A Chronotopic Examination of Language Ideologies in Educators' Accounts of Translanguaging

• In Event: Educators' Perspectives on the Translanguaging  Landscape in Multilingual Educational Contexts

Abstract

Scholars have engaged in defining or problematizing translanguaging as a concept, theory, and pedagogical tool (cf. Allard, 2017; Jaspers, 2018; Li, 2018). While its theoretical underpinnings are still subject to much debate in Applied Linguistics (Bhatt & Bolonyai, 2019), its pedagogical value for Bilingual Education has been somewhat established (Garcia & Li, 2015). In this paper, I utilize the notion utilizing the notion of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) to explore how educators navigate the pedagogical merits of translanguaging vis-à-vis their own ideologies of language and learners. In doing so, I bring together a number of arguments that support or challenge translanguaging bridging the scholarship in linguistics and education more broadly.



The data for this study come from a nation-wide survey administered among 967 educators through a professional forum in the United States in 2019. The analysis for this study is based on a 447 completed survey responses by various institutional stakeholders with classroom teachers and language specialists topping the participant list. In particular, I studied educator accounts of translanguaging to two open-ended questions, in which they were requested to provide the definition of the term and the types of translanguaging practices they adopted in their educational settings. In analyzing these accounts, I examined educator discourse around language and learners in general and translanguaging in particular through the chronotopic lens, which is a linguistic configuration of time, space, and particular social types (Agha, 2007). This discursive analytic approach allowed me to recognize the contextual opportunities and limitations in educators’ ideologies of language and learners that translated into their understanding and use of translanguaging.



The preliminary findings suggest that the chronotopic image of translanguaging in educator accounts is primarily instrumental, i.e. an aid for making the target language accessible for students’ learning. The learners in this image are often bilingual, i.e. they have a native language and a target language, who are allowed to code-switch during certain instructional periods. Their languages are often regarded to be readily available for use in classroom settings. While some respondents articulated a belief in the equitable nature of translanguaging, they rarely linked it to learners’ bodily and emotional identities. I discuss these findings in relation to the scholarly definitions and discussions of translanguaging in education and linguistics. I argue that while translanguaging is informative of educator ideologies, its transformative capacity is less foregrounded in these ideologies and reported instructional practices due to the institutional and contextual constraints.



The chronotopic approach used in this study addresses the call to examine the ideological dimensions of translanguaging within the context in which they are produced (Jaspers, 2018; Poza, 2017). Additionally, it is a rather fresh approach for the translanguaging scholarship within the field of Education. The study’s empirical implications highlight the need for solidifying the foundational principals behind the concept of translanguaging that would go hand in hand with its pedagogical applications.

Author

• Madina Djuraeva, Wisconsin Center for Education Research