Sustaining Critical Approaches to Translanguaging in Education: A Contextual Framework

Translanguaging remains a timely and important topic in bi/multilingual education. The most recent turn in translanguaging scholarship involves attention to translanguaging in context in response to critiques of translanguaging as a universally empowering educational practice. In this paper, seven e...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:TESOL quarterly 2024-06, Vol.58 (2), p.664-692
Main Authors: Mendoza, Anna, Hamman‐Ortiz, Laura, Tian, Zhongfeng, Rajendram, Shakina, Tai, Kevin W. H., Ho, Wing Yee Jenifer, Sah, Pramod K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic language
Bilingual education
Collaboration
Context
Educational Practices
Ethnography
Familiarity
Ideology
Language acquisition
Language ideologies
Multilingualism
Teaching Methods
Translanguaging
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Translanguaging remains a timely and important topic in bi/multilingual education. The most recent turn in translanguaging scholarship involves attention to translanguaging in context in response to critiques of translanguaging as a universally empowering educational practice. In this paper, seven early career translanguaging scholars propose a framework for researching translanguaging “in context,” drawing on the Douglas Fir Group's (2016) transdisciplinary framework for language acquisition. Examining translanguaging in context entails paying attention to who in a classroom wields power, as a result of their greater proficiency in societally valued languages, their more “standard” ways of speaking these languages, their greater familiarity with academic literacies valued at school, and/or their more “legitimate” forms of translanguaging. In our framework for researching translanguaging in context, we propose three principles. The first principle is obvious: (1) not to do so apolitically. The other two principles describe a synergy between ethnographic research and teacher‐researcher collaborative research: (2) ethnographic research can assess macro‐level language ideologies and enacted language hegemonies at the micro‐ and meso levels, and (3) teacher‐researcher collaborations must create and sustain inclusive, equitable classroom social orders and alternative academic norms different from the ones documented to occur in context if left by chance.
ISSN:0039-8322
1545-7249
DOI:10.1002/tesq.3240