Transnational Perspectives on Translanguaging in Online Instructed Spaces

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

As the world experienced unprecedented disruptions in education and everyday life in 2020, questions arose about how to continue to support and advocate for multilingual learners. Yet, long before the Covid-19 pandemic sent education into an online format, scholars who advocated for translanguaging also advocated for awareness of the multimodal nature of communicative processes across languages and the need to harness different media for multilingual communication (e.g., García and Kleifgen, 2020; Kleifgen, 2013). Thus, translanguaging practices and pedagogies had been flowing into online spaces before the pandemic and are likely to continue to change and fluctuate across modalities as the current pandemic ends.

The aim of this panel is to explore how practices, pedagogies, and teacher beliefs about translanguaging across transnational and formal educational settings translate to formal online teaching modes. Literature across the various subfields comprising educational linguistics characterizes translanguaging as a theory about how the bilingual mind works, a multilingual phenomenon, and an array of pedagogies that support the use of students’ and teachers’ linguistic repertoires as a resource for learning and positive identity formation (Goodman and Tastanbek, 2021; Li Wei, 2018; Otheguy, García and Reid, 2019). While research has been increasingly demonstrating the benefits of translanguaging as a pedagogical approach and decrying its absence in monolingual and discrete bilingual teaching, little research has been conducted, until recently, on teachers’ and students’ beliefs and practices of translanguaging in instructed online spaces.

Regardless of how linguists and educators may express their support and advocacy of heteroglossia in classroom instruction, the processes through which minoritized communities imagine themselves linguistically and culturally require an acknowledgment of the politics of difference that drives militancy around minoritized language groups’ activism and decolonial efforts. Because language operates as a symbolic demarcator of groups’ authority, ethnolinguistic communities may choose to represent their language as a site of difference, accentuating or attenuating cohesive aspects of their linguistic repertoires to achieve political objectives and survive economically, as in the case of the minoritized languages speakers’ repertoires deployed in commerce and tourism (Chiswick, Patrinos and Hurst, 2021; Heller, 2010). As de Swaan (2020) remarks, languages are ‘hypercollective goods’, and for this reason, the struggle for defining and operationalizing them in curriculum and instruction involves a myriad of converging interests in constant need of careful disentanglement. The confluence of interests in curricularizing language determines the visibility of options for realizing public education as a socially just and humane common good. As the papers in this panel discuss, how languages are framed and articulated in academic instruction bears profound implications for how teachers attempt to ethically influence students’ attitudes towards diverse communicative practices, expanding or restricting the meaning of language by drawing attention to it as a local or translocal phenomenon.

Sub Unit

• Language Issues SIG

Chair

• Bridget Goodman, Nazarbayev University

Individual Presentations

• ‘Keeping home languages out of the classroom’ Multilingual international students’ perceptions of translingualism in an online college composition class Authors - Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Northeastern University

• Shifting beliefs and practices on translanguaging in an online master’s programme - Bridget Goodman, Nazarbayev University