Trans/plurilingual Pedagogies: A Multiethnography

Abstract

Trans/plurilingual theory and pedagogies have been generating extensive attention within global English language teaching and teacher education. This article responds to the burgeoning area of trans/plurilingual pedagogies, outlining diverse pedagogical practices and perspectives from a group of English language educators at a large, cosmopolitan Canadian university. Considering recent assertions that there are onto-epistemological differences between multilingualism, plurilingualism, and translingualism, this article looks to demonstrate how (or even if) these differences manifest in the pedagogical practices of diverse faculty within the same language teaching and teacher education programs. Drawing on multiethnographic data, this article concludes with a discussion of the potential and limitations of critical pedagogies, the affordances of multiethnography as an accessible methodology for use by researchers and pedagogues, and a call for greater bi-directional knowledge flow between language researchers and classroom instructors.