Translanguaging and the Transformation of Classroom Space: On the Affordances of Disrupting Linguistic Boundaries

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Transforming Schooling for Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices

Abstract

Purposes
This paper explores how emergent bilingual children and youth engage in everyday forms of translanguaging within the contexts of classroom interactions. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data from three schools, we highlight the ways in which these students transform the social space of their respective classrooms by disrupting supposed linguistic boundaries and generating novel opportunities for language use.

Perspective
Otheguy, García, and Reid (2015) define translanguaging as “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (p. 283). Although there has been a recent move towards translanguaging pedagogies (García & Kleyn, 2016; Palmer et al, 2014; Pontier & Gort, 2016), most emergent bilinguals are in classrooms where the official policies and practices both assume and reinforce the supposed boundaries between languages.

Methods
Drawing on methods from conversation analysis (Goodwin 1990; Sacks et al. 1974), we closely examined the instances of translanguaging taking place within three different classrooms. One of these settings was a Spanish-English dual language classroom, one was an English-only classroom at a school that was preparing to transition towards a bilingual model, and one was a more typical English-only classroom. The examples were analyzed using a form of discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) that attends to the wider social and cultural implications of language in use.

Evidence
We present data from three schools to highlight the ways in which emergent bilingual students transformed the social space of their respective classrooms by disrupting supposed linguistic boundaries and generating novel opportunities for language learning. The first classroom was a Spanish-English dual language classroom, the second was an English-only classroom at a school that was preparing to transition towards a bilingual model, and the third was a more typical English-only classroom.

Results
The first classroom was a dual language classroom in which the official policy was one of language separation. Despite this official designation, the teacher in this classroom sometimes drew flexibly on her own linguistic repertoire by translanguaging within the context of instruction. The second classroom was an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom at a school that was officially a monolingual school. However, the teacher in this classroom was bilingual, and she actively supported and promoted students’ translanguaging. The third classroom was a more typical ESL classroom. While the teacher in this classroom was not bilingual, he did sometimes engage in translanguaging. Across all three classrooms, students drew flexibly on their bilingual repertoires in ways that seemed to normalize translanguaging. They disrupted the boundaries between English and Spanish in their everyday talk, and by doing so, they transformed these bilingual and monolingual classrooms into translingual spaces.

Significance
By highlighting the transformative impact of emergent bilingual students’ everyday translanguaging, we point out that emergent bilingual students continue to disrupt linguistic boundaries and thereby transform classroom space on their own regardless—and sometimes in spite—of the policies and pedagogies that adults imagine, enact, and impose on their behalf. (498 words)

Authors

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University

• Michiko Hikida, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Leah Durán, The University of Arizona