reported in the context of African bilingualism (Makoni & Mashiri, 2007) or Corsican bilingualism (Jaffe, 1999). In Ideologies in action, Jaffe describes advances made in the inclusion of Corsican in all of its forms as a viable and teachable language. Indeed, Corsican researchers and policy-makers advocated for successfully moving away from the commonly accepted diglossic perspective and situation in place in the 80s, which offered an unbalanced power dynamic between French (High) and Corsican (Low) and nurtured, walled-off, social, and educational norms. The developing ideologies lead to the acceptance of polynomic status and approaches to language variations on the island. This marks the emergence of an important shift in policies where "[t]he concept of polynomy did not advocate a power reversal, but rather, a redefinition of what power was" (p. 186) leading to the acceptance of all variations of Corsican. However, as Jaffe observes, recognition of how bilinguals draw from their entire linguistic repertoire when speaking and learning had not yet entered mainstream thinking about language ideologies. Therefore, these changes revealed the difficulty of applying the idea of polynomic language against a backdrop of deeply rooted ideas about linguistic legitimacy in the face of practical requirements for teaching. . . . Nor did it seem that tolerance of diversity was extended to mixed forms, whether they were mixtures of Corsican and French or mixtures of Corsican dialects. (Jaffe, 1999, p. 187) The recent efforts of the Belgian school system in offering more diversified and more accessible opportunities for bilingual education is a salient example of actions taken to offer more appropriate policies which place "[l]'édu-Vol. 10, 2019 cation bilingue au coeur des politiques linguistiques" (Babault, 2015, p. 38). In fact, research interest is burgeoning, marked by the growing number of journals dedicated to the topic, such as the creation of Critical Multilingualism Studies in 2012, followed by Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts in 2015, not to mention the large number of articles and monographs (Burck, 2005;Kramsch, 2009;Kramsch & Zhang, 2018). In fact, as early as 2005, the pedagogical value and potential of codeswitching was described by Lin and Martin (2005). In the context of heritage language learners, Cummins (2005) argues the necessity of adapting bilingual educational strategies to take into account the fully functioning cross-linguistic transfers that exist between two languages. All such contributions lend social and educational validity to codeswitching.
In their descriptions of bilingual classrooms, García (2007García ( , 2009) and Creese and Blackledge (2010) evidence the value of the pre-acquired linguistic repertoire of bilinguals and their inherent translanguaging as a linguistic "toolkit" that equips bilingual learners for educational success. Attempting to eliminate the natural tendency of bilinguals to translanguage, and to impose upon them instead a monolingual identity destroys their inherent capacity to make connections between all of the languages they know and all of the languages they are learning. Traditionally, in the context of modern language learners in the United States, monolingual neophyte learners of French were discouraged from using their knowledge of English to develop translanguaging techniques and skills between English and French. The well-anchored, persistent, and pervasive (still today) preference for "target-language-(only)" approaches removes all languages except the target language from acquisition strategies. In the same manner, bilingual (English-Spanish) neophyte learners of French were not encouraged to use their knowledge of English, not to mention Spanish, or their predisposition to use interlanguaging pathways between English, Spanish, "Spanglish" and French as they acquired the language. Most commonly used textbooks offer no tools or approaches that elicit such connections.
In the case of L3+ acquisition, the next section sheds light on the advantages that flexible and customized approaches offer in the acquisition process. It shows how the use of all pre-acquired languages, as well as connections existing among typologically similar languages, become an asset for learning. The journal Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts presents translanguaging and translation, not only as communicative phenomena but also as "advanced pedagogies" that embrace the co-existence of multiple languages in the implementation and creation of pedagogical approaches. The courses, teaching pedagogies, and materials produced in this article reflect these principles.
Comme cela est exposé dans les figures 3 et 4, Juntos : French for speakers of English and Spanish « [p]resents multilingual examples that engage learners in exploring, deducing, and hypothesizing "about the concordances and divergences between target, reference and auxiliary languages while essentially performing exercises in the target language" » (Carvalho et Child, 2018, p. 423). Nous nous efforçons de réduire l'aspect négatif des labels apposés aux langues

Intercomprehension of the Romance langages and English
In an effort to offer other opportunities for students to expand their multilingual repertoire, we have developed a separate course called "Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages." 3 This course is not a language course per se; learners who speak English and a Romance language acquire a reading proficiency of five Romance languages at the same time: Portuguese,Catalan,Spanish,Italian,and French. 4 In this course, translingual acquisition processes intervene in three manners: 3 Donato and Oliva piloted the course for the first in the United States in spring 2014 at CSULB. Oliva offered the course as a short-term study-abroad program on the campus of the University of Corsica for CSULB students during the summers of 2015, 2016, and 2017. In spring 2018, Donato offered the course at CSULB and Oliva at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. 4 These languages are listed here in the order in which they are presented in EuRom5 (Bonvino, Caddéo, Vilaginés Serra, & Pippa, 2011). This order (from west to east along the geographical continuum) reflects the original linguistic proximity of the languages, with the exception of French, which is placed last, based on its grammatical, lexical, and syntactical particularities.
• through the use of the pre-acquired repertoire to understand unknown written content • through the use and the expansion of connective pathways among languages

Figure 7
Interlexicality and intergrammaticality The course uses the EuRom5 platform (Bonvino et al., 2011), which offers a unique approach to language learning and language teaching via intercomprehensive strategies where learners transcend traditional language learning skills in reading and, to some extent, listening (Caddéo & Jamet, 2013). Learners start from their repertoire and work on language proximity with the other languages (Fig. 7) by functioning through translingual translation processes, both orally and in writing, whether in the classroom or at home. This allows for an accelerated acquisition of reading competencies at an advanced level in all languages as described by Bonvino et al. (2011) "l'apprenant] arrive très rapidement [40 heures (EuRom5, n.d.)] a un niveau de compétences de lecture qui varie entre B1 et B2 du CECR" (p. 69), which is roughly the equivalent of an Intermediate High to Advanced Low on the ACTFL rating scale (ACTFL, 2016): Dans l'enseignement des langues dit traditionnel (à l'école comme à l'[u]niversité), les langues sont conçues comme des unités distinctes à étudier séparément. Les comparaisons se limitent généralement à une L1 vers une L2. Eu-Rom5 contribue clairement à dépasser cette vision binaire et permet de considérer que dans un monde où la pluralité des langues et des cultures est la norme, il est nécessaire d'affronter l'apprentissage et l'enseignement des langues d'un point de vue plurilingue. (Bonvino et al., 2011, p. 68) In order to illustrate the innovative aspects of this course for students specializing in language and linguistic studies, we share the experience of Francesca Ricciardelli, co-author, and student in the CSULB Italian masters' program, who intends to continue her work in intercomprehension at the doctoral level and who took the intercomprehension course in spring 2018: Le livre EuRom5 contient vingt lectures par langue, réparties sur 3 niveaux avec 7 articles [à chaque niveau]. Chaque semaine nous [les étudiants] devons traduire deux textes de langues différentes, mais du même niveau. . . . Nous choisissons la langue cible pour la traduction, y compris l'anglais. Dans un premier temps, les traductions étaient difficiles, mais, de semaine en semaine, nous affinons notre capacité à traduire des textes de difficulté croissante dans les langues que nous ne connaissons pas ou peu au début de l'apprentissage.  In other contexts, the course can be conducted in a single language, the one that is shared by all students. In our classes, the discussion of a prepared text Vol. 10, 2019 ( Fig. 8) in one of the five Romance languages is carried out collaboratively in multiple languages by all students, who often translanguage as they speak and write, drawing from their various linguistic repertoires. The repertoire always includes English as a common resource when the need arises, but the use of less-known languages is seen as a facilitating factor. In a very different context, Portolés and Martí's research (2017) on English as an L3 in the case of speakers of Catalan and Spanish invites us to think of that flexible shift in languages in the classroom as one that does not merely imply a random shift of code choice, due to lack of linguistic knowledge, but the complete use of one's multilingual repertoire as an interre- The teacher's approach plays a pivotal role. This uninhibited use of multiple languages initiates a de-dramatization process reinforced by no hierarchical treatment of the five languages (Fig. 8), leading to an environment that offers no linguistic barriers to communicative translanguaging. The course not only encourages students to rethink their communication habits in new languages, but also to redefine what it means "to be fluent in" or "to know" a language. Any new linguistic skill, which may otherwise be described as "passive" or "partial" because it may essentially be of a receptive nature, is valorized here as an additional tool supplementing the learner's thriving repertoire.
Dès la première leçon, le concept des compétences partielles a été introduit, discuté et analysé. Cela nous a immédiatement aidés à comprendre qu'il n'est pas nécessaire d'être capable de parler, lire, écouter et écrire à la perfection pour comprendre et même communiquer dans une autre langue. De plus, les [autres] élèves ont constaté que, au contraire de ce qui fait le fondement des cours de langues traditionnels aujourd'hui, embrasser ses langues déjà connues pour en comprendre d'autres de la même famille linguistique peut devenir une stratégie très utile et, de fait, productive. (Ricciardelli, personal interview, May 3, 2018) In similar fashion, in Oliva's Intercomprehension course taught at St. Lawrence University in spring 2018, the transcriptions ( Fig. 9) exemplify how the use of the full repertoire allows for linguistic expansion through the intercomprehension techniques of bridging and relaying (Castagne, 2007), based on similarities and discrepancies. This work relies on the validation and elicitation of pre-acquired knowledge and skills not solely the "content" learned in class (Cenoz, 2017;Cenoz and Gorter, 2015). In the following interview transcripts, both students are English-speaking, with minors in French (student #1) and Spanish (student #2). Students were asked to compile data from texts in the five EuRom languages plus English, to argue the correlations and divergences between "there is/there are" and their equivalent forms in other languages.

Figure 9
Oliva's intercomprehension course at St. Lawrence University, Spring 2018. Interview question: "Discuss the correlation and differences between "there is/there are" and their equivalent forms in the other languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian).
The students were not provided with any ancillary grammatical tools. They solely enacted their multilingual language repertoire and intercomprehensive metalinguistic skills (acquired in the courses) in the effort to comprehend the Romance language content presented to them. As a result, students explicitly develop their own understanding of interlingual grammar by weaving their Vol. 10, 2019 multilingual competencies together with the metalinguistic knowledge that they are elaborating as their work with multiple Romance languages.
En outre, chaque semaine nous devions lire des articles académiques pour stimuler des discussions en classe et sur la plateforme en ligne [afin que l'] on puisse discuter avant, pendant et après la leçon et réfléchir ensemble sur ce que nous avions découvert sur des sujets pertinents comme la métacognition des langues, l'apprentissage des langues apparentées, les compétences partielles, les intelligences multiples, et la pédagogie, entre autres. (Ricciardelli, personal interview, May 3, 2018) In order to assess the progress of the students toward the goal of Intercomprehension, Dr. Cortés Velásquez, an intercomprehension specialist at the University of Roma Tre who visited the course at CSULB, hosted a focus group at the end of the course. The transcripts of the recorded focus group sessions were compiled by Ricciardelli and reflect students' perspectives on the course and its outcomes. One of our heritage speakers of Spanish declared: "Io voglio continuare il mio studio di francese e italiano, . . . e ora voglio migliorare il mio livello di spagnolo accademico", 5 demonstrating a heightened interest in expanding her knowledge of those languages that were already present in her linguistic background. The response of this student truly underscores the advantage of multilingual learning, particularly for heritage speakers. In this case, the student, a heritage speaker of Spanish, wishes to both deepen her knowledge of French and Italian but also acquire an academic level of Spanish, which resembles that of the other languages she is learning. This student, like many others, has recognized that there is an academic register of her heritage language, and now sees multiple possibilities for the application of that heritage language, which in all likelihood has never been studied formally: La fluidité de ce type de translanguaging en classe a engendré une communication efficace et productive qui a renfoncé la motivation des étudiants de multiples manières, notamment [avec la] perspective d'une application pratique dans la vie quotidienne. (Ricciardelli, personal interview, May 3, 2018) One of our students, who has worked as a teaching associate in both French and Italian, noted that this class helped her understand the importance of bridge languages in Romance language teaching. She became aware of the extent to which heritage Spanish speakers could rely on their Spanish as they bridge to learning French or Italian: [P]arce que je suis professeur, j'ai [a]pris des choses, . . . et je [les] ai appliquées avec les étudiants, parce qu'avant . . . de prendre ce cours j'avais peur de parler espagnol et je pense que j'ai créé ce mur moi-même, je sais pas pourquoi! Mais ce cours m'a donné la capacité de comprendre les nuances de la langue et moi je les utilise avec mes étudiants pour [leur bénéfice] et je pense que ça c'était le mieux pour eux, le mieux pour moi et le mieux pour tout le monde. (Ricciardelli, personal interview, May 3, 2018) One of the students affirms that this class helped him gain more confidence in languages he would like to use in a professional context. He had begun learning Catalan shortly before taking the class on Intercomprehension, which he found useful for his career goals: "Vorrei fare il traduttore . . . e vorrei farl [o] in altre lingue romanze, per esempio, la settimana scorsa ho fatto dall'italiano al catalano anche se non parlo catalano bene ma riesco a fare la traduzione . . . tradurlo perché la lingua scritta la conosco meglio." 6 The course never imposed a lingua franca but rather fostered principles of linguistic openness, inclusion, and acceptance that offer opportunities for personal growth. Such multilingual practices can be found in both EuRom5 and the Juntos series.

Conclusion
As a coda to this article describing the courses we have created and the reaction of our students, it behooves us to mention a two-part series in the Los Angeles Times devoted to the individual language repertoires of residents of the greater Los Angeles region (Bermudez, 2018a). The author of these articles was prompted to write the series when confronted by a woman in a park who reprimanded her for speaking to her daughter in Spanish. The woman told Ms. Bermudez that she was certainly confusing her child, to which she answered that her daughter spoke three languages. The incident sparked a meditation by Bermudez on the great divide between monolingual America and the bi-, tri-and any-number-of lingual adults, and increasingly, of children in Southern California. These two groups are as far apart as they could possibly be. For the second article in the series, Bermudez invited Angelenos (residents of Los Angeles) to share their own linguistic trajectories (Bermudez, 2018b). The outpouring of emotion over linguistic gain and loss in immigrant families that either encouraged or discouraged bilingual practices in the home, the desire to recuperate or expand one's linguistic repertoire as a quintessential element of one's identity, and the celebration of the richness of life in multiple languages nearly jumped off the page. The unmitigated desire for language and the desire to ensure that future generations experience as many languages as possible, and, above all, be free to live their entire linguistic repertoire, resonated among all of those cited with overwhelming consensus. Although the multilingual subjects who offered their stories in response to Bermudez' call are lacking in the terminology of our profession, they all sought to better understand how their identities were fulsomely realized through language, and diminished when one of their languages was denied to them through shame and the need to assimilate. These people, all of them, speak the hopes, dreams, and concerns of our students who flourish in classroom settings that engage their identity in all of their languages and the learning potential that they possess.