Critical Translanguaging to Disrupt the Coloniality of Language in a South African Teacher Education Class

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

Abstract

Objectives
While translanguaging has significant transformative and emancipatory potential, no language practice is inherently transformative. Critical translanguaging pedagogies need to be deliberately designed to disrupt hegemonic language ideologies that position some language practices as deficient and others as superior. In this paper, I aim to show how the coloniality of language was disrupted in a case study of language and literacy teacher education, with distinct consequences for the positioning of Black and White students in relation to their language resources. I aim to show how the integration of critical literacy (Janks, 2010), translanguaging and whole-body sense-making (Lin, 2019) with coloniality of language (McKinney & Christie, in press) can enable the design of critical transformative pedagogical translanguaging practice.

Theoretical framework
In designing and analysing an example of critical pedagogical translanguaging in literacy teacher education, I draw on the theoretical frameworks of De/Coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) including colonial language ideologies (Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, 1986); translanguaging and whole-body sense-making (Lin, 2019) and Janks’ (2010) synthesis model of critical literacy. In a context where African languages are systematically excluded, critical translanguaging pedagogy must begin with surfacing students’ linguistic repertoires, and interrogating the colonial language ideologies that exclusively value English. Whole-body sense-making (Lin, 2019) enables analysis of the embodied and multi-sensory nature of language ideologies and communication. Drawing on Janks’ (2010) synthesis model of critical literacy, I focus on how paying attention to the relationship between language and power (i.e. domination), as well as centring marginalised linguistic resources (diversity), can enable moments of heightened participation (access) and challenge students to learn to work with marginalised semiotic resources in new ways (design).

Modes of enquiry & Data sources
The research site is a language and literacy module in a teacher education programme at an elite English medium university in South Africa. Participants were a multilingual lecturer and a linguistically and racially diverse group of 24 students (including speakers of isiXhosa and Afrikaans). Linguistic ethnography enabled analysis of the entanglements of macro social structures and processes with micro interactions (Copland & Creese, 2015). Data collection tools included observation, audio-visual recording of interaction and images of collaboratively produced work.

Findings
Data analysis shows how working translingually disrupted monolingual ideologies and racialised patterns of classroom participation where (mostly White) English home language speakers are more confident to contribute and hold the floor while (mostly Black) African language speakers are reticent. It shows how English dominant students confronted the limitations of their linguistic repertoires and took up practices of translanguaging that were new to them. Finally, the data show how foregrounding isiXhosa resources, enabled a bilingual isiXhosa/English speaking student and lecturer to share rich communication and knowledge resources with the class, constructing moments which disrupted the coloniality of language and of being.

Significance
The research presented in this paper contributes both an integrated theoretical framework for, as well as empirical evidence of, how critical translanguaging pedagogy can be used to challenge racialised ideologies and inequalities that are perpetuated through monolingual approaches to education.

Author

• Carolyn McKinney, University of Cape Town