Rethinking Translanguaging as an Everyday Practice

Recent debates in bi- and multilingual studies have problematised some paradigms, such as code-switching, for reifying static language boundaries and their inability to account for creative communicative practices. Instead, translanguaging has been reintroduced to capture the critical 'languaging' practices, which reflect the fluid movement between and across languages.

Yet this emerging tradition still tends to celebrate and thus exoticise the presumed linguistic creativity, even though it is indeed 'quite normal' and 'ordinary' and by no means a new phenomenon. In so doing, scholarship inadvertently constructs a linguistic Other whose translanguaging is expected to be made legible according to normative epistemologies of diversity.

This presentation is based on the premise that the analytic potential of bi/multilingual studies can be enhanced through a stronger focus on translanguaging as a reflective of everyday, mundane, and ordinary occurrences, rather than of exotic, eccentric or unconventional ones. Translanguaging is neither to celebrate nor to deplore but something to observe and examine with interest like anything else.

Following Higgins and Coen (2000, pp. 14-15), 'we accept that as Homo sapiens, we are all the same in terms of genetic structure and cognitive potentiality... Beyond that, we don't think that as humans we have anything in common but our differences...'

Translanguaging is rather ordinary – a necessary condition of linguistic ordinariness is its creativity. We, as Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) educators, therefore, need to consider two critical English Language Teaching (ELT) implications:

• how English language learning students use different linguistic repertoires outside the classroom, what they talk about, and which agencies they prefer to express in which forms of their linguistic repertoire
• the multiple activities and practices embedded within English language learning students, including the ways of learning, being, and speaking.

Date

Friday 6 September 2024

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Professor Sender Dovchin
Curtin University