Translanguaging and embodied teaching and learning: lessons from a multilingual karate club in London

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the role of embodied repertories in teaching and learning in a multi-ethnic karate club in East London and its implications for language teaching and learning. We do so through the lens of translanguaging and apply the concept of translanguaging space where diverse semiotic systems are integrated and orchestrated. Through a close examination of how teaching and learning takes place in the karate club, we argue that embodied repertories are central to interactions and pedagogy. The coach manages and instructs the class through orchestration of embodied repertories and verbal instructions. Learning Japanese karate terms becomes part of embodied performance, repeated, copied and polished along with drilling of physical moves, whilst the other available linguistic repertories, Polish and English, become languages of discipline, explanation, elaboration or reinforcement. Such translanguaging practices serve the purpose of the karate club envisaged by the coach and become an effective way of communication amongst the participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds. The notion of translanguaging, in particular, the idea of orchestration, helps to highlight the multiplexity of resources in embodied teaching and learning and overcomes the monolingual and the lingual biases.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• orchestration
• embodied repertoires
• karate
• linguistic ethnography

Introduction

As Block (2014) pointed out, whilst applied linguistics research has made very significant progress in overcoming the monolingual bias in the last two decades, there remains what he calls a lingual bias: ‘the tendency to conceive of communicative practices exclusively in terms of the linguistic (morphological, syntax, phonology, lexis), although the linguistic is often complemented with a consideration of pragmatics, interculturalism, and learning strategies’ (56). He termed this tendency ‘lingualism’ and urged applied linguists, especially those working in second language acquisition (SLA) to move beyond it to embrace multilingual embodiment and multimodality. In this article, we will focus on the role of embodied repertories in teaching and learning, and take a translanguaging approach that challenges the conventional notions of language. The teaching and learning context that we are investigating in this article is not a typical standard school or classroom, but a karate club. Teaching and learning take place way beyond the school and the classroom. Understanding the processes of teaching and learning in diverse social contexts has important implications for policy and practice in and beyond education. It also helps to broaden our horizons on language teaching and learning in particular.

The karate club that we are studying is based in East London for a group of multi-ethnic and multilingual children. We regard the karate club as a ‘translanguaging space’ (Li 2011, 2018), a space that is created by and for translanguaging practices and a space where boundaries between different socially constructed languages and between language and other semiotic resources are being pushed and broken. We are especially interested in integration and coordination between bodily acts and language in the teaching and learning practices of the karate club. We aim to show how the translanguaging approach helps to highlight the significance of embodied repertories in teaching and learning. The article is structured as follows: We begin with a brief outline of our theoretical approach and discuss the notion of embodied repertories. It follows with an introduction of the context of our study – the multi-ethnic and multilingual karate club in London, and the key participants and the database of the study. We then present an analysis of four examples from our database to show the orchestration of embodied repertoires and verbal commands in demonstration, instructions, performance and learning. We conclude the article with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of our study.

Translanguaging and embodied repertories

From its early days as a descriptive label for the pedagogical practice of alternating between different input and output languages in minority language classrooms (Williams 1994) to a theoretical and analytical approach to the sociolinguistic realities of the twenty-first century where bi- and multilingual language users engage in dynamic discursive practices to make sense of their social worlds (for a review, see Garcia and Li 2014; Li 2018; Garcia and Otheguy, this volume), the concept of translanguaging has opened up new ways of understanding human communication and social action including language teaching and learning and beyond. Translanguaging not only transcends the boundaries between named languages as socially constructed entities, or in Otheguy et al’s words, ‘the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages’ (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015, 283; see also Otheguy, García, and Reid 2018), but also sees the traditional divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the extralinguistic dimensions of human communication as nonsensical and foregrounds what Li Wei (2018, 17) calls the ‘orchestration’ of diverse and multiple skills and resources in sense- and meaning-making (see also Li 2016; Zhu, Li, and Jankowicz-Pytel, forthcoming). Whilst there is much emphasis on the fluid languages practices of multilingual language users in the current and fast expanding translanguaging research literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the other aspects of the translanguaging approach, i.e. overcoming the ‘lingual bias’ that is mentioned above (Block 2014). Below we will discuss the role of embodied repertories in social interaction and explore how they work with other semiotic resources including conventional linguistic codes.

The translanguaging approach to human social interaction as intersection of multiple linguistic and semiotic systems enables us to look more closely at the role of embodied repertories. Similar to objects, senses, materials, etc., embodied repertories constitute an important dimension of semiotic practices, contributing to meaning-making and at the same time, intersecting with other semiotic repertories. The role of embodied repertories has been flagged up in the earlier sociological and anthropological literature on human communication. For example, Goffman (1963) talked about the important part played by ‘body idioms’ in signalling, interpreting and assessing individuals’ level of involvement. Duranti (1992) examined how sighting along with spatial positioning in ceremonial greetings contribute to maintaining the hierarchical social order of Western Samoan communities. Nevertheless, research in applied linguistics and language teaching and learning tends to privilege language in the form of speech and writing to the so-called non-linguistic cues including body idioms. In their call for ‘an embodied sociolinguistics’, Bucholtz and Hall (2016) searched the body in various sociolinguistic work on voice, style and self-presentation, body talk, agency, embodied motion and experience, mediation of objects, technologies and language and urged for an interdisciplinary conversation among various research traditions. They warned against the tendency to see embodiment as a background noise and as ‘secondary to language rather than the sine que non of language’ (174). Studies on gestures (e.g. Kendon 2004; McNeill 2015) have championed the centrality of gestural communication against seeing gesture as an ‘add-on’ to speech, and argued that gesture and speech are bound and integrated to the extent that gestures orchestrate speech (McNeill 2015, 3).

While these studies foreground the importance of embodied repertories in interactions, they also raise the question: how do these repertories work together? From a translanguaging perspective, integration and coordination are the key and they take place in what Li (2011) calls the translanguaging space, space created by and for translanguaging practices. In the translanguaging space, language users integrate social spaces that have been formerly separated through different practices in different places, as well as multiple modes and a wide range of complexities of everyday interaction. It is a space not only where different (linguistic) repertories, activities, histories, experiences and identities come into contact, but also where various semiotic repertories (not just linguistic, but multisensory and multimodal) are integrated into coordinated and meaningful performance and social action. Recent studies have further explored the nature of integration and coordination in translanguaging spaces. Zhu, Li, and Lyons (2017) applied the notion of translanguaging space in exploring communication in a Polski Sklep (Polish shop) in London. They argue that orchestration is the best way to describe how multilingual and multimodal semiotic systems work together and why communication is a collaborative effort. Meaning- and sense-making among participants of social interaction is similar to what happens in an orchestra: different instruments (languages and semiotic systems) contribute differently to the making of music (meaning), and no one instrument is more or less significant than another. Just as an orchestra needs their players to attune and respond to each other’s playing, participants also need to reciprocate each other’s employment of semiotic systems retrospectively or progressively in anticipation.

Similar attempts in defining how different semiotic possibilities work together include the terms of ‘attunement’ or ‘alignment’ as proposed in Pennycook and Otsuji (2017) and Pennycook (2017, 2018). Starting from Arnaut’s view (2016) that interaction is unregimented, messy and transversal and language is a ‘distributed entity across people and places’ (447), they use the terms attunement and alignment to describe the communication need to adapt to other people, language, objects, place, etc, in the process of grouping and arrangements. Comparing these two terms, however, Pennycook and Otsuji (2017) believe that attunement suggests a ‘more varied adjustment’ than alignment and hence captures better the ways of ‘collaborating with, listening to, and granting authority to new kinds of voices’ (Brigstocke and Noorani 2016, 1–2; cited in Pennycook and Otsuji 2017, 448). They frame these terms in the overall picture of ‘semiotic assemblage’ where the ‘ad hoc’ and ‘momentary’ grouping and arrangements of many kinds of materials and semiotic activities intersect at a given place and time. They are not alone in trying to foreground the multiplicity of intersecting materials and semiotics. At the beginning of this century, Scollon and Scollon (2003) used the term semiotic aggregate, to describe ‘multiple semiotic systems in a dialogical interaction with each other’ (12). Jaworski (2017) describes the busy, vibrant and simultaneous layering of objects, activities, people, spaces and moments as moiré effect, the overlaying of one pattern over another, from relatively simple shapes to more complex forms involving motion and depth. Similar holistic views of communication can be found in some of the multimodality studies of teaching and learning, particularly those of the use of image and text in literacy development, digital media, poetry, interactive whiteboard, family narratives, etc. A special issue of TESOL Quarterly (Early, Kendrick, and Potts 2015) provides compelling examples of the transformative impact of multimodality perspectives of communication in studies of language teaching and learning.

In the context of language teaching and learning, however, there is limited research on the role of embodied repertories. Rosborough (2014) analysed gestures and body positioning for their roles in interactions between teachers and second language learners and demonstrated how gestures were used mimetically as a mediational tool to ‘afford joint attention, content coordination and a transformative change in intention during the activity’ (243). Belhiah (2013) showed how gestures can be used as a resource for achieving mutual understanding and displaying alignment and intersubjectivity in second language learning situations. These studies help to revisit the notions of agency, affordances, participation and creativity and to re-examine the dynamics and complexity of interactions in teaching and learning.

We aim in the present study to focus on the role of embodied repertories in teaching and learning in the London karate club and to explore its implications for language teaching and learning in general. We do so through the lens of translanguaging and apply the concept of translanguaging space where all the semiotic systems are integrated and orchestrated.

The project, the people and the place

The present study draws data from the sports phase of the project, Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse words in four UK cities (TLANG), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK. The project adopts linguistic ethnography as the overall methodological framework, a methodology that allows researcher to tie ethnography down with concrete examples of interactional data and at the same time, to open linguistics up through rich ethnographic analysis and interpretation (Rampton et al. 2004). In addition, for each city, the project uses team-based ethnography which ‘enables a wider and deeper coverage of work, a broader comparative base, and multiple researcher triangulation (Woods et al. 2000). Our part of the study is based in London and we carried out team ethnography in four contexts: business, arts and heritage, socio-legal practices and sports, with an aim to understand the role of multilingualism in the everyday life of the individuals in these settings. Within each site, we identified a Key Participant (KP) and followed the person over a four-month period. As well as our own observations and recording, the KP collected data on our behalf which included recording of their interactions with others, their social media usage and in some cases diaries of their activities. The data for the present study were collected during our investigations into two multilingual karate clubs where our KP coached between October 2015 and January 2016, and include fieldnotes (45,997 words), recordings (28 h 26 m 27 s audio recording and 4 h 19 m 4 s video recording), linguistic landscaping (110 photographs) and interviews (8 sessions). In addition, a small amount of social media data (6 text messages + 13 emails + 23 WhatsApp messages) were collected through screenshots and forwarding /archiving.

Our KP, Sensei SK, in his fifties at the time of the project, was born into a Polish Roma family of travellers in Żary, a town in western Poland. He started learning karate in his teens and is now a 6th Dan (rank) karate instructor. In 2006, SK moved to the UK to join his sister who had lived in London already, aiming to find a better life for his family and a better future for his children. In London, SK started off teaching karate to young children and gradually expanded his professional engagement to teaching adults in other clubs. SK’s language profiles cannot be easily described in conventional terms such as first language/mother tongue, second language or foreign language. Growing up in a family and a community where multiple languages/dialects co-exist and, at the same time, symbolise different status and allegiance, SK learned to speak and use a number of languages at home and school and later, in the workplace. In the following we outline the ecology of SK’s linguistic repertoire. Whilst we use conventional linguistic labels for the languages he knows, uses and has learned/is learning, it was very clear during our observations that SK took it as part of his everyday existence that he needed to use bits of different languages and language varieties for communication. He seemingly effortlessly selects features from his linguistic repertoires and alternates from one language to another in his communication, although he claimed that his proficiency in certain named languages, e.g. English, was poor. His linguistic profile is as follows:

• Romani (or Romanese as known amongst the Roma communities): SK learned to speak two mutually unintelligible Romani dialects from his mother’s and father’s side respectively. As a child, the main language at home was the Romani dialect spoken by his father, as his mother moved to his father’s home after getting married. Although his mother did not speak her own dialect to them until he was older, SK learned to speak his mother’s dialect by keeping in contact with other speakers of the same dialect.

• Polish: SK started learning Polish, the language of instruction and learning in schools in Poland, when he attended a local primary school at the age of 7 after the Polish government outlawed Roma tradition of roaming and his family was forced to settle down. He struggled with learning through a language that was very different from his home languages. However, he made it through the school system without being sent to the special education centre where most of ‘Gypsy’ children, including many of his childhood friends, were sent, just because they were Gypsies. He speaks Polish at home, as his wife does not speak Romani. His spoken Polish has features that appear to be different from standard Polish grammar and pronunciation. He uses Polish with other Polish-English bilingual speakers including our research fellow, DJP. During our data collection period, we observed him speaking Romani and Polish with his assistant from the Polish Roma community and send text messages in Romani as well as Polish.

• English: SK started learning English when he moved to the UK in his mid-forties. He still goes to English lessons every week. SK can read some limited English (e.g. signs, simple forms or emails from his workplace). However, in everyday interaction, he seems to be reluctant and to speak in English and tends to use a mediator to interpret for him whenever he can find someone who speaks both English and Polish. He reports that he often gets his children to reply to his workplace emails on his behalf.

• Japanese: As with most karate clubs across the global, commands are usually given in Japanese. SK started learning specialised Japanese terms and vocabulary for karate when he learned karate at the age of 15 in Poland. He is proud of his mastery of Japanese specialised karate terms and regards this as a key indicator of his advanced karate skills. SK’s expertise in Japanese karate terms is impressive and contributes to his authority as the 6th Dan (rank) instructor.

The karate club reported in this paper is located in Newham, East London, the most linguistically diverse borough in the UK with the lowest proportion of population (58.6%) speaking English as first language (2011 Census). The club runs on a weekday during school terms and it is free and open to the local children. SK is the only official instructor there with the help of a 15-year-old boy of Polish Roma background, Dv, who speaks English, Polish and Romani. There are about 20 children of mixed ability, age and language background attending the club. Six children are speakers of Polish; the rest of the group are from other ethnic backgrounds and speak various languages. The oldest, 16-year-old Dn, was a recent arrival from Russia speaking no English but Russian and basic Polish. The youngest 4-year-old participant, Baby S, is of Lithuanian origin. While he remains quiet most of the time, his carer speaks Lithuanian, Russian and Polish to him. A couple of active players and good friends, a boy I and a girl N, are both Lithuanians. E, an Albanian girl, speaks both Albanian and English. Another girl, G, and two boys, N1 and N2, speak English only. There are also children of African and Afro-Caribbean heritage. One boy, N1 (or Big N) has a Polish father and Jamaican mother and both of the parents speak to him in Polish. The children have different karate ranks, marked by the colours of their belts with yellow and orange colours (beginners to intermediate levels) being the most common. Dv, the coach’s assistant, is a black belt, the top rank.

We now present four examples from the data that we collected, showing in turn:

• the importance of physical demonstration over verbal commands,

• embodied instructions where the physical and the verbal are coordinated, and

• embodied learning and performance where formulaic Japanese is learned through embodied repertories and other available linguistic codes and becomes performance.

In line with the principles of translanguaging research which questions the socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015) and the existence of different languages as structural and cognitive entities (Li 2018), we will not identify the different languages with separate fonts. Where the meaning is not transparent to an English reader, we provide an English translation. Transcription conventions can be found in the appendix.

Showing ‘like this’ and ‘(now) watch’: physical over verbal

As our fieldnotes captured, all karate sessions that we observed are structured in a similar way. Each starts with gathering and lining up of the participants, announcement of administrative issues, opening with a dojo (training hall) protocol ritual, followed by some warm-up exercises. After these, the pupils are split into two groups led by SK and Dv separately. Each group is given learning targets by SK, practising and learning new moves or rehearsing kata (a set of fixed moves) in preparation for grading. There is a strong emphasis on copying and memorising formalised sequences of physical movements and correct postures in practice, and SK relies on demonstration to achieve this. The following fieldnotes capture several techniques of demonstration used by SK in coaching. In the first fieldnote, SK demonstrates the moves and then stops to give the pupils a chance to do them on their own. The correction and extra help he provides for an individual pupil are often intended as a way of demonstrating to the whole group as well, as seen in the second fieldnote. In this example, while guiding a pupil through the sequence of the moves, SK not only provides support for the pupil but also a model for the whole group. Peer demonstration is frequent in the training and as in the third fieldnote, SK sometimes chooses one pupil to demonstrate and asks other pupils to observe and to compare.

1. ‘Ushiro’ – he (SK) continues demonstrating the moves and the rest of the class follow. He stops after a while and watches the children working without his support. (Fieldnotes by DJP, a member of the project team, dated 08.12.15)

2. He focuses on the more advanced trainee wearing an orange belt, Albanian E, who appears to struggle with one specific move. He uses her as a model to show the sequence of the moves explicitly; he holds her arms and moves them exactly the way they should move during this particular exercise. He uses that technique as a form of demonstration for the group and individually for the student who needs support. (DJP, 01.12.15)

3. Children are sitting on the floor around SK; he chooses another student to demonstrate the correct position and asks the rest of the group to judge how well it is done. Children shout loudly, tying to stand to show that the knee of back leg is not straightened or that front arm is too low. / … / Students change; another person demonstrates and others are criticising now. (DJP, 03.11.15)

What is remarkable is the fact that the verbal is there to complement physical demonstrations. SK often cues his demonstration with phrases such as ‘like this’ or ‘(now) watch’. These phrases draws students’ attention and orient them towards demonstration. Excerpt 1 provides an example where SK teaches a new exercise to the pupils and how he embodies his demonstration through body movement, eye gaze, gestures, and verbal commands.

Excerpt 1: ‘Like this’

Table

Speaker	Listeners	Turn number	Context: SK demonstrates a new exercise to the children Participants: Karate Coach (SK), Assistant Dv(Dv), Children (Cc), Length: 00h 00m 22s Source: LonSpoVid_20151020 EH (3)
			Verbal	Body movements	Visual
SK	Cc	1	Next	SK looks at the children opposite to him
		2	Like this	SK holds out his arms, pointing to the children, who copy him and hold out arms
		3	Watch
		4	First	SK first kneels down with hands on the floor and then pushes up
		5	Ichi (Counting in Japanese, meaning one)	SK stands up
		6	Like this	SK runs towards the opponent
		7	Ichi ni san shi go roku (Counting in Japanese 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), xx, ten times	SK kicks into the opponent's open hands several times
Cc		8	Shout after each kick
		9		SK walks backward towards the spot he starts
		10	You're first	SK points at the line of children opposite to him
		11	Down	SK moves arms up and then down, asking the children to kneel down
		12	Line up, stand up	SK lifts his arms up when looking at students of his line

In the example, SK demonstrates and organises a new exercise which involves one pupil standing up from a kneeling position, running to the opponent and then kicking into the opponent’s open hands. Prior to the excerpt, SK has grouped the children into two lines: one line facing him and standing up; and the other kneeling down and in line with him. In Turns 1–3, he marks the new task and a forthcoming demonstration with the short phrases ‘next’, ‘like this’ and ‘watch’ while looking at the children opposite him and holding out his arms. After the children copy his arm movements, SK demonstrates the sequence of movements: kneeling down with hands on the floor, pushing up, standing up, running towards the opponent and kicking into the opponent’s open hands. He keeps his verbal commands and cues minimal: signalling the first sequence of the movements by saying ‘first’ in Turn 4, counting ‘one’ in Japanese in Turn 5, cueing his demonstration with ‘like this’ again in Turn 6, and counting in Japanese all the way to six while he kicks, alternating between legs before he announces ‘10 times’ in Turn 7. He then moves onto organising and preparing the children for the exercise in the rest of the episode. His verbal instructions are blended with his body movements and gaze. He points at the line of children standing opposite to him and says ‘You’re first’ in Turn 10, asks them to kneel down while moving his arms up and then down in Turn 11. Finally, he turns around to the children of his line who are sitting down and asks them to ‘line up’ and ‘stand up’ with a gesture in Turn 12.

Embodied instructions

Similar to demonstrations, SK manages and instructs his class through embodied repertories. The following example (Excerpt 2) shows how he tries to group and stage the children into two lines through coordination of embodied repertories and verbal instructions.

Excerpt 2: Staging and grouping

Table

Speaker	Listemer	Turn	Context: Participants: Source:	SK tries to line up students in two rows Karate Coach (SK), Children (Cc), Child (C). LonSpoVid_20151124_SK_EH (1); Length: 00 h 00 m 29s
			Verbal	Body movements	Visual
SK	C	1		SK walks around dojo to group students into two teams. He picks a student by student
SK	C	2	one. two	SK picks another student
SK	C	3	three. four. yes	SK puts the fourth student closer to his team
SK	C	4		SK walks towards the other students
SK	C	5	quickly. one	SK shows to the student where to stand by waving his arm and the belt held in his hand
SK	C	6	two. quickly	SK looks at the next, red belt student. SK makes a head movement inviting the red-belt student to join in
SK	C	7		SK holds the student's arm and leads the student to his new place next to the 1st student
SK	C	8	quickly	SK points the floor and looks at another student
SK	C	9	San (Counting in Japanese, three)	SK picks the third student
C	SK	10		another student runs to SK
C	C	11		the fourth student stands in his new position
C	C	12		another student raises his hand to show he wants to join in as well
SK	C	13	ok
SK	C	14	you. like this	SK holds the student’s hand and finds space for the volunteering student
SK	C	15	gdzie masz swoje miejsce. tu chodź (where do you have your space. come here)

In terms of verbal instructions, SK mainly uses ‘simple’ English phrases consisting of vocative ‘you’ (Turn 14), numbering (he assigned number to students, Turns 2, 3, 5, 6, 9), ‘quickly’ (Turns 5, 6 and 8), ‘ok’ and ‘like this’ (Turns 13–14). The words and phrases focus on ‘here and now’. Embodied repertories include touching, hand-holding, arm-handing, walking together, pointing, waving, head movement, and eye contact. To move the pupils into their spots, he puts his arms around their shoulders, hold their hands, points at the floor, look at them, and gestures at them. These embodied repertories are seamlessly integrated and blended together: assigning a number to the pupils takes place at the same time as SK walks them to the right spots; vocative ‘you’ occurs just before SK holds the chosen pupil’s hands; ‘quickly’ accompanies SK’s gesture of ‘coming here’; and ‘like this’ precedes SK’s demonstration. Orchestration also takes place at another level: in the middle of his counting, he changes the number from English to Japanese (san, meaning three) (Turn 9) and then he continues the flow of instructions through embodied repertoires: no more counting, just touching, hand-holding, eye gaze (Turns 9–13). In the last turn, he makes a comment in Polish and explains to the child about space.

Embodied learning and performance

The role of formulaic Japanese in the karate club is particularly interesting. As mentioned earlier, nobody in the club, including SK, is a fluent speaker of Japanese. Japanese is predominantly used in commands and as specialised karate or martial arts terms. Learning Japanese karate terms and commands is part of karate training. The method of learning Japanese karate terms is, according to SK in the interview (cited below), through ‘repeating it hundreds of times during a training’ so that the children do not even know when they have learnt it.

DJP:

czy tu uczysz ich w jakiś sposób … masz [jakąś swoją metodę?

SK:

[nie nie nie to w sumie wszyscy wszyscy chyba uczą się w ten sposób przez mowę swojego nauczyciela, nie, jak on używa ten język kiedy mówi jak modułuje. i nauczyciel to w sumie powtarza setki razy na treningu. to nawet później te dzieci nawet nie wiedzą kiedy już umieją …

English translation.

DJP:

do you teach them in a certain way … do you [have your method?

SK:

[no no no it actually is that all I think learn the same way through the teachers’ talk, right, how he uses the language how he speaks and how he uses. and the teacher actually repeats it hundreds of times during a training. so then those children don’t even know when they have learnt it

(Interview with SK by DJP, a member of the project team, I2SD_1 292–301)

Repeating, acting out and copying Japanese karate terms or commands many times seem to be SK’s main strategy of teaching the Japanese commands. Drilling of a karate move very often takes place in parallel to that of Japanese karate terms or commands. Excerpt 3 is part of a long transcription of a coaching session with some re-occurring sequences. SK asks the children to do a basic kata (a sequence of moves) in pairs and he repeatedly uses some Japanese karate commands in the practice. It starts with SK’s short command in Japanese (ready. begin) in Turn 1, followed by a further instruction (patrz do przodu, meaning look ahead) in Polish (Turns 1–2). The children shout ‘kiai’, a short yell used in Japanese martial arts symbolising ‘fighting spirits’ (Turn 3). The next few turns (Turns 4–14) are a mixture of Polish, English and Japanese: SK reminds the group of the technical requirement (go straight, not on the curve) in Polish (Turn 4). After an exchange of osu (meaning respect) in Turns 6 and 7, he gives an order of five push-ups in English to a child who was not trying (Turn 8), asks two girls to wait (Turn 9) and then switches back to Polish to organise the class (Turn 10) before resuming the command in Japanese (Turn 11). In Turn 14, the two girls echo SK and repeat the name of a basic kata (taikyoku shodan). SK continues with his instruction in Japanese (hajime, meaning start) (turn 15), but interestingly for the analysis here, he orders the students to stop immediately in English, because not everyone starts at the same time. He then tells the students off in Polish ‘haven’t you heard that you begin on the command, hajime’ (Turn 16). He further explains the sequence of actions by saying ‘I am not counting for you/ I’m not count’ twice (first in Polish and then in English) (Turns 16–17) and instructs the pupils in English to return to the exercise by saying ‘again’ (Turn 17). Right after resuming the Japanese command (ready + stance) (Turn 18), he interrupts the practice once more, this time, in order to move the pupils around the dojo (training hall). He asks them in Polish to ‘move {him/herself}’ (przesuń się) and then adds in English: ‘you the same’ (Turn 19), indicating that others should follow the same instruction.

Next, by saying ‘again’ in Turn 20, SK prompts the pupils to return to the exercise. He shouts the name of the kata in practice and exchanges osu with the children (showing respect). In Turn 28, SK makes some comments on a pupil’s moves in English. His English utterances are short, simple and direct. They are characterised by the predominant use of content words, second person pronoun, a small number of grammatical words, and little or no use of the copula. He also accidently pronounces the word ‘practice’ as ‘practick’. These features seem to characterise SK’s use of English in the club. The rest of the session, for which the transcript is not provided here for space reason, consists of repetitions of the kata and the key Japanese commands as highlighted above.

The example illustrates how the drilling of Japanese terms and that of a karate kata take place simultaneously. Both of them are part and parcel of targets of learning and performance; learning Japanese terms becomes embodied performance. ‘Kiai’ needs to be shouted out and performed at the end of a kata, just as the name of the kata ‘taikyoku shodan’ to be repeated back as a way of showing understanding. ‘Osu’, accompanying bowing, is exchanged frequently to fulfil its multiple functions: greeting, response to a question or instruction, showing respect, or to indicate the completion of routines at the end of a kata. The children follow the Japanese commands to get ready for ‘yoi’ and to start for ‘hajime’.

Excerpt 3: A coaching session ‘hajime’

Table

Speaker	Listener	Turn number	Context: Young students are training ‘taikyoku shodan’, a type of kata, and they are learning the command ‘hajime’, to begin their practice appropriately Interlocutors: Coach (SK), assistant (Dv), children (Cc), a child(C), individual students (C^1, C^2, C^3, Lx, Nc, Nx^1) Source: LonSpoAud_20151006_SK_EH(Audio data)
			Verbal	Additional Context / Description	English translation
SK	Cc	1	yoi. hajime	SK instructs students to begin training	ready. begin
SK	C	2	… patrz do przodu		… look ahead
C	SK	3	kiai!		{spirit yield!}
SK	C	4	technika idzie p-prosto nie po łuku		the technique it goes s-straight and not on the curve
C	SK	5	kiai!		{spirit yield!}
SK	C	6	osu!		respect
C	SK	7	osu!		respect
SK	C^1	8	/ … /five push ups quickly	SK punishes a child not trying hard enough (C^1)	/ … /five push ups quickly
SK	Cc	9	next Lx and eer Nc wait		next Lx and eer Nc wait
SK	C^2	10	. tam usiądź. z tamtej strony	SK sits the child (C^2) who finished practice	. sit over there. the other side
SK	Lx Nc	11	Osu	SK begins practice with next couple of students (Lx and Nc)	respect
Lx Nc	SK	12	Osu	students answer back	respect
SK	Lx Nc	13	taikyoku shodan!	SK commands the student to practice the most basic kata (‘first cause’)	kata ‘first cause’!
Lx Nc	SK	14	taikyoku shodan!	the couple repeats / shouts back	kata ‘first cause’!
SK	Lx Nc	15	yoi.hajime! …	SK commands students to begin	ready. begin! …
SK	Nc	16	stop. nie słyszałaś jak powiedziałem że na komendę hajime robicie. ja nie liczę wam teraz.	SK stops the students to correct their wrong practice	stop. haven’t you heard when I said that on the command begin you’re doing. I am not counting for you now.
SK	Lx Nc	17	I’m not count. again	SK warns he will not be counting to help them	I’m not count. again
SK	Lx Nc	18	yoi. mus- mosubi-	SK tries to restart the practice with students (mosubi stance: heels placed together with each foot turned out at 45 degrees)	ready. sta- stance-
SK	Cc	19	przes-przesuń się. you the same.	S stages other students across / in the room	mo-move. you the same.
SK	Lx Nc	20	again.mosubi dachi … osu.	SK restarts the practice with C^1 and C^2	again. stance. respect.
Lx Nc	SK	21	Osu		respect
SK	Lx Nc	22	taikyoku shodan!	SK commands the student to practice the most basic kata – “first cause”	kata ‘first cause’!
Lx Nc	SK	23	taikyoku shodan!		kata ‘first cause’!
SK	Lx Nc	24	yoi. hajime!		ready. begin!
C	SK	25	kiai … kiai		{spirit yield!}
Dv	Cc	26	yoi. mosubi dachi. rei. osu	Dv teaches his group in the background	ready. stance. bow. respect
Cc	Dv	27	Osu		respect
SK	Lx	28	… not point. mistake you first not kiai. you move. wrong. practick. go	SK is commenting on a student’s practice, seems not satisfied with what they did and sends one/two of them to practise more	… not point. mistake. you first not kiai. you move. wrong. practick. go

In contrast to Japanese as part of the learning goals, Polish and English, the other available linguistic codes in the repertories, are mobilised flexibly as languages of discipline, explanation, elaboration, or reinforcement of the same message. There are examples in which English or Polish translation equivalents are offered to facilitate embodied learning of Japanese. In Excerpt 4 below, SK leads a warm-up exercise and tries to get his pupils to lean forward while sitting with legs apart. While leaning forward and stretching his arms, SK gives out a Japanese command, mae, and then offers its English equivalent (forward) in his next turn.

Excerpt 4: Teaching Japanese command ‘mae’ [forwards/front]

Table

Speaker	Interlocutor	Turn	Context: SK teaches his team the Japanese term ‘mae’ Interlocutors: Karate Coach (SK), children (Cc) Source: LonSpoVid_20151124_SK_EH (1); Length: 00 h 00 m 05s
			Verbal	Body movements	Visual
SK	Cc	1		changes position - transition between exercises
Cc	SK	2		students follow SK's change of position
Cc	SK	3		students get into ‘legs apart’ sitting positions
SK	Cc	4	mae. forwards	SK keeps on bending forward with his arms stretched ahead
Cc	SK	5		students copy SK's move and bend forward

Discussion and conclusion

We hope to have shown in this article how a translanguaging space is created in the multi-ethnic and multilingual karate club in East London through meaningful orchestration of multiple semiotic repertoires including body movement, rhythm, gesture, eye contact, head movement, pointing, in addition to linguistic ones. Our data demonstrate that embodied repertories are not secondary to verbal utterances. Quite contrary, we have seen that the ‘lingual bias’ is reversed: verbal utterances are employed to cue and complement body movement and therefore become part of embodied repertories. For our Key Participant, SK, karate is a performance of body movements, techniques and Japanese karate terms, which need to be learned and perfected by repetition and copying. Transferring his vision to teaching, embodied repertories become central to interactions and pedagogy in the club. SK embodies demonstration through body, body movements, eye gaze, gestures, etc, cued with his verbal comments. He manages and instructs the class through orchestration of embodied repertories and verbal instructions. As learning and performing Japanese karate terms is equally emphasised as learning karate moves, doing Japanese becomes part of embodied performance, repeated, copied and polished along with drilling of moves, while the other available linguistic repertories, Polish and English, become languages of discipline, explanation, elaboration or reinforcement.

Our conceptualisation of the karate club as a translanguaging space, based on Li Wei’s notion (2011, 2018), helps to understand how multilingual and multimodal semiotic systems work together and embraces a broader view of communicative practices that Block (2014) called for in which language does not occupy the central place any more, in the same way as the shop keeper in the Polish shop (Zhu, Li, and Lyons 2017) and a deaf-blind customer in Mumbai (Kusters 2017), or as a second language learner in negotiating understanding of a math assignment in a classroom (Rosborough 2014). It lends further evidence to the argument that ‘the linguistic repertoire is only one of a range of multisensory and multimodal semiotic possibilities that are activated, assembled and orchestrated to make and communicate meaning and get things done’ (Zhu, Otsuji, and Pennycook 2017, 390).

Understanding teaching and learning in the karate club through translanguaging, in particular, the translanguaging space lens, also helps to overcome the monolingual bias. In the examples, we see differentiation of roles and distribution of different semiotic and modal systems and multiple languages. Such a differentiation serves the purpose of the karate club envisaged by the coach and at the same time, facilitates effective communication among karate practitioners from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Despite uneven proficiency levels of the two languages involved and his sense of insecurity with English, SK is free to alternate between Polish and English to support the learning of Japanese karate terms and his teaching. In the project report (Zhu, Li, and Jankowicz-Pytel 2017), we observe his additional use of Romani with his teaching assistant, Dv, who shares more or less the similar language backgrounds. His confidence in using features from his entire linguistic repertoire stands in contrast with his reluctance to speak in English in everyday life and the other club he coaches as observed during the project. The mobilisation of multiple languages in the club, particularly Polish and Romani, is underpinned by SK’s sense of ownership towards the club. The club is set up by a charity to support children from (marginalised) ethnic backgrounds. SK is delegated to run the club and he has the ultimate authority to decide on learning activities and duties of care towards his young students. The flexible use of multiple languages and other semiotic resources has made SK an effective coach, a coach who overcomes the apparent insecurity with English and is proud of his Polish Roma heritage and achievement in Japanese karate terms. Bringing this to the context of language teaching and learning, we are reminded that classroom is a space where not only multiple semiotic systems intersects, but also learners’ and teachers’ histories, experiences and identities come into contact with each other.

Teaching and learning is a complex process of meaning- and sense-making, as highlighted through the notion of translanguaging space. A consideration of embodied dimension of teaching and learning opens up an opportunity to revisit taken-for-granted assumptions underlying teaching and learning. A comprehensive view of communication that translanguaging advocates also challenges some fundamental frameworks in (language) teaching and learning, for example, communicative competence framework or assessments which place language use and knowledge at the central place, and ultimately challenges the goal of (language) learning.

As mentioned in the introduction of this article, (language) teaching and learning take place beyond the school and the classroom, and the present study demonstrates this. Yet, what we have observed in the karate is not fundamentally different from what is or perhaps should be happening in a more conventionally constructed school classroom. Classrooms and schools can indeed be translanguaging spaces where teachers and students engage diverse multiple meaning-making systems and subjectivities to generate new configurations of language and education practices. They can also be spaces where teachers and students challenge and transform old understandings and structures, shifting the orders of discourse brining the voices of Others to the forefront. That is the real significance of translanguaging as it brings the real world to the classroom and school.

Acknowledgements

The article is substantially revised from a working paper as Zhu Hua, Li Wei, and Jankowicz-Pytel, D. (2017). Translating Culture in Multilingual Karate Clubs in London. Working Papers in Translation and Translanguaging (WP. 20). Available at https://tlang.org.uk.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes on contributors

Zhu Hua is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication in Birkbeck College, University of London. Among her recent publications are Exploring Intercultural Communication: Language in Action (2019 Routledge, 2nd edition), Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities (2016, Routledge, with Adam Komisarof) and Research Methods in Intercultural Communication (2016, Blackwell). She is book series editor for Routledge Studies in Language and Intercultural Communication and Cambridge Key Topics in Applied Linguistics (with Claire Kramsch).

Li Wei is Chair of Applied Linguistics and Director of the UCL Centre of Applied Linguistics, UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK, and the Founding Editor of International Journal of Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. His 2015 book with Ofelia Garcia, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, won the 2016 British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize.

Daria Jankowicz-Pytel was a research fellow for an AHRC-funded project, Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG), at Birkbeck College, University of London between 2015 and 2017. She now works as a freelance translator and interpreter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK [grant number AH/L007096/1].

Appendix

Transcription conventions

() → English translation;

xx → unintelligible;

no separate fonts for different languages

[ → simultaneous utterances by different speakers