1.1 Introduction
Two ideologies of people and nations have given rise to two conceptualisations of language and its place in the personal and socio-political lives of speakers. The first sees language as an autonomous object, an independent and self-standing system of sounds, words, affixes, and sentential structures often regarded as independent from its context of use. This view is part of the conventional wisdom shared by laypeople and educators alike. And it receives encouragement from some precincts in linguistic theory, where, for example, well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky (Reference Chomsky1965, Reference Chomsky2012) have long seen the syntax of a language as a computational system that, independently of speakers and their usage, generates, in the formal sense of the term, the well-formed sentences of the language. We label this first and most familiar conceptualisation of language, and the ideology from which it derives, as monoglossic.
A second conceptualisation of language, derived from a different ideology, considers language as inseparable from, indeed as an integral part of, human action within specific social settings, inextricably intertwined with the activities of people in interactional contexts. We label this second ideology and the derived conceptualisation of language as heteroglossic. It too finds common ground with some scholars in linguistic theory. For example, William Diver (Reference Diver, Huffman and Davis1969 [2012], Reference Diver, Huffman and Davis1995 [2012]) envisions language as a complex semiotics that, while standing on its own, explicitly requires the participation of the communicatively engaged user to account for utterances that are not in themselves linguistic objects but the joint product of the linguistic system and domain-general faculties. It is in the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Reference Maturana and Varela1984) that the heteroglossic ideology finds its clearest formulation. These scholars regard humans as engaged in languaging rather than in manifesting a language; language, under their heteroglossic conception, is what humans do, not what they have.
These two different conceptualisations of language correspond to two ways in which speakers and learners have been included or excluded from programmes of language education.
The monoglossic conceptualisation is closely associated with the modern history of Western colonisation. What is taught to monolingual students as the phonological and lexico-structural forms of their independent, self-standing national language corresponds to the linguistic norms and practices of those with institutional privilege in the Western world, a privilege ultimately derived from the colonial enterprises of the major European powers. When an additional language is taught, it is presented as an additional self-standing object, whose forms too correspond to a single set of norms and practices. This monoglossic ideology informs how language has been conceptualised in the two pedagogical traditions generally known as foreign language education and bilingual education.
Since the second half of the twentieth century and the independence of former Asian and African colonies, these fields have adapted to the many different linguistic norms and practices of the new learners who have come to populate the world’s classrooms. These adaptations have resulted in the development of approaches under the rubrics of second language education and heritage language education and have resulted as well in the transformation of bilingual education. But until recently, the conceptualisation of language accompanying these adaptations has remained unchanged. The languages involved are still the independent objects with autonomous systems of sounds, words, and structures that derive from monoglossic ways of thinking and reflect single sets of norms and practices. As we will see, this persistence of the monoglossic model holds whether the language is taught as a subject or used as a medium of instruction.
The second conceptualisation of language, which we have called heteroglossic, has entered language education more recently. Piercing the traditional structures of educational programmes that are still labelled foreign, second, heritage, or bilingual, this view has been advanced in multilingual education approaches that have been transformed through the concepts of plurilingualism and translanguaging. Despite epistemological differences between these two concepts, there are points of contact (García & Otheguy, Reference García and Otheguy2019). In both, the conventional borders of language are relativised and the native-speaker standard is questioned. These heteroglossic conceptions of language bring to the forefront Maturana and Varela’s sense of languaging as what people do, responding to more inclusive ideologies about how human beings do language.
This chapter reviews the different approaches to multilingual education that are prevalent today and the ideologies about people and nations upon which they rest. We first review the ideologies surrounding different manifestations of language education. We then review each of what are usually seen as separate fields – foreign language, heritage language, second language, and bilingual education. We discuss their histories and approaches and describe how their monoglossic conception has worked against their aims of developing multilingual people. We end by discussing two newer paradigms, plurilingualism and translanguaging, focusing more directly on translanguaging approaches in multilingual education.
1.2 Language Education and Its Adaptations in the Twentieth Century
The advent of universal education in parts of Europe and the Americas during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consolidated the language practices of white monolingual speakers with power and devalued or rejected altogether the ways of languaging of minoritised people. Language in education thus became a force in the colonial processes of racialisation and subjugation, reifying the norms and practices of the powerful as the language and confining others to the realm of the incorrect or dialectal. In this context, many speakers of the dominant language recognised the benefits for themselves, but especially for their children, of learning other languages seen as belonging to other powerful groups and nations. The study of what came to be known as modern languages – English, French, and German, and later Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese – emerged and developed as the foreign language field throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But lack of satisfaction with this type of language instruction led some elite private schools to institute bilingual education programmes where two of the prestigious modern languages were used as media of instruction (García, Reference García2009).
In the wake of partial power realignments brought about by independence movements in Asia and Africa, many minoritised Indigenous and autochthonous communities throughout the world started claiming socio-political and educational rights and, of special interest here, linguistic rights. Racialised ethnolinguistic groups and other disadvantaged communities started claiming the right educate their children in a manner that would incorporate their linguistic and cultural practices. Many of these new students were now non-white and spoke languages not previously included under the modern category. Moreover, many did not start out as monolinguals, as they had grown up in societies where autochthonous practices were multilingual. Foreign language education started to adapt, moving now to include, at least at the secondary and tertiary levels, new languages that either were not European or were written in different scripts, most commonly Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian. (In some areas, some of these languages were now the students’ own home languages, leading to what in some countries is now called heritage language education.)
Under these changing circumstances, foreign language education was also now not applicable to educate the many immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who crossed national boundaries and needed to quickly learn the language of the new society. As language educators applied their understandings of foreign language education and extended it to this new population, second language education was developed. Soon, the second language adaptation started substituting the foreign language one in many countries throughout the world. There then developed the additional goal to have these newly arrived students acquire a second language of power, most frequently English, to be used not in foreign lands, but in the students’ own contexts.
As applied linguistic scholarship grew, and as more previously colonised and minoritised people were given access to education, there was renewed attention to the failure of language education to produce bilingual speakers. The focus on teaching a foreign language as a subject was increasingly abandoned in favour of using the additional language as a medium of instruction. Based on what had been learned from experience with bilingual education, new Immersion and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approaches replaced much traditional foreign language study. As a result of the social upheavals of the mid twentieth century, bilingual education was also transformed to serve the bilingual aspirations not only of language majorities but also of racialised bilinguals.
1.3 The Monoglossic Paradigm
Having sketched out the important differences between foreign, second, heritage, and bilingual education, we stress in this section the separate-object, monoglossic conceptualisation that they share, a conceptualisation that, in our view, has consistently limited the success of students who need or want to become bilingual or multilingual.
1.3.1 Foreign Language Education
Although often deemed ineffective, foreign language education is today the most prevalent approach. In most educational systems throughout the world, foreign language study takes place in secondary or tertiary institutions where it is considered one more academic subject of study. Foreign language education started originally (and in many quarters remains today) as the teaching of another named language that, like the national one, belonged to another people who were usually monolingual and white. The prevailing ideology has been that the foreign language is spoken, not here, but somewhere else, by people of the different culture and history associated with that other place. For the most part, instruction was for the privileged, not for everyone, and did not recognise as failure the fact that students often did not end up speaking these languages (Reagan & Osborn, Reference Reagan and Osborn1998).
These foreign languages so conceived were historically taught following the grammar-translation method familiar from the teaching of Latin. The focus was on grammatical rules and their application to translation from the foreign language into the students’ own. By the beginning of the twentieth century, François Gouin had started experimenting in France with what he called the direct method, which prioritised oral communication. However, because of the poor command of the language by foreign language teachers, this approach was not widely implemented, and foreign language instruction evolved from grammar translation to the reading method. By the middle of the twentieth century, the goal of developing the communicative capacity of citizens in foreign languages despite the requisite language ability of teachers led to what in the USA was called the audiolingual method and, in the UK, the situational method. Both owed their development in part to behaviourist psychological theories popular in the academy at the time. These methods provided opportunities for mimicking and memorising dialogues that were scripted, thus alleviating the burden on teachers and moving away from grammar translation and reading methods, giving priority to the spoken language (Richard & Rodgers, Reference Richards and Rodgers2014).
Reacting against the behaviourism of the audiolingual and situational approaches, the cognitive method focused on developing a rule-governed cognitive approach to grammar that could be taught deductively or inductively. As technology opened possibilities of listening to and seeing multilingual speakers at work, communication once more became the goal of language instruction. The communicative method grew out of the work of sociolinguists such as Dell Hymes (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972), who saw language in its different manifestations mainly as a system for communication. Although oral language was prioritised, attention was also given to written language, especially in the teaching of languages with different scripts (Celce-Murcia, Reference Celce-Murcia and Celce-Murcia1991).
Since, in its origins, foreign language education aimed to meet the needs of socially powerful learners, it was natural that the conceptualisation of language would be that of a named entity that corresponded faithfully to one culture, one historical context, and one nation, as well as to the monolingual and mostly white and male speakers upon whose practices it was normed. The foreign language was taught alongside the inculcation in young monolingual children of the dominance of their own linguistic and cultural practices, in a process that led to the development of subjectivities of power and superiority. On the relatively few occasions when this approach was successful, bilingualism was produced additively, as the secure identities and mother tongues of learners were complemented by the addition of an entity from another nation consisting of another language representing another culture and another history. Although it was always taught as a separate subject, there was no hesitation in helping students make meaning of the new language through their mother tongues. Whether the methodology was grammar-translation, reading, cognitive, or communicative, the students’ mother tongue was often used to explain grammar, to make meaning of written and oral texts, to think about language. In reflecting on strategies used in US classrooms when teaching a foreign language, Guadalupe Valdés (Reference Valdés2001) describes how white English-monolingual students in Spanish language classes are given access to glossaries, readings annotated in English, and explanations in English. In fact, they are allowed to ‘use their L1 [first language] to understand how the target language works and to provide them with access to meaning’ (Reference Valdés2001: 26). This is very different from the strictly monolingual/monoglossic ways in which most racialised Latinx students are taught English in the USA.
1.3.2 Heritage Language Education
As the world’s linguistic diversity became increasingly visible in schools around the world, some countries started to support the mother tongue education of many ethnolinguistic groups. This instruction usually took place after the obligatory schoolday or on weekends. In Canada, the term used for this activity was heritage language education. (This government-supported instruction served to complement the many existing programmes sponsored by families, the goals of which involved the transmission not only of language but of social, historical, and religious values.) Within the new complementary heritage language programmes, minoritised children became integrated into a context that valued them for the different understandings they held (Carreira & Kagan, Reference Carreira and Kagan2018; García et al., Reference García, Zakharia and Otcu2014; He, Reference He2010).
The positive experience of racialised bilingual children in community- and government-run complementary programmes could not be replicated with similar success when mother tongue teaching was incorporated into the normal schoolday. The teaching of Spanish in the USA is a case in point. A modern European language, Spanish had been connected to great literary texts by authors from Spain, amplified in more recent times to include writers from Latin America. It was taught in US schools as an important academic subject especially starting after the decline of interest in German during the First World War. But Spanish was also the language of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, conquered, colonised people considered racially distinct. In the terms of Valdés (Reference Valdés2018), Spanish was curricularised in foreign language classrooms for English speakers, following a norm inapplicable to the growing number of US Latinx who already spoke the language. Spanish language teachers were not prepared to understand, listen to, and engage with Latinx students, for they lacked the students’ familiarity and facility with the language. Scholars like Valdés (Reference Valdés, Valdés, Lozano and García-Moya1981) clamoured for changes to the Spanish as a foreign language curriculum to accommodate the Spanish spoken in the USA. But as the adaptation later named heritage language education grew, Valdés became disillusioned with the change, as heritage language courses increasingly aimed to eradicate what were seen as errors and interferences in the Spanish speaking of Latinx students. The focus of instruction became what was considered the international Spanish standard, eradicating the minoritised speakers’ ways of languaging.
More generally, the heritage language field, especially in the USA, continued under the sway of a deficit model, in which students are often seen as having home languages susceptible to a characterisation as incomplete and marred by errors (Montrul, Reference Montrul2008; Polinsky, Reference Polinsky2018). Rather than extending the bilingual students’ repertoire, heritage language education continued, and does to this day, many of the practices of foreign language education. It sees the teaching of language as a curricularised academic subject, not as teaching actual language practices. As a result, rather than supporting minoritised students’ bilingualism, this form of teaching often creates feelings of linguistic insecurity that result in a shift to the dominant language and away from what is considered the heritage language.
Language education approaches for students using a language other than that of their school have grown around the world. But because of their roots in foreign language education, they tend to be taught as presented in standardised, usually written, texts, and not as spoken in life, especially by bilingual learners with bicultural and transcultural identities. In recent years, many heritage language education scholars have taken a more critical position (Loza & Beaudrie, Reference Loza and Beaudrie2022). And yet, because of their focus on changing the ways of being and languaging of the learners that they purport to serve, heritage language programmes often lead, not to the firming up of these native home languages or the layering on them of additional written norms, but to their elimination.
1.3.3 Second Language Education
As the process of decolonisation developed, many racialised bilinguals from the former colonies migrated to the former metropolitan centres, often bringing their families with them. In response, school systems used the only expertise they had in teaching language – that of foreign language education, now placed in the service of teaching the national language of the host society. Foreign language teachers were often retooled as teachers of second languages, with the expectation that the language had to be taught expeditiously and according to standards set for those considered native speakers of the national language. Because the language taught was the same language as that taught to native speakers, teachers of the subject that in the USA is called language arts, and in the UK and other places simply English, often collaborated with second language teachers. The emphasis was not simply on the mechanics of the language, but on its use to read, write, speak, and listen – tasks expected of all students. In contrast to foreign language education programmes that predominate in secondary and tertiary institutions throughout the world, these second language efforts often start at the primary level (Cook, Reference Cook2008).
As suggested by the terms first and second, second language teaching is rooted in linguistic ideologies that give pride of place to speakers regarded as native. The idea is that students come to school with a first language, an L1, to which a second language, an L2, can be added. The approach provides selected lexical and structural elements of the standardised national language of the host country that reflect school usage, but often not the usage of the wider society, especially not of the part with which the learners first interact. The edited written text has become primordial in teaching, and the second language is often taught in isolation, seldom recognising that students not only come to the new school with rich linguistic experiences from lives in their countries of origin but are also quickly developing experiences of doing the language of the host country with norms and features other than the ones of the school.
Second language programmes assign the students’ home language a diminished role, aiming once again to eradicate disfavoured linguistic practices and promote a shift to the dominant national language. This is accomplished, to a considerable extent, via the concept of academic language, which once reified becomes the only target of instruction. The academic language of second language programmes achieves the erasure of the complexities of norms and practices associated with speakers, aiming to set aside all structural and pragmatic features other than those sanctioned by teachers and printed in school texts. And so, one finds that in most second language instruction, especially those for minoritised children, the teaching takes place in separate sheltered classrooms where only the dominant language is used. It is the standard academic language that is centred, making no room for the students’ home language practices, nor for that matter for those of the other language they are developing outside school.
The lessons learned in teaching racialised bilinguals a second language were then applied throughout the world to teaching the language promoted as the international language of the twenty-first century – English. The second language field is now academically huge and commercially powerful, fuelled especially by the world’s interest in learning English and promoted by entities such as the British Council. The label of English as a second language projects an important message. A language with the power of English cannot simply be considered a foreign language to be used in another land. Instead, it needs to be a second language to the speaker, opening opportunities for jobs and benefits even in their own society. In many Latin American, Asian, and African countries, English teaching always falls under the second language model and is taught by a specialised language teacher. Although officially the teaching is monolingual, many English-as-a-second-language teachers throughout the world rely on the students’ home languages, especially in Asian countries (Lin, Reference Lin1999).
As the second language field has grown, the teaching of English has been increasingly transformed into an enterprise known as Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT). In a welcome development, scholars and practitioners that support GELT centre the diversity of Englishes, as well as the use of Englishes with interlocutors from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds (Rose & Galloway, Reference Rose and Galloway2019). And because its goal is the use of English in a globalised world, the main theoretical focus of GELT is communication. Yet its applied focus is still in need of considerable improvement, as textbooks and professional development efforts continue to present English as a monolith whose prime exemplar is the native speaker.
1.3.4 Bilingual Education
Through the ages, many groups have organised bilingual schools where two languages are used as media of instruction. Among dominant ethnolinguistic groups, bilingual education gave their children an opportunity to become bilingual. For their part, minoritised groups able to organise bilingual schools offered their children an education in their home language, as well as in the society’s dominant language. In all these bilingual schools, the two languages were separately used, often by different teachers, following different curricula and texts. The mid twentieth century brought about the resurgence of bilingual education, connected with the achievement of independence in countries in Africa and Asia and the educational demands of Indigenous and autochthonous minorities everywhere. In the best of cases, the hope was that programmes billed as developmental maintenance bilingual education would develop the bilingualism or multilingualism of the children. In other cases, transitional bilingual education programmes were used to ensure that the children shifted to the language designated as dominant. These transitional bilingual education programmes became prevalent in many countries in Africa and Asia, where the students’ designated mother tongue was used as medium of instruction only until third grade, that is, until students were approximately nine years of age. In the United States, bilingual education programmes became mostly transitional in nature after 1974, with the goal being the transition to English monolingual programs as soon as the children were able to use the new language (García, Reference García2009).
A bilingual education programme known as immersion was developed in Quebec, Canada in the 1960s to ensure the French language acquisition of the children of the more powerful anglophone majority. There were early immersion programmes for students starting school; and there were late immersion programmes for secondary school students. There were also total immersion programmes in which only the language other than the students’ home language was used, and partial immersion programmes, essentially indistinguishable from developmental forms of bilingual education where only some part of the instruction takes place in the other language. Immersion programmes spread throughout the world, especially in connection with the teaching of English in early childhood education (Tedick et al., Reference Tedick, Christian and Fortune2011), but also to teach other languages like Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, and so on. Bilingual education approaches foreshadowed Content and Language Integrated Learning or CLIL (Coyle, Reference Coyle2008), with many programmes where language was taught as a subject evolving into CLIL approaches, bringing foreign/second/heritage/bilingual education programmes closer together.
Alongside these worldwide developments, in the United States bilingual education was transformed during the twenty-first century into something called dual language education (conspicuously abandoning the term bilingual). In these programmes, two groups of children are often taught in the same classroom – those learning English and those learning the other language. Most of these dual language programmes are in English and Spanish and found in primary classrooms. The two languages are strictly compartmentalised by day, time, teacher, or subject. But whereas in practice the primarily anglophone learners of Spanish often have the lesson scaffolded through English, the English language learners are seldom allowed to rely on their language practices for making meaning. Rather than centring the language practices of racialised bilingual students, the pedagogy of dual language education centres those of white monolingual English-speaking or monolingual Spanish-speaking students. The result often is the failure of Latinx students in both English and Spanish, the language considered their home language.
1.4 The Heteroglossic Paradigm
By the time the twenty-first century rolled around, globalisation had brought about the increased visibility and audibility of heterogeneous multilingual practices, and the presence of intercultural exchanges among speakers from different linguistic traditions. It also brought about a greater consciousness of the failure of the language education field to include all learners and develop their bilingualism or multilingualism. The failure is related to the lack of fit between the epistemologies of bilingualism and multilingualism as additive, an L1 + L2, and the actual dynamic multilingual practices of speakers, which go well beyond the boundaries that have been assigned to named languages or named varieties (García, Reference García2009).
In the late twentieth century, as the world’s linguistic diversity became increasingly visible to educators everywhere, efforts were made to validate language varieties that reflected the practices of racialised speakers. For example, in the United States, African American English Vernacular was described as a system as logical and systematic as any other variety of English (Labov, Reference Labov and Labov1972). Throughout the world, creoles were validated as ordinary languages (De Graff, Reference De Graff2005). But despite efforts to include these varieties in education, they were only used transitionally in early education and subjected to cross-dialectal analyses. The emphasis was on wiping out differences, rather than leveraging them for the benefit of the students. A paradigm other than that of named languages and named varieties that are added and compared, without one of them slated for elimination from the start, would have to become established to produce bilingual and multilingual education approaches that leveraged the heteroglossic practices of speakers.
The concept of heteroglossia, first introduced by Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin1981), proved very useful to disrupt the notion that languages were singular separable objects and that bilingualism was the simple addition of these objects, an L2 added to an L1. In order to name the dynamic language practices of multilingual speakers in interactions, a series of terms were introduced – polylanguaging or polylingual languaging (Jørgensen, Reference Jørgensen2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, Reference Pennycook2010), translingual practices (Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah2013), plurilingualism (Council of Europe, 2000) and translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge, Reference Creese and Blackledge2010; García, Reference García2009; García & Li, Reference García and Li2014; Li, Reference Li2011, Reference Li2018; Otheguy et al., Reference Otheguy, García and Reid2015, Reference Otheguy, García and Reid2019). All these terms have in some way advanced the notion that language is more than a separable system of stable meanings and structures. Instead, language can only be made sense of in its context because it is inseparable from human action and experience. Of all these terms, plurilingualism and translanguaging have had the greatest effect in transforming the logic of, and the approaches towards, existing programmes of multilingual education.
1.4.1 Plurilingualism
The Council of Europe (2000) coined the term plurilingualism to signal the increasing importance of multilingualism and language learning to further economic development and ensure that language did not restrict human rights (Hélot & Cavalli, Reference Hélot, Cavalli, García, Lin and May2017). In advancing plurilingualism as a term, the Council supported a different concept of multilingualism – the ability to use several languages to varying degrees to engage in intercultural action. A plurilingual ability refers to the repertoire of languages a speaker can use, and the awareness of the required linguistic tolerance towards ways of using language by others. Plurilingualism in education is tied to the concept of intercultural education and the development of intercultural competence. To advance plurilingualism, CLIL was espoused as a way to move away from teaching language as a subject, and towards using language as medium of instruction for content areas. Traditional core programmes of foreign language instruction now often follow principles of CLIL, coming closer to the practices of bilingual education.
Importantly, education under plurilingualism also involves educating ‘for linguistic tolerance’, to raise ‘awareness of linguistic diversity’ and to participate in ‘democratic citizenship’ (Council of Europe, 2003: 16). An example is the development of multilingual awareness projects, such as the Evlang project (Candelier, Reference Candelier2003). The concept of plurilingualism acknowledges the importance of the students’ first language in developing proficiency in L2 or L3. Four pedagogical practices are often observed: (1) the use of students’ first language in instruction, (2) the inclusion of multilingual awareness projects, (3) a more flexible local language norm as target of instruction, and (4) the use of CLIL, even in what are considered foreign language classrooms.
The CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020) has extended the framework of plurilingualism in new directions. The four skills are no longer just listening, speaking, reading, and writing but are now posited as four communicative activities that reflect real-life language use: reception, production, interaction, and mediation. There is more focus on the agency of language users in meaning-making, and on the awareness and dispositions that interlocutors bring into interactions. The volume defines plurilingualism as ‘an uneven and changing competence, in which the user/learner’s resources in one language or variety may be very different in nature from their resources in another’ (p. 30). Further, the volume develops a set of scales and descriptors for building a pluricultural repertoire and a plurilingual comprehension, thus repositioning translingual practice as a form of competence rather than an indicator of deficit (Savski & Prabjandee, Reference Savski, Prabjandee, Chau, Lie, Jacobs and Renandya2022).
And yet, despite the advent of plurilingualism in language education, the goals of language education in Europe remain different for white citizens than for brown or black refugees. The expectation for brown and black refugee youth in schools is not that they speak and use the national language ‘to varying degrees’, but to what is considered a ‘native’ degree. Similarly, refugee youth in European schools first must demonstrate full proficiency in the dominant language of the country in order to have access to universities. Another limitation of plurilingualism in Europe is that it is tied to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2000). Thus, assessment still puts language learners into ‘buckets’ representing different proficiencies. Although the concept of plurilingualism is an important tool to move multilingualism forward, assessment of the different language proficiencies is separately determined. There is no interest in assessing the learners’ plurilingual proficiency. The learners’ plurilingual proficiency becomes a series of different monolingual performances.
Plurilingualism in language education has represented a big step forward. It has pushed against the concept of balanced bilingual competence, centring learning on the speaker’s existing repertoire and leveraging it. But to put it in terms we have used before (García & Otheguy, Reference García and Otheguy2019: 8), plurilingualism differs both epistemologically and in terms of societal goals from the other concept circulating in language education today, which is that of translanguaging, to which we now turn.
1.4.2 Translanguaging
Translanguaging disrupts the colonial logic that has been instituted in language, a logic which presents named languages and their norms as the only way to do language, when in fact what these names and norms do is reflect the practices of the dominant group (Mignolo, Reference Mignolo2007). Reconstituting language education by overcoming the colonial logic with a logic derived from the experiences and practices of the speakers is a central goal of translanguaging (García et al., Reference García, Flores, Seltzer, Li, Otheguy and Rosa2021).
Whereas plurilingualism focuses on developing student’s intercultural competence by fostering their ability to use several languages to communicate across cultural or national contexts, translanguaging focuses on the emergent bilingual’s unitary repertoire. The bilingual engages in languaging with a single repertoire, that is, with the single network of linguistic/semiotic/multimodal features that they have assembled to make meaning. The translanguaging idea of the use of a unitary repertoire goes beyond the uneven use of what are deemed several languages across cultures espoused by plurilingualism. Instead, translanguaging refers to the bilingual speaker’s use of language in ways that are their own, transcending the boundaries that have been established for named languages. As Otheguy, García, and Reid (Reference Otheguy, García and Reid2015) have put it: ‘Translanguaging is 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’ (p. 281). If plurilingualism is about intercultural competence, translanguaging is about the speaker’s intraculturality. This has to do with the agency of learners who draw on their local individual community’s languaging to make meaning for themselves. And this is in contrast to conforming to linguistic norms established externally and based usually on the norms and practices of socially dominant groups, most often white males. Whereas plurilingualism is concerned with enhancing communication across languages and groups, translanguaging aims to reflect the bilingual speaker’s single representation of linguistic resources and enactment of ingroup norms and practices. It is hoped that the translanguaging approach contributes, not only to a more accurate theoretical understanding of bilingual speakers, but also to greater social justice for people whose language practices have been marginalised. (For a dissenting view supporting the conventional view of bilingual competence in formalist terms, see MacSwan, Reference MacSwan and MacSwan2022.)
Bilinguals learn to select or suppress features of their unitary repertoire depending on their interlocutors, developing a social awareness of the language practices of the people with whom they interact (Otheguy, Reference Otheguy2022). When interacting with monolinguals, they select only those lexical and structural units that make communication possible, suppressing the rest. But when interacting within bilingual families or communities, bilinguals are free to use all their resources, not suppressing any feature of their repertoire. Translanguaging also advances intercultural communication but does so without assuming the cognitive reality of separate named languages, relying instead on multimodal repertoires of features and practices that cannot be equated with those of monolinguals.
1.5 Translanguaging Pedagogical Practices
Translanguaging pedagogical practices consist in general terms of helping emergent bilinguals in the assemblage of their repertoire and the sharpening of their awareness of when it is socially appropriate to suppress or deploy particular features (Pennycook, Reference Pennycook2010). The repertoire is multimodal (consisting of the linguistic, the visual, the gestural, etc.), and these resources are always available to the learner. Translanguaging pedagogical practices are intended to open instructional spaces where teachers leverage this multimodal unitary repertoire to learn and make meaning (Li, Reference Li2011). More specifically, these practices consist of the set of stances and approaches described in CUNY-NYSIEB, 2021; García et al., Reference García, Johnson and Seltzer2017, as well as on the CUNY-NYSIEB website, www.cuny-nysieb.org.
Translanguaging pedagogical practices do not aim to add a language as if it were a separate box filled with new lexico-structural features. Instead, educators conceive of the learners’ multimodal semiotics, which include but are not limited to linguistic features, as pearls on a string that grows longer and more complex as learning advances. Teachers help to extend the strand of pearls, so that learners can use them to communicate successfully, and to present themselves as better prepared and more adorned as they interact with others. The linguistic/semiotic resources that students bring to the learning situation are always leveraged, and no request to leave some of the disfavoured ones at the classroom door is countenanced.
Translanguaging pedagogical practices encompass both instruction and assessment. Assessment is on the basis of the entire repertoire – what students can do with all their linguistic resources. Instructors whose teaching is based on developing the students’ translanguaging unitary repertoire use formative assessments that do not separate proficiencies by individual named language. Instead, assessment attempts to capture how well learners communicate using their unitary repertoire. Assessment that builds on translanguaging theory does not simply evaluate whether a student can use a particular language with specific features, but whether they can use language to communicate messages, to find key evidence in a text, to synthesise information, to compose an argumentative text, to solve a mathematical problem, etc. That is, assessment under a translanguaging approach measures general language proficiency and content understandings, without regard to the specific features considered to be of one language or another (Ascenzi-Moreno & Seltzer, Reference Ascenzi-Moreno and Seltzer2021).
Translanguaging pedagogical practices can be used in all levels of instruction. They are not strategies. Instead, they are strategic ways of opening space for students’ translanguaging (Li, Reference Li2011) in any language classroom. Four purposes for opening up translanguaging space have been identified: (1) as scaffold, (2) as documentation/assessment, (3) as deepening of understandings, (4) as transformation (Sánchez et al., Reference Sánchez, García and Solorza2017).
The most frequent opening of translanguaging instructional spaces occurs to scaffold instruction. Teachers scaffold meaning making for students who need assistance working through a particular named language. Sánchez, García, and Solorza (Reference García, Johnson and Seltzer2017) refer to this use as translanguaging rings. These rings are like lifesavers for different tasks that are put on individual students to engage them and expand their Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1978). Educators must also know when to take off the lifesaver rings. For example, in an intermediate level German as a foreign language classroom in Poland, some students might need translanguaging scaffolds to read a complex text in German. Some might need a glossary, others access to a tablet; yet others might need to work with a peer through Polish, or with the teacher. In collaborative groups, they could be encouraged to use all their resources to make meaning of the text. Some might use gestures and role play, whereas others will draw or find images on a tablet. Another example of the use of translanguaging rings occurs in an English as a second language class in New York, where a student named Julia has just arrived from Honduras. She cannot understand the story that the teacher is reading out loud. The teacher pairs her with another student who speaks Spanish, who then opens up the meaning of the text for her. The teacher encourages Julia to annotate the text with her own words or pictures, so that she can go back to the text and move through it more slowly and deliberately.
Scaffolding is also the reason why the teacher in a heritage language education programme in Canada leverages Mei Ping’s English to develop Chinese language features. For example, the teacher allows Mei Ping, who is ten years of age, to write a narrative about the midsummer autumn festival in ‘Chinese’, by using English and incorporating all the lexical items that Mei Ping has learned to write in Chinese (for more on translanguaging approaches to teach writing, see Espinosa & Ascenzi-Moreno, Reference Espinosa and Ascenzi-Moreno2021; Fu et al., Reference Fu, Hadjioannou and Zhou2019). Scaffolding is also the reason for opening up a translanguaging space in a heritage language class for adults concerned with the revitalisation of Sãmi in Norway and of Māori in New Zealand.
Another space for translanguaging is for documentation and assessment of what the learner knows and can do. For example, in many countries, instruction is supposed to take place in the national or official language. But if teachers really want to know what learners know, they must allow students to engage with their content knowledge using whatever linguistic resources they have. A student, Azim, arrives in Sweden from Syria. If the teacher wanted to really understand what Azim knows, he must be allowed to use all his linguistic/semiotic resources. Azim is said to speak not only Arabic, but also Kurdish and French. The only way to really document what Azim knows and the progress he is making it to encourage his translanguaging. The question is: is the teacher interested in knowing whether Azim can compose, for example, a narrative? Or is the teacher just interested in knowing whether Azim can compose a narrative in Swedish? These are two different questions and require different kinds of answers and types of pedagogical practices.
Opening up of a translanguaging space can serve another purpose – to deepen understandings. In a fourth-grade dual language bilingual English/Spanish class in the USA, ten-year-old students read My Name Is María Isabel (the teacher calls her María). Some of the students have been in the bilingual programme since kindergarten, others have just arrived in the USA and only speak Spanish. Still others have just moved to the neighbourhood and only speak English. There is an English version and a Spanish version of the chapter book, and so the teacher reads out loud the English text on the English day and the Spanish one on the Spanish day. After she reads the text, she groups the students in linguistically heterogeneous groups for a discussion of why naming makes a difference. The students are encouraged to use all their linguistic repertoire in the discussion of the reading.
A fourth strategic use of opening translanguaging space is for transformation of subjectivities of inferiority and foreignness. Because of the flexibility and adaptability that translanguaging brings to language, students are not constrained by one linguistic norm. For example, a teacher in South Africa presents many multilingual ways of speaking in South Africa, following what Makalela (Reference Makalela, García, Lin and May2017) has called ubuntu translanguaging. This normalises different ways of languaging, so that those who have been heard as deficient can transform their subjectivities of inferiority. In addition, this practice has the potential to transforms all the listeners, constructing a society where everyone listens to each other free of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, Reference Flores and Rosa2015).
García, Johnson, and Seltzer (Reference García, Johnson and Seltzer2017) find it useful to think of translanguaging pedagogical practices in terms of three components – stance, design, and shifts. Educators must first develop a translanguaging stance, that is, they must start thinking differently about learners, language, bi/multilingualism, and teaching for multilingualism. We have often called it the juntos [together] stance, pointing to the idea that learners and their bilingual development must be considered in their wholeness, and not as separate categories. In language education, learners are often slotted into categories such as basic, intermediate, or advanced; or as language learners or native speakers. However, a translanguaging stance asks teachers to view emergent bilinguals as being positioned along all points of a bi/multilingual continuum, depending on the specific task that they are being asked to perform. In other words, we are all emergent bilinguals, as we draw from our unitary repertoire to develop our languaging and our learning. To view learners and speakers this way, educators also must deeply believe that language is not simply a separate entity but is the ability of all human beings to assemble all their multimodal resources (including the linguistic) to make sense of their own lives. Language teaching is not simply adding a separate language, but extending the learners’ existing repertoire with new features and practices and making them aware of their use.
A translanguaging design makes sure that all meaning-making resources are available in instruction, and that translanguaging is used strategically to open spaces and to scaffold, document what students know, deepen understandings, and transform student subjectivities.
Finally, it is important for teachers to be able to engage in translanguaging shifts that respond to the students’ translanguaging corriente [current]. This means that teachers must always be conscious of where the students’ interests lie – what is their purpose in becoming bilingual? In what sociocultural context are they becoming bilingual? How are the students positioned racially, socially, economically? Who are the teachers and what understandings do they hold? Who are the members of the community, and what desires do they have regarding their children’s bilingual development? These are all questions that teachers must ask and attempt to respond to, so that their instruction shifts with the translanguaging corriente that is flowing within and also alongside individuals in the classroom and in the larger society.
1.6 Conclusion
Inspired by a heteroglossic conception of language that sets aside the methods and strategies of the monoglossic understandings, educators can coherently open translanguaging spaces in education for multilingualism. This opening can transform the ways students and teachers engage with what is regarded as the target language of instruction. The goal may still be the acquisition of a target language, but instead of believing that learners must leave behind what is seen as their native language, they leverage all their understandings – linguistic, cultural, historical – with the goal of developing and using a unitary translanguaging repertoire. Learners can only extend themselves in ways that incorporate new features if they bring their entire beings into the act of languaging. It is only then that new features and practices will be experienced as their own, able to be leveraged in plurilingual/intercultural encounters. The degree to which language educators will be successful in the future will depend on our ability to listen to each other with intent, and to validate the heteroglossic practices that make language a true instrument of all humanity.
