Translanguaging, Bilingualism, and Bilingual Education

Emancipatory and critical language education: a plea for translingual possible selves and worlds

“…European languages associated with traditions of highly regarded cultural creations and socio-economic leadership, like English, French, and German, are represented by premium educational institutions (namely very selective, independent, international schools) that offer bi/multilingual programmes which develop and demand perfect bi/multilingual skills, aimed at students and families who desire to attain or retain global citizenship status, through mobile, distinguished, academic, and professional careers. In sharp contrast with the orthodox purism of 'additive bi/multilingualism' of prestigious schools, there are several forms of more or less symbolically violent, assimilationist, 'subtractive bilingualism' (Cummins, 2010;García, 2009;García & Fishman, 2002;García et al, 2012;García & Wei, 2013) embodied by most public schools, especially if located in middle class to impoverished neighbourhoods, which struggle with overall academic underachievement and learning difficulties by means of linguistic mainstreaming. These subtractive programmes serve homogenising educational goals and attempt to meet the supposed needs for sociocultural assimilation of communities where heritage languages abound and pervade their daily lives, both at home and at work, making them feel socially inferior or alien, while official languages remain mostly as foreign languages belonging to the outside privileged majority.…”

“…The promising, yet laborious, alternative scenario consists in promoting a 'dynamic' and polyphonic bi/multilingualism (Bartlett & García, 2011;García, 2009;García & Wei, 2013) that goes beyond subtractive and additive practices by developing an inclusive bi/multilingual curriculum where spontaneous and fruitful crossing over or entanglement of languages becomes the new ecology of learning, teaching, and human development as a whole. Even if no one in the teaching staff has a good command of those languages, they can be valued, promoted, and used as anchoring positions for translinguistic and transcultural dialogues, through the regular exercise of shared semantic and pragmatic 'translation' to gain experiential awareness of cultural diversity, and cope with the so-called boundaries of linguistic and cultural (un)translatability.…”

Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education

“…Instead, a practice of linguistic diversity seems to be the 'normality': making use of the heritage languages and the majority languages in a pragmatic and functional mode, including strategies of translanguaging , i.e. composing utterances out of the whole linguistic repertoire a person has at their disposal, if this is appropriate in a communicative setting (García and Wei 2014). A qualitative study which was carried out in Austria shows that this type of practice is often hidden by migrant families if they are questioned about their linguistic behaviour, simply because they are aware of the fact that it is neither appreciated by the general public in European immigration countries nor accepted in the pedagogical sphere (Brizic 2007).…”

Research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching

“…Such longitudinal identity research is enhanced by a scalar approach, which includes both timescales and sociolinguistic scales. Canagarajah & De Costa (2016) treat scales as a shifting category of practice in order to interpret how identities emerge from the translanguaging (García & Li 2014) and metrolingual (Pennycook & Otsuji 2015) practices of people and institutions.…”