TRANSLANGUAGING PRACTICE IN THE NICKELODEON CARTOONS AND ITS POTENTIAL FOR TEACHING SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AT AN EARLY AGE

Abstract

TV shows can take us to other worlds, times, and dimensions, even without leaving the sofa! This time the television adventure has taken us to another language, Spanish, which is shown as a very important linguistic and sociocultural link in the television content aimed at children on the Nickelodeon channel. Along with the characters, plot, and setting of the cartoons Santiago of the Seas and The Casagrandes, the translanguaging practices nuance magnificently a bilingual and pluricultural world of the two animated sketches, and they become a strong didactic resource for teaching Spanish as a foreign language at an early age. Expressed through repetitions, orders, greetings, appealer nouns, contextualized examples, culturemes, encouraging the public to participate in the show, the translanguaging practices incite the children to infer meanings, to produce phrases in Spanish and to think about other language and other culture, helping them in that way to become active and autonomous participants in the learning SFL process, perhaps for the lifetime.