Languaging Across Contexts: Unpacking Monoglossic Ideologies' Effects on Linguistic Choice and Presentation of Identity

• In Event: (Re)Imagining English Language Arts Through a Critical Translanguaging Lens: Practical and Epistemological Insights on Teaching "English"

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores the role monoglossic ideologies have in emergent multilingual students’ understandings of their own languaging practices and linguistic identity. The purpose is to unpack the languaging practices and ideologies of Hemily, a ninth-grade Guatemalan student. By providing vignettes of her participation, and thoughts about, her languaging practices in three contexts, home, work, and school, this paper illustrates the connection Hemily’s languaging practices had to who she was as a person and how she was socialized to understand language as a tool for communication, showcasing identity, and relationship-building. Simultaneously, her languaging practices, and how she thought about and described them, also illustrated how her shifting perspectives were shaped by the larger sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts that Hemily navigated.

Theory
Translanguaging theory describes how multilinguals language, specifically the fluid movement they experience between languages as they draw on their linguistic repertoire or communication system ​​(García & Wei, 2014; García & Kleifgen, 2018). To understand Hemily’s languaging practices, Wei’s (2018) translanguaging space and translingual instinct are used to illuminate how power, prestige, and linguistic hierarchies played out in Hemily’s discussion of her own languaging across time. Within a translanguaging space, users forefront aspects of cultural and linguistic identity, experience, and history by drawing on their translanguaging instinct in ways that “go beyond narrowly defined linguistic cues and transcend culturally defined language boundaries to achieve effective communication” (Wei, 2018, pp. 24-25).

Methods
This paper draws on data from an ethnographic case study conducted across the 2015-2016 academic school year at a newcomer sixth through tenth grade school in Kentucky. The focal participant was 15 and a Guatemalan Indigenous, Quiché- and Spanish-speaker. Based on her language proficiency score, she was placed in the Students with Limited and Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) cohort. Data collection consisted of ethnographic observations (one and a half to three hours each, four times per week) primarily during social studies class, interviews (at the study’s start, middle, and end), near-daily informal check-ins, and artifact collection. Additionally, at home, Hemily photographed anything related to, or representative of, when, how, or why she languaged.

Findings
Hemily utilized knowledge from across her linguistic repertoire in ways that illustrated how she negotiated cultural and linguistic borders at home, work, and school by drawing on her translanguaging instinct. In the process, she engaged in the co-construction of translingual spaces: spaces of linguistic openness where her languaging practices transcended the boundaries of named languages (Wei, 2018). At the same time, as Hemily’s awareness of the monoglossic language policies embedded in the spaces she navigated, so too did her policing/criticality of her own languaging practices. As such, despite beginning the year with expansive heteroglossic understandings of her multilingualism and with a keen translanguaging instinct, she ended questioning her multilingualism and articulating an interest in prioritizing English language development/production.

Implications
Findings indicate the need to focus on creating translanguaging spaces that cultivate and nurture students’ translanguaging instinct by challenging larger monoglossic ideologies and language policies dictating school and community spaces that TEMs navigate.

Author

• Rebecca E. Linares, Rowan University
  Presenting Author