TransAcquisition Pedagogy: A Powerful Synergy of Māori and Western Knowledge Systems to Improve Emergent Bilingual Students’ Reading and Writing in English

Authors: Dr. Sophie Tauwehe Tamati

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37082/IJIRMPS.ICTIMESH-24-Dubai.5

Short DOI: https://doi.org/g8znzc

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Abstract: TransAcquisition will be presented as a culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy for the biliterate development of emergent bilingual students to use their home and school languages interdependently in mutually supportive ways to improve their achievement in reading and writing at school. The presentation will begin with a brief historical overview of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Kura Kaupapa Māori immersion schooling model (Ministry of Education, 1989). It was in these Māori language immersion schools that TransAcquisition pedagogy was developed in a doctoral intervention study using the students’ pre-existing literacy in Māori to develop and improve their reading comprehension in English (Tamati, 2016). The study’s quantitative findings show that the students’ academic language and reading comprehension in English significantly improved as a result of the eight-week TransAcquisition intervention program. In this presentation, TransAcquisition is theoretically justified as a pedagogical approach at the ‘interface’ between Western and Māori knowledge systems (Durie, 2004, 2005, 2021). As an ‘interface’ approach that synergises the epistemological and pedagogical foundations of Māori and Western knowledge systems, TransAcquisition is both a ‘power pedagogy’ and a ‘pedagogy of power’ (Barnhardt, 2008; Macfarlane & Macfarlane, 2019). The process used to synergise Māori knowledge concepts with Cummins’ (1978, 1979, 1981) theory of developmental language interdependence, Rata’s (2015) theory of conceptual progression, and Williams’ (2002) translanguaging teaching technique will be discussed in this presentation. The synergistic process produced new concepts of three-on-thee mapping, metashuttling, relational transfer, linguistic fluidity, and the Interrelational Translingual Network, which are applicable to the teaching and learning of bi/multilingual students everywhere. These new concepts align with the Read-to-Retell-to-Revoice-to-Rewrite stages of transacquisitional tasking, exemplifying the pedagogical use of target language interchange. The structured sequence of each tasking stage promotes the reciprocal transfer of semantic knowledge between the students’ languages to support a greater understanding of the meaning messages in both languages. By this means, the TransAcquisition tasking process develops the biliterate potential of emergent bilingual students by engaging them in cross-linguistic meaning-making and conceptual knowledge-building.

Keywords: TransAcquisition Pedagogy, Bilingual Education, Biliterate Academic Achievement

Paper Id: 6.605

Published On: 2025-01-14

Published In: Special Issue - International Conference on Trends and Innovations in Management, Engineering, Sciences and Humanities (January 2025)

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