Translanguaging: a pedagogy of heteroglossic hope

ABSTRACT

Translanguaging research has documented language practices within the multilingual, multimodal turn and the post-multilingualism era. Space still remains for inquiry into translanguaging practices that respect and align with students’ multilingual affordances across languages. How might these practices counteract monoglossic pressures in classrooms and their appearance in/through teacher-student dynamics? Growing attention given to bi/multilingual students includes a call to develop meaningful, heterogeneous contexts of learning that sustain their cultural and linguistic repertoires. As a pedagogy of hope, translanguaging counteracts monoglossic bias by (a) enhancing students’ cognition and language learning, (b) creating entry points for all into learning communities, and (c) enacting more just, equitable, and humanizing instructional practices in multilingual classrooms. This special issue features five carefully curated articles that together showcase how translanguaging offers hope for shifting monoglossic perspectives and practices across teachers and students, ages and contexts, and through multimodal means. Several new and meaningful contributions emerge from these articles to inform the current translanguaging knowledge base. These include insight into translanguaging practice within minoritized languaging spaces, the uncertainties and tensions of translanguaging pedagogy, translanguaging as a vehicle for teacher self-reflection and criticality, multimodality as an entry point into translanguaging, and longitudinal examinations of translanguaging practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• pedagogy
• heteroglossic
• bilingual
• monolingual
• bilingual education
• advantages of bilingualism
• multilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabrina F. Sembiante

Dr. Sabrina F. Sembiante is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Florida Atlantic University and received her doctoral degree from the University of Miami in Teaching and Learning with a specialization in Language and Literacy Learning in Multilingual Settings. Her research explores pedagogical supports for emergent-to-advanced bilingual students' developing bilingualism, biliteracy, and academic languaging in school contexts.

Zhongfeng Tian

Dr. Zhongfeng Tian is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers University–Newark. He holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Boston College and a M.Ed. in TESOL from Boston University. His research examines different ways that teachers can make their classrooms more heterogeneous, humane, and inclusive for multilingual learners in ESL and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) contexts, and how to prepare culturally and linguistically competent teachers with social justice praxis.