Translanguaging in Language Teaching and Learning: Current Practices and Future Directions

Introduction

The field of applied linguistics and teaching English to speakers of other languages has experienced various reforms in relation to the ontology and epistemology of English language education. From the early debate challenging the dichotomy of native and non-native speakers of English (Liu, 1999) and the development of World Englishes (Kachru, 1992), to the more recent acceleration of Global Englishes language teaching (Rose and Galloway, 2019) and multimodal and translanguaging as a theory, method, or approach of language education (García and Li, 2014; Li, 2022; Li and García, 2022), it seems that English language education has witnessed more than a ‘multilingual turn’ (May, 2014); it is going through a critical ‘trans-era’ that recognizes both linguistic and cultural diversity, and views social, cultural, and multimodal resources as valuable assets in learning for inclusive education (Dovchin and Lee, 2019). The question still remains regarding whether such native-oriented, fixed, elusive, impossible but patronizing learning goals should respond to the new sociocultural and psychological considerations and diversity of the landscape of English language education.

Given the complexity of how languages are used in various settings, it is essential that English be viewed as a global language, with multifaceted linguistic, cultural and multimodal practices. The very essentialist view of English language learning and teaching, which embodies the native-speakerism ideology, regards native-speaker ‘standard’ English as the ultimate goal and learners’ first languages (L1s) and multilingual and multimodal practices as linguistic deficits (c.f. Fang and Liu, 2020; Holliday, 2006; Lippi-Green, 2012). As the English language has spread across the world as a global language, non-native speakers of English have come to outnumber its native speakers, which leads scholars, educators and policy-makers to rethink English language education, especially to re-consider the ways English is taught and assessed and placed within the entire curriculum in schools. The sociolinguistic nature of English has recognized the linguistic diversity of communication through the use of English as a global language. It is natural that people incorporate their various linguistic, multimodal, multisemiotic resources in communication where ‘native-speaker norms’ are no longer viewed as the panacea; in fact, they can even be challenged through the ‘playfulness’ of language use (Li, 2018). At the sociolinguistic level and from the perspective of English for international communication, English should thus not be viewed as the property of native speakers (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011), as the focus of education has consequently been moving from the traditional, monolingual perspective towards multi/translingualism (Cenoz and Gorter, 2019; May, 2014). Ironically, in some parts of the world, the majority of English as a foreign language (EFL) students and teachers still prefer native-speaker models, despite them not being able to really speak like native speakers of, for example, British or North American English in terms of the pronunciation and intonation that they attempt to master (see e.g., Zhang, 2004). This is a time for all of us to be reminded of the possibility that the ‘trans-era’ urges traditional second language acquisition to move beyond the restricted ‘native norms’ in English learning but instead focus on the realistic language use for dynamic needs and goals of language learners, and for communication in situ where people adopt various multimodal and semiotic resources.

From the perspective of multilingualism or Global Englishes language teaching (Rose and Galloway, 2019), translanguaging in relation to practice and pedagogy has gained attention because it recognizes both teachers’ and learners’ linguistic resources and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991; García and Li, 2014). The adoption of translanguaging inside and outside education settings has been explored, as by Cenoz (2017), in pedagogical translanguaging and spontaneous translanguaging. While translanguaging as a theory and a pedagogical and linguistic tool has drawn attention (Cenoz and Gorter, 2019; Fang and Liu, 2020; Li, 2018), the effectiveness of implementing such a tool in language learning and language use requires more exploration (Liu et al., 2020; Wang and Curdt-Christiansen, 2019). This issue has prompted both established and emergent scholars on translanguaging or translingual/multilingual education to explore both language use in classrooms and social settings, to view the effectiveness of the translanguaging strategy in language/content learning and further to promote a decolonizing pedagogy by recognizing learners’ linguistic repertoire as a whole, as well as to adopt a translanguaging perspective to promote inclusiveness of language use and equity. This special issue of RELC Journal intends to address several issues:

Translanguaging to Facilitate Learning

Translanguaging has been applied in classroom settings to empower learning, regardless of pedagogical translanguaging where teachers carefully plan the language used for teaching, or spontaneous translanguaging, where stakeholders are able to maximize their linguistic repertoire for language and content learning. The various translanguaging strategies are adopted to challenge the monolingual ideology. From the theoretical perspective, for instance, in this special issue, Cenoz and Gorter (2022) described pedagogical translanguaging and its application for language classes. With the focus on activating students’ multilingual and multimodal repertoires, pedagogical translanguaging plays a key role in facilitating learning. In particular, both strong and weak forms of pedagogical translanguaging were introduced for different purposes of teaching. There is also a misconception that translanguaging simply refers to the inclusion of learners’ L1s in learning, and that translanguaging is adopted mainly for language acquisition. This misconception has been challenged by Sohn et al. (2022), where they argued for the need and incorporation of translanguaging pedagogy with more critical content and language integrated learning (CLIL). With the recognition of translanguaging in CLIL, some traditional notions, such as ‘English-only’, ‘target-language-only pedagogies’ and ‘native-(English-) speakerism’ are challenged for more inclusive CLIL programmes. In a thematic review, Liu and Fang (2022) traced the development of translanguaging from the perspective of multilingualism, with a specific focus on stakeholders’ attitudes towards the implementation of translanguaging in foreign language classroom settings. It is found that stakeholders generally hold positive attitudes towards translanguaging practices in various English language teaching (ELT) contexts. This review hence calls attention to the importance of re-examining the significance of translanguaging in ELT practices and concludes with relevant pedagogical implications.

Again, the challenge to monolingual ideology is not new in the field of applied linguistics or ELT, but many proposals seem to be offered to pay lip service. To highlight the benefits of translanguaging in learning, some empirical findings regarding how translanguaging can be adopted to facilitate learning are shown in studies in this special issue. First, Sun and Zhang (2022) explored the effects of translanguaging in online peer feedback for enhancing English writing performance. Their findings showed that the adoption of translanguaging for online peer feedback was more effective, compared with English-only online peer feedback, at least in the first round of the experiment, while this was not shown in the second or third round. Interestingly, other factors, such as motivation, agency, self-efficacy and translanguaging awareness were also discussed to further understand the effectiveness of translanguaging in order to facilitate learning. Another study by Jiang et al. (2022) investigated Chinese university students’ perceptions of translanguaging in order to understand some predictive effects of factors contributing to translanguaging practices in language teaching and learning. Their one-way analysis of variance of the data revealed that non-English major freshmen were more accepting of their teachers’ and peers’ use of translanguaging compared to their English major counterparts. Their results of multiple regression analysis further showed that the amount of teacher translanguaging and student attitudes to translanguaging explained a significant quantity of the variance in the amount of student translanguaging.

It seems that the effectiveness of translanguaging has been discussed and proven in the contexts of the studies in this special issue. However, we also need to understand that the process and results in terms of how translanguaging could facilitate learning is complicated. Cenoz and Gorter (2022) also mentioned some challenges of pedagogical translanguaging in practice because language teachers may perceive them differently. Apart from various attitudes from the teachers, the struggle of applying translanguaging in language teaching and learning is also related to various policy initiatives, and the implementation of translanguaging should be understood with due consideration of institutional policies and national or state policies regarding the medium of instruction, such as English as a medium of instruction (EMI), to further unravel the complexity of translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy in relation to its effectiveness in application (Fang and Liu, 2020; Paulsrud et al., 2021; Sah and Kubota, 2022).

Translanguaging for Inclusive Education and as a Decolonizing Pedagogy

Apart from facilitating language or CLIL, another recurrent theme of the adoption of translanguaging is to empower the unfairly treated individuals for a more equitable and inclusive education, and further promote a decolonizing pedagogy. First, the implementation of translanguaging for inclusive education needs the professional development of the key stakeholders: teachers, to raise their awareness of the benefits of translanguaging and their role in creating dialogues with other stakeholders; and students and parents, for example, as active agents to challenge native speakerism during the education process. Cinaglia and De Costa (2022) emphasized the need for cultivating critical translingual awareness among teachers, whose main role is that of teacher educators. They draw on three elements of Seltzer’s critical translingual approach – personal stance, political stance, and pedagogical stance – for teacher educators to help teachers readdress the complexity of language from their own personal teaching experiences, the broader power and ideology connecting to systems of power, and thus return to classrooms ‘to recognize and leverage students’ entire repertoires of communicative resources’ (Cinaglia and De Costa 2022: 456).

‘Not a first language but one repertoire’, Li and García (2022) in this issue respond to the misunderstanding that translanguaging is simply viewed as the recognition of students’ L1s. They challenged the ‘name languages’ in understanding the concept of translanguaging and shared two stories of bilingual students in London and New York, to further elaborate how the translanguaging lens would challenge the raciolinguistic ideologies and recognize students’ full repertoire to facilitate learning as a decolonizing project. Readers will find it thought-provoking that the two teachers represented in Li and García (2022) viewed some new understandings and started to incorporate students’ multilingual resources and regarded them as legitimate learners. Li and García summarized at the end of their paper that it is important for teachers to recognize the difference between process and product if they want to incorporate translanguaging into their teaching as ‘a top priority in decolonizing education in the 21st century’ (Li and García, 2022: 322). Another piece of empirical evidence can be found in Tian et al.’s (2022) collaborative efforts. As a team of teacher educators, researchers and students, they worked together to promote educational equity during the teaching and researching cycles. Despite hardships, the authors shared some lessons they learned from this journey, and provided valuable stories and resources for teachers, researchers and students who want to know more about translanguaging.

Teacher agency through translanguaging was also reported in Phyak et al.’s (2022) ethnographic study in Nepal. Different from Li and García’s (2022) cases where teachers did not raise the awareness of translanguaging in education, Phyak et al.’s data showed how teachers resisted the official English-only monolingual ideology and incorporated students’ L1s in classroom activities to facilitate teaching and learning. We learned that the role teacher transformative agency played in empowering students to invest their language abilities in learning. The story shown in this paper well responded to Cinaglia and De Costa’s (2022) argument as regards the need for cultivating critical translingual awareness among teachers. Clearly, teacher agency plays a key role because the teachers in Phyak et al.’s (2022) study were self-empowered before empowering their students through the adoption of translanguaging strategies to facilitate teaching and learning.

Another issue regarding translanguaging and assessment is that translanguaging is often regarded as challenging and as a result becomes an insufficiently researched area of the topic. Steele et al. (2022) presented a picture of Australian aboriginal students, who were able to adopt their various linguistic resources, dialects and repertoires for various purposes in their daily lives, may be disadvantaged regarding their language use, particularly in terms of assessment. The authors concluded with the need to embrace students with aboriginal backgrounds in assessment practices. While the experiences of Australian aboriginal students only present a case in point, the idea of translanguaging may allow other unfairly treated individuals or groups to be treated more fairly.

Zhang’s (2022) interview with Suresh Canagarajah adds clarity on the various issues relating to translingual practices and translanguaging in domains beyond daily life. This is particularly the case with regard to writing in English as an additional language in academic contexts. Readers will find in Canagarajah’s personal experiences and histories what translingual practices can do and in what ways they impact English learners’ and users’ personal and professional lives, especially in working towards social justice and equity.

We are grateful that this special issue also features a technology review by Zheng and Peng (2022) , who introduced the ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) software to analyse multimodal aspects of translanguaging. The special issue also features three book reviews with books dealing with ‘translanguaging in EFL contexts’, ‘translanguaging in multilingual English classrooms’ and ‘translanguaging and EMI’.

Conclusion

Contributions to this special issue addressed various issues regarding translanguaging and language education from educational and social aspects. The topic of translanguaging itself is not ideologically free – we hope that readers will view all the contributions of this issue from a critical perspective to unpack the concept of translanguaging as a practical theory of language (Li, 2018), or even translanguaging as method (Li, 2022), to understand the benefits/effectiveness/challenges of translanguaging for educational contexts (Bonacina-Pugh et al., 2021; Fang and Liu, 2020; Ho and Tai, 2021), as well as to promote social justice through the use of language (García and Leiva, 2013; Li, 2022). Readers may also ponder: Is the use of translanguaging most effective in learning, or is the adoption of translanguaging a must in education or daily language use? To make it more specific, we also want to make it clear that translanguaging could not and should not be imposed as a language policy or set of social practices. It is a natural phenomenon of language performance. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of translanguaging in this issue and beyond; still, the social, psychological and emotional level of how translanguaging would facilitate learning needs to be further tackled. Translanguaging should also be understood as more than a pedagogical, methodological, or theoretical perspective but a political and decolonizing stance (Giroux, 2022; Li, 2022). This special issue has addressed the importance of translanguaging to facilitate learning, as well as a key concept to promote inclusive education and a decolonizing pedagogy, particularly for those unfairly treated individuals, to promote social justice and linguistic equality. Of course, we acknowledge that it is a huge task to deal with the concept of translanguaging in different contexts: for example, through both pedagogical translanguaging and spontaneous translanguaging, and translanguaging for education and translanguaging to promote social justice.

As guest editors, we express our gratitude to the RELC Journal editorial team that has given us such a valuable opportunity to showcase all the important works in this special issue. We hope that the discussion and debate on translanguaging through this platform will enable the advancement of the field of applied linguistics and language education to the ‘trans-turn’ and to move the field forward for an equitable orientation in language education for different stakeholders.