Relanguaging translingual writing in a Khayelitshan primary school

ABSTRACT

Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity – prominently captured in the notion of ‘translanguaging’– are starting to be seen as normative and natural. In turn, homogeneity and fixity, instantiated for example in standard languages, are becoming the ‘odd-ones-out.’ I challenge the dichotomy between linguistic fluidity (languaging) and fixity (named languages), in a situated conceptual account of translingual writing practices in English classrooms in a Khayelitshan primary school. These spaces fold the linguistic fluidity typical of South African townships, and the fixity of two standard languages, into one complex spatial repertoire. Operationalizing this spatial perspective, I suggest that students are constantly engaged in relanguaging, recursively sorting out the classroom repertoire according to the various linguistic norms enfolded in the space, and of bringing together linguistic resources in various combinations. Relanguaging systematically unsettles the dichotomy between fluid languaging and fix institutional language norms retained in dominant conceptualizations of translanguaging. This way it opens up new conceptual and analytical perspectives with possible pedagogical implication for writing instruction and testing. Standard English could, for example, be assessed beyond its own confines, using writing tasks that can make visible increasingly sophisticated linguistic sorting skills as students.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• relanguaging
• writing
• education
• English teaching
• spatial repertoire

Acknowledgments

I thank Rose Marie Beck for her thoughtful and incredibly precise comments on the latest version of this paper. She really helped to bring out the most important aspects much more clearly. I also thank Tessa Dowling for her patient guidance throughout the research period and her brilliant input in the analyses. Mastin Prinsloo and Irene Brunotti engaged closely with the first draft of this piece and greatly guided me in finetuning it. And lastly the three anonymous reviewers have really pushed me to streamline the argument and have that way strengthened the paper a lot. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Parts of this paper have been published as part of my PhD dissertation (Krause 2019) and in Krause (2021)

2. This research has been cleared by the Humanities Faculty Ethics in Research Committee of the University of Cape Town (Reference Number: HUMREC201510-01). All participants have provided informed consent. The research aims and methods were introduced at a teachers’ meeting at the school and each teacher signed a consent form before any observation or interviews took place.

3. The name of the school was changed.

4. Schools in quintile 1 are the poorest in the country and those in quintile 5 the best resourced ones.

5. With the prefix nomo-, (from ‘nominalis’, as ‘pertaining to a name or names’) I seek to draw attention to the administrative sorting and naming processes that bring forth and stabilize what we are used to perceiving as naturally bounded entities: languages (Scott, 1998). Nomolanguages do exist as ideologically and discursively constructed but also as materially constituted for example in school books, curricula, tests. The prefix nomo- is therefore not meant to deny the existence and influence of languages but merely to defamiliarize the term and thereby remind us of the processes involved in the production of languages (see also Krause 2021; Krause-Alzaidi 2022).

6. I adopt the idea of ‘foldedness’ from Actor Network Theory, see for example (Latour 2005).

7. For example Garcia and Wei quote the research by Bialystok, Craik, Klein and Viswanathan (2004) which, in their words, “suggests that it is the constant use of the bilinguals’ brain Executive Control System in having to sort through the language features that gives bilinguals a cognitive advantage” (Bialystok, Craik, Klein and Viswanathan 2004, quoted in Garcia and Wei 2014, p.15).

8. More detailed and partly differently focused versions of these analyses have been published in Krause 2021, the monograph which emerged from the PhD thesis Krause 2019.

9. On the pages I handed out the picture story was preceded by some traditional English grammar tasks on separate sheets that the students filled in first. At the time I was interested in determining their English levels. For the conceptual project in this paper these parts are not insightful. I separately introduced the task related to the picture story as I describe in the text.

10. At this point I was still using the prefix ‘isi-‘ to refer to Xhosa but I decided to drop the prefix further along in my research as in English the noun class prefix structure does not make sense.

11. According to Standard Xhosa orthography, 'yesi thathu' would have to be written in one word: 'yesithathu'.

12. My supervisor Tessa Dowling was also present in the stimulated recall interviews.

13. The ‘u-’ in ‘u-he-and-she’ is the class 1a noun class prefix used as a device to talk about ‘he and she’ as one linguistic chunk (see Krause 2021).

14. SWX orthography prescribes ‘iingalo’ (arms).

15 ‘uvuka’ consists here of the subject marker ‘u-’ for class 1/class 1a plus the verb –vuka (wake up). Englished: he wakes up.

16. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ukuswima%22&nfpr=1&sxsrf=ALiCzsZHzQJGTTn3FRV6roJzsM1NWR_NRw:1658223489593&filter=0&biw=1920&bih=1019&dpr=1 (last accessed 19.07.2022). Note that 2 or 3 instances come from my writing on ‘ukuswima’ that has been published in Krause 2021.

17. There are some exceptions if morpheme boundaries are involved. For example ‘ndiyammamela’ would feature two ‘m’, but the first one is an Object Marker for class 1/1a and the second one is the initial letter of the verb ‘-mamela’ (listen): ndi-ya-m-mamel-a (I listen to her/him).