Translanguaging, Bilingualism, and Bilingual Education

• In Event: 65.043 - Bilingual and Multilingual Education: Current Practices and Future Prospects for Promoting Justice, Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education

Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that at the heart of heteoroglossic approaches to bilingual education is translanguaging. Translanguaging originally referred to classroom practices of deliberately changing the language of input and the language of output, for example, reading about a topic in one language, and then writing about it in the other language (Williams, 2012). García (2009) extends this original notion: “Translanguaging, or engaging in bilingual or multilingual discourse practices, is an approach to bilingualism that is centered not on languages as has been often the case, but on the practices of bilinguals that are readily observable” (p. 44). The author argues that translanguaging is the normal mode of communication in communities throughout the world as it encompasses the “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage to make sense of their bilingual worlds.” The author asserts that when used in schools, translanguaging provides bilingual students with the opportunity to use their full linguistic and semiotic repertoire to make meaning. The author argues that translanguaging is transformative for the child, for the teacher, and for education itself, and particularly for bilingual education. This concept of translanguaging moves the field beyond the narrow view of codeswitching, wherein the focus is on the language (code), and enables us to understand the processes by which bilingual students perform bilingually in a myriad of multimodal ways in the classroom.

Author

• Ofelia García, City University of New York