Translanguaging

Winner of the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize 2014 This book addresses how the new linguistic concept of 'Translanguaging' has contributed to our understandings of language, bilingualism and education, with potential to transform not only semiotic systems and speaker subjectivities, but also social structures.

Translation and Translanguaging brings into dialogue translanguaging as a theoretical lens and translation as an applied practice. This book is the first to ask: what can translanguaging tell us about translation and what can translation tell us about translanguaging? Translanguaging originated as a term to characterize bilingual and multilingual repertoires. This book extends the linguistic focus to consider translanguaging and translation in tandem – across languages, language varieties, registers, and discourses, and in a diverse range of contexts: everyday multilingual settings involving community interpreting and cultural brokering, embodied interaction in sports, text-based commodities, and multimodal experimental poetics. Characterizing translanguaging as the deployment of a spectrum of semiotic resources, the book illustrates how perspectives from translation can enrich our understanding of translanguaging, and how translanguaging, with its notions of repertoire and the "moment", can contribute to a practice-based account of translation. Illustrated with examples from a range of languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Czech, Lingala, and varieties of English, this timely book will be essential reading for researchers and graduate students in sociolinguistics, translation studies, multimodal studies, applied linguistics, and related areas.

With increasing mobility of people across the world, there is a pressing need to develop evidence-based teaching practices that lead to high-quality education, which serves the needs of inclusive societies and social and epistemic justice. This book presents cutting-edge qualitative case-study research across a range of educational contexts, research-method contributions and theory-oriented chapters by distinguished multilingual education scholars. These take stock of the field of translanguaging in relation to the education of multilingual individuals in today’s globalized world. The volume breaks new ground in that all chapters share a focus on teachers as ‘knowledge generators’ and many on teacher-researcher collaboration. Together, the chapters provide comprehensive and up-to-date applications of the concept of pedagogical translanguaging and present recent research in educational contexts that have hitherto received scant attention, namely secondary-level education, education for adult immigrants and the school-wide introduction of pedagogical translanguaging in primary school. Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 8 are free to download as open access publications. They can be downloaded from our website: https://www.channelviewpublications.com/page/open-access/.

This book is the first to apply the theory of translanguaging to multilingual classrooms in an Asian context, offering strategies for teaching specific grammatical and comprehension skills to students struggling to read in English. It also enriches the methodology of coding bilingual transcripts with ideas resulting from a detailed analysis of a large and rich data set. Lastly, the author discusses growth areas in the emerging field of translanguaging and challenges for teachers implementing a translanguaging approach in a superdiverse classroom.

Looking closely at what happens when translanguaging is actively taken up to teach emergent bilingual students across different contexts, this book focuses on how it is already happening in classrooms as well as how it can be implemented as a pedagogical orientation. It extends theoretical understandings of the concept and highlights its promises and challenges. Using a Transformative Action Research design, six empirically grounded ethnographic case studies describe how translanguaging is used in lesson designs and in the spontaneous moves made by teachers and students during specific teaching moments. The cases shed light on two questions: How, when, and why is translanguaging taken up or resisted by students and teachers? What does its use mean for them? Although grounded in a U.S. context, and specifically in classrooms in New York State, Translanguaging with Multilingual Students links findings and theories to different global contexts to offer important lessons for educators worldwide.

This edited volume explores diverse translanguaging practices in multilingual science classrooms in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Luxembourg, South Africa, Sweden and the United States. It presents novel opportunities for using students’ home, first or minority languages as meaning-making tools in science education. It also invites to explore the use of language resources and other multimodal resources, such as gestures and body language. In addition, it discusses and problematizes contingent hindrances and obstacles that may arise from these practices within various contexts around the world. This includes reviewing different theoretical starting points that may be challenged by such an approach. These issues are explored from different perspectives and methodological focus, as well as in several educational contexts, including primary, middle, secondary levels, higher education, as well as in after-school programs for refugee teenagers. Within these contexts, the book highlights and shares a range of educational tools and activities in science education, such as teacher-led classroom-talk, language-focused teaching, teachers’ use of meta-language, teachers’ scaffolding strategies, small-group interactions, and computer-supported collaborative learning.

To respond to the multilingual turn in language education, this volume constitutes a challenge to the traditional, monolingual, and native speakerism paradigm in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) through a translanguaging lens. The chapters offer complex global perspectives – with contributions from five continents – to open critical conversations on how to conceptualize and implement translanguaging in teacher education and classrooms of various contexts. The researchers exhibit a shared commitment to transforming TESOL profession that values teachers’ and learners’ full linguistic repertoires. This volume should prove a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers interested in English teaching and learning, applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and social justice.

This edited collection explores the immense potential of translanguaging in educational settings and highlights teachers and students negotiating language ideologies in their everyday communicative practices. It makes a significant contribution to scholarship on translanguaging and considers the need for pedagogy to reflect and embrace diversity. The chapters provide rich empirical research and document translanguaging in varied educational contexts, with studies from pre-school to adult education in different, mainly European, countries, where English is not the dominant language. Together they expand our understanding of translanguaging and how it can be applied to a variety of settings. This book will be of interest to students and researchers, especially in education, language education and applied linguistics, as well as to professionals and policymakers.