Critical Literacy and Additional Language Learning: An Expansive View of Translanguaging for Change-Enhancing Possibilities

• In Event: Translanguaging for Critical Literacy: An Expansive, Ecological View of Language

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This conceptual paper focuses on critical literacy (CL) work in applied linguistics to highlight some recent paradigmatic changes in language theory and practice, offering new possibilities for CL education in additional language (AL) teaching and learning. Particularly, we articulate a critical heteroglossic perspective (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that is commensurate with Janks’ (2010) synthesis model of CL to bolster change-enhancing possibilities of translanguaging (TL) pedagogies.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
There has been burgeoning research on TL (García & Lin, 2017) and other related translingual and plural approaches (Canagarajah, 2015; Moore, Lau, & Van Viegen, 2020). TL as a pedagogic approach articulates a critical stance to leverage and legitimize outside-school multilingual and multimodal repertoires and practices for meaningful learning (García & Kleyn, 2016) to disrupt language hierarchies and academic monolingualism and promote minoritized students’ education and identities (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Particularly, enlisting students’ full semiotic repertoires allow for greater engagements in complex, critical learning (García & Li, 2014) that is often precluded from AL classrooms operating from monolingual standards.

Many scholars stand for the critical potential of TL as it provides the needed scaffolds for minoritized students to navigate the “codes of power”, enabling more equitable successful academic and social engagements. However, for some scholars, operating from a mere scaffolding stance, TL runs the risk of further perpetuating English hegemony (Flores, 2014). Flores and Rosa (2015) remind us that transformation cannot be achieved solely through supporting minoritized students’ access to the dominant language but also through active dismantling of the raciolinguistic hierarchies, hence adopting an overt critical, decolonizing, anti-racist, praxis-oriented approach to AL teaching and learning is needed.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
We will examine a recent expansive view of TL that adopts ecological and posthumanist perspectives on language and learning and discuss how this impending shift can potentially push CL beyond its traditional logo- and verbo-centric approaches (Janks, 2002) to ones that mobilize students’ multiple linguistic, semiotic, bodily, affective and spatial repertoires to allow for multiple ways of knowing, feeling, experiencing, and meaning-making, opening up greater change-enhancing possibilities. We will give a brief review of some recent studies of TL in AL classrooms that adopt a more overt critical focus on social issues commensurate with a critical heteroglossic perspective (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and Janks’ (2010) integrated model.

Scholarly significance
Our proposed expansive view of critical TL is by no means to define or restrict what criticality looks like in AL education, but rather to underscore how “a restive problematisation” (Pennycook, 2001) of TL practices can bolster possibilities for change without reducing it to another neoliberal project of celebratory pluralism (Kubota, 2016). Bringing in some most recent articulations of TL that encompass an expansive, ecological, distributed view of language, we aim to offer new lenses/dimensions for CL engagements in AL classrooms and present important implications for CL approaches to pedagogy and research in and for AL classrooms.

Authors

• Sunny Man Chu Lau, Bishop's University

• Zhongfeng Tian, The University of Texas at San Antonio

• Angel Mei Yi Lin, Simon Fraser University