Translanguaging and Power: New Possibilities for Bilingual Classrooms?

• In Event: Using Theories of Language and Power to Investigate Pressing Aspects of Education

Abstract

Recently, scholars have called for new approaches to bilingual education that challenge asymmetrical power relations across languages. This includes efforts to create heteroglossic spaces that will facilitate language and content learning in linguistically diverse classrooms. Translanguaging has recently emerged as both a pedagogical approach and a tool for fostering transformation (García & Li Wei, 2014; Flores & García, 2013; Hornberger & Link, 2012). Translanguaging centers the dynamic language practices of bilinguals, highlighting that boundaries between “languages” are actually socially constructed and maintained (García & Li Wei, 2014). Drawing on Bakhtin and Fairclough, this paper examines the theoretical underpinnings of translanguaging and the potential for such an approach to contribute to social change.

Closely linked to this year’s annual theme, “Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies,” this paper explores how translanguaging can recognize bilingual students’ language practices while simultaneously providing opportunities for critical inquiry into whose voices are valued in different “social fields” (Bourdieu, 1991). Somewhat paradoxically, bilingual programs in the US are rooted in efforts to expand educational access and assimilate immigrant students into a monolingual “mainstream.” Some programs claim to contribute to elevating the status of the minority languages while simultaneously providing students with access to the language of power. Most programs, however, separate languages in time and space, strictly monitoring which language can be used when and where. Yet bilinguals constantly transcend these restrictions in actual practice as they translanguage: participating in hybrid language practices that include translation, code-switching, or reading in one language and writing in another (García & Li Wei, 2014).

A translanguaging approach aims to provide opportunities for students to draw on their entire linguistic repertoires to facilitate language acquisition, content learning, and a metaknowledge about language use. Translanguaging is fundamentally oriented towards social justice, with the goal of incorporating multiple subjectivities and challenging language hierarchies (Flores & García, 2013). Translanguaging is inherently heteroglossic (Bakhtin in Holquist, 1990) As such, efforts to designate official languages act as “masks for ideologies of many kinds” (Holquist, 1990 p. 51). When language ideologies remain unquestioned, they inevitably serve to sustain unequal power relations. Translanguaging as a pedagogy serves to denaturalize ideologies that hierarchically position languages and their varieties. By deconstructing the myth of one single language as necessary for unification, or one variety as superior to another, students can recognize the political and sociohistorical nature of language. As traditional boundaries are contested, the raw materials available for self-authorship (Holquist, 1990) may be altered and social transformation furthered.

Far from offering a solution to deeply entrenched monoglossic language ideologies, this theoretical paper argues that a translanguaging approach makes naturalized assumptions regarding language transparent. Additionally, this paper suggests that translanguaging contributes to destabilizing and expanding the possible ‘subject positions’ (Fairclough, 1989) available to bilingual students and therefore supporting a broader range of viable language practices.

Author

• Nora W Lang, University of California - Santa Cruz