Critical Language Awareness in Translanguaging: Exploration in a Teacher Education Course

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Six
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Language Awareness: Consequential Truth(s) in Multilingual Contexts (Table 14)

Abstract

Translanguaging as theory and pedagogy could help teachers reconceptualize languages and engage in the political act of critical teaching (García et al., 2021). Although translanguaging pedagogy is intended to cultivate critical language awareness (CLA) in academic learning given its liberating purpose and social justice orientation (García & Li Wei, 2014), its transformative power to “[liberate] the voices of language minoritized students” (García & Leiva, 2014, p. 200) has been questioned. Poza (2017) argues that “its ties to critical pedagogy appear only sporadically” in empirical research (p. 101), with little evidence showcasing “a significant reorientation of values with respect to language practices allowed and supported in classrooms, [or] a subversion of oppressive language ideologies” (p. 117). In response to Poza’s (2017) call to bring CLA (back) into translanguaging, our qualitative study examines: (1) How did participants develop CLA in a graduate-level, translanguaging-infused teacher education course? (2) What were some opportunities and challenges in this process?

This study occurred from July through August 2018 during a seven-week-long graduate-level teacher education course focusing on bi/multilingual theories and practices at a private research university in the Northeastern of the United States. Five teacher candidates volunteered as our research participants. Our data sources included (1) semi-structured interviews (N=5); (2) the course instructor’s teaching journals; and (3) participants’ written work (e.g., artifacts from in-class activities, lesson plans). We adopted an inductive coding approach (Saldaña, 2015) in data analysis. After data triangulation, we identified four themes, including: (1) emerging CLA demonstrated through rethinking bi/multilingualism, (2) emerging CLA demonstrated by challenging English-only ideologies, (3) translanguaging’s potential in generating critical reflections of participants’ lived experiences with languages, and (4) challenges of transforming CLA into practice.

Our findings have pointed out the potential of translanguaging in prompting spontaneous reflections on pre-service teachers’ personal experiences with language and languaging, paving way for them to critically rethink the status of English in teaching, learning and communication for social justice. Yet, although teacher candidates were able to demonstrate their emerging CLA as manifested at the ideological level, they encountered substantial difficulties enacting critical translanguaging into practice. In their lesson plans, English was largely positioned as the end goal of content-area education and translanguaging was often reduced to a translation strategy to scaffold academic language development. Based on the findings, we propose suggestions on teacher education course design and advocate for program-wide efforts in sustaining and strengthening CLA across the curriculum. We argue that, to sustain the criticality of language beyond students’ ideology, the colonial history of language and the intersectionality of language, race and power must be taught explicitly and put at the center of teacher education.

Authors

• Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Northeastern University
  Presenting Author

• Zhongfeng Tian, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author