ABSTRACT
Be it in order to practice linguistic mediation or to foster metalinguistic awareness and multilingual literacy, translation plays an essential role in additional language teaching and learning and bi-/multilingual education. Wishing to investigate actual translation practices in bilingual education in France, the authors carried out research at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Strasbourg with 25 bilingual teachers completing their first year of teaching practice in bilingual preschools and primary classrooms. The purpose of this research project was to analyze their representations and attitudes towards translation, and to lead them to explore the pedagogical affordances of translation in the context of a multilingual reading project. Analysis of the teachers’ discourses show the extent to which the one language one teacher policy and the resulting separation of languages in bilingual education in Alsace exert a considerable influence on the ideological representation of translation and its possible pedagogical implementation. However, the analysis of the multilingual reading project demonstrates that translingual activities are examples of a new pedagogical approach to translation in a bilingual education context, which fosters integrated and translingual learning, as well as the development of biliteracy and metalinguistic awareness.
