A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging

Abstract

Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what I call an integrated multilingual model of individual bilingualism, contrasted with the unitary model and dual competence model. I further distinguish grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like monolinguals, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar. I call the viewpoint developed here a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

Teachers’ misunderstandings about hybrid language use: Insights into teacher education

“…The subject is not easy, however, even for language experts. Many arguments exist about the intricacies of how human brains process language and whether these practices are better described through lenses of code‐switching (MacSwan, ) or translanguaging (Otheguy, García, & Reid, ), among others. While various publications have attempted to outline pedagogical implications of linguistic hybridity, these scholarly arguments raise complex questions that rely on different disciplinary traditions, theoretical models, and ontological framings.…”

Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

“…Question-question similarity was part of Task 3 on cQA at SemEval-2016/2017(Nakov et al, 2016b, 2017; there was also a similar subtask as part of SemEval-2016 Task 1 on Semantic Textual Similarity (Agirre et al, 2016). Question-question similarity is an important problem with application to question recommendation, question duplicate detection, community question answering, and question answering in general.…”

Multilingual Semantic Parsing And Code-Switching

“…Note that our models are only trained on "pure" English and German utterances; there are no code-switching training examples in the input. Code-switching is a complex linguistic phenomenon and there are different accounts of the socio-linguistic conventions governing its use (Poplack, 2004;Isurin et al, 2009;MacSwan, 2017), as well as of the structural properties of utterances with code-switching (Joshi, 1982). Here we focus on the simple kind of code-switching where a single phrase is produced in a different language than the rest of the utterance.…”