The Basque Country spreads on both sides of the Pyrenees in France and Spain and historically the area is divided into seven provinces. This presentation refers to the challenges related to multilingualism in primary education in the three historical territories that make up the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) where Basque and Spanish are official languages. Basque is a minority language spoken by approximately 33.9 % of the population (Basque Government, 2016) but it is the main language of instruction at school. English and French are taught as foreign languages and nowadays students not only have Basque and Spanish as home languages but also other European, Asian and African languages. In this presentation we analyze the challenges of developing language skills and learning content in a second or additional languages. Students in this context need to develop communicative and academic competences in several languages. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to focus on students as multilinguals who can use resources from their whole linguistic repertoire and translanguage to optimize their learning process (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017). In this presentation, the concept of pedagogical translanguaging will be discussed and some examples of pedagogical translanguaging that have been used in Basque primary schools will be shown. Pedagogical translanguaging is aimed at developing Basque, Spanish and English and also metalinguistic awareness and language awareness. The result of some evaluations and students’ and teachers’ feedback on multilingual school practices based on pedagogical translanguaging in the Basque Country will also be presented (Aldekoa, 2018; Leonet, Cenoz & Gorter, 2019).

Aldekoa, A. (2018). Gure ikastola en tres languages: the teaching and learning of trilingual oral expository skills. Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition 4: 73-92. Basque Government (2016) VI. Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa. Euskal Autonomi Erkidegoa. Donostia. Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2017) Translanguaging as a pedagogical tool in multilingual education. In Cenoz, J.; D. Gorter & S. May (eds) Language awareness and multilingualism. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Berlin/New York: Springer. 309-321. Leonet, O., Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2019) Developing morphological awareness across languages: translanguaging pedagogies in third language acquisition. Language Awareness. (online first) ) DOI: 10.1080/09658416.2019.1688338