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“Can you teach us (Catalan) in Spanish?”

Students’ and teachers’ multilingual tensions and monolingual stances in relation to pedagogical translanguaging to learn Catalan during study abroad

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat Rovira i Virgili
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

Published online: 10 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.26002.gal
Abstract
This paper explores the complex sociolinguistic landscape of Catalonia, examining how international students and Catalan language instructors adopt distinct stances regarding pedagogical translanguaging. While international students acknowledge Spanish as a beneficial scaffold to learn Catalan, instructors often favor a monolingual Catalan approach as a form to resist the language’s historical subordination. The study argues that embracing pedagogical translanguaging holds significant social justice implications, fostering minority language revitalization and promoting linguistic complementarity over exclusionary monolingual ideologies. This approach could also help mitigate tensions in bilingual educational contexts, as supported by recent translanguaging research.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Pedagogical translanguaging for third language development
    • 2.2Language revitalisation in Catalan higher education
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Methodology for data analysis
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.2Students’ translanguaging Stance
    • 4.3Stance-taking to legitimise the monoglossic teaching approach
    • 4.4Heteroglossic learning and monoglossic teaching practices
  • 5.Results and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Declaration of interest statement
  • References
References (60)
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