Abstract
Introduction
In recent years scholarly discussions surrounding translanguaging as theory and translanguaging practice (e.g. Canagarajah, 2013, 2020, 2022), especially in relation to English as an additional language for those whose first language is not English, have been burgeoning (Leung and Valdes, 2019). This kind of engagement in academic explorations and scholarly debate has led to new developments along this line, with increasing numbers of publications for deepening our understanding of language learning, language teaching and applied linguistics as a broad discipline as well as a field of inquiry (Fang et al., 2022; Li and Garcia, 2022; Li and Lin, 2019). Such developments also include the investigation into translanguaging in other language skill areas (Jiang et al., 2022; Sun and Zhang, 2022) and the related teacher education enterprise (Cenoz and Gorter, 2020; Tian and Shepard-Carey, 2020).
I have the honour of having a conversation with Professor Li Wei, well-known for his publications such as the best-selling The Bilingualism Reader (Li, 2022), The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader (Li, 2011), Applied Linguistics, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (Garcia and Li, 2014) which won the 2015 BAAL Book Prize, and The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism which won the 2009 British Association for Applied Linguistics Book Prize. His 2018 paper on translanguaging as a practical theory has become a motivation force that drives this line of research even further. Professor Li is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Taylor & Francis), and Applied Linguistics Review (De Gruyter). He founded several other leading journals in linguistics and education, including the International Journal of Bilingualism (Sage), Global Chinese (De Gruyter), Chinese Language and Discourse (Benjamins), Language, Culture and Society (Benjamins), Educational Linguistics (De Gruyter) and Research Methods in Applied Linguistics (Elsevier). He is Editor of the Wiley-Blackwell book series, ‘Research Methods in Language & Linguistics’ and ‘Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistics’.
I was born and grew up in Beijing, China, speaking Mandarin as my first and only language in my childhood. But I was very much aware that we were a family of Manchu heritage who had lost its own language across the generations – my grandfather knew Manchu and I remember watching him writing Manchu, but my parents’ generation had stopped using Manchu. When I came to England in the 1980s, I immediately became aware of a similar intergenerational language shift in the immigrant and ethnic minority communities, from various ethnic languages to English. I found it interesting that whilst schools and public institutions were primarily concerned about what was assumed or perceived as poor command of English by some members of the immigrant and ethnic minority communities, the communities themselves were more concerned about the apparent rapid loss of their ethnic languages amongst the younger generations who seemed to prefer to use English as their primary language of communication.
Language maintenance and language shift (LMLS) is a field of enquiry within the broad fields of sociolinguistics and sociology of language, established by scholars such as Joshua Fishman. I decided to pursue it for my doctoral studies. I was particularly intrigued by the phenomenon of mixing elements from different named languages in everyday conversational interaction amongst bilingual and multilingual language users and its role in language maintenance and language shift, both from a scientific point of view – language mixing involves choice and decision making, speech planning, cognitive control, etc. – and from a policy and attitude point of view, because the general attitude is that whilst knowing different languages is good, mixing them up isn't; it is assumed to confuse young children or lead to lower school achievement. But language mixing is a key mechanism for linguistic innovation and change. All languages are contact languages and mix elements that can be traced to other named languages. To me, no language could be ‘maintained’ in isolation, and intergenerational language shift is a natural process of social change. The process of mixing languages in everyday social interaction is very dynamic and creative; it adds meaning and colour. So, I was interested in exploring the interactional architecture and how implicature and inferencing work in bilingual interaction, which was my doctoral work, which prepared the ground for my subsequent work on translanguaging.
It must be stressed that none of the people who are actively pursuing translanguaging in their scholarship invented the term. It was Colin Baker who coined it by putting the trans prefix to the term languaging, a term that has a very long history of scholarship, when he introduced Cen Williams’ work in Welsh revitalisation programmes. It referred to an agentive learner strategy of flexible and dynamic use of their linguistic and semiotic repertoire for learning, in response to a more strict one-language-only or one-language-at-a-time monolingual school language policy. The essence of translanguaging is about respecting the learners as bilinguals, not monolinguals.
I had previously been following the scholarship on ‘languaging’, which, as I say, had existed for generations, including in Halliday's work on language as a social semiotic, in distributed language and distributed cognition, etc. Adding trans to languaging caught my imagination as it seems to have done to many others, because it not only captures the dynamic nature of bilingual and multilingual interaction that I am interested in, but also raises some fundamental questions about human cognition and the nature of human languages. My 2018 article in Applied Linguistics presents more discussions of these questions.
It is helpful to point out that translanguaging came out of a very different epistemology from terms such as code-switching, and the majority of researchers working with translanguaging, especially those in the education field, have never used code-switching and the like. It is somewhat unfortunate that the two terms, and others, have been mixed up. I want to repeat that ‘translanguaging has never intended to replace code-switching’ (Li, 2018: 27). Translanguaging scholars agree with many other (socio-/psycho-) linguists that language is more than a code, and there is no switch in the bilingual brain and you cannot switch a language on and off like a lightbulb. But Williams was very clear in his original discussion of translanguaging in the Welsh revitalisation programmes that it was not meant as a descriptive label; translanguaging isn't a thing in itself. It is a practice and a process, a practice of flexibly using elements of one's linguistic and semiotic repertoire for meaning making and a process of constructing knowledge – that is, learning.
As people know from my 2011 article in the Journal of Pragmatics, my initial work through the translanguaging lens was not about language teaching and learning, though I did use translanguaging as an analytic perspective on multilingual and multimodal practices in the complementary schools’ context for ethnic minority children in the UK. I have a particular interest in everyday interactions amongst multilingual youth, including their digital communication. And translanguaging gives me a tool to gain a better understanding of not only their language practices but also their lived experiences. I worked with colleagues such as Angela Creese, Adrian Blackledge, Mike Baynham and Zhu Hua on a major research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, where we investigated translanguaging beyond the education context, in community sports, community business, community legal practices and community arts and heritage, in four diverse cities in England and Wales, which further demonstrated the value of translanguaging as an analytic lens in understanding the social changes in the community and in people's everyday life.
Translanguaging research has gone way beyond the education context, and that is a very significant development. But within the educational context, we have seen applications of the translanguaging perspective to a variety of learning contexts, including English-medium instruction (EMI), content-and-language integrated learning (CLIL), heritage language education, mobile and digital technology-enabled/enhanced learning, etc. Very noticeably in all of these contexts, there are tensions between the so-called policy and actual practice. Translanguaging helps to focus the analytical attention on how the learners challenge the imposed policies or conventional norms in various ways, sometimes very subtly, and free themselves up by drawing on multiple resources they have access to in learning. The impact on not only the knowledge and skills gained but also the subjectivity of the learner is enormous.
More recently, scholars are taking a Global South perspective, using Southern theories, to identify alternative ways of conceptualising language, communication and learning, questioning and rejecting what Boaventura de Sousa Santos termed ‘abyssal thinking’. Ofelia Garcia, with whom I have collaborated over the years, led the writing of a manifesto: ‘Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals’ (García et al., 2021).
I am currently working with Maggie Hawkins on the idea of transpositioning – a process whereby participants break from their preset or prescribed roles and switch perspectives with others, through communicative practices such as translanguaging and transmodalities, by releasing one's self from conventions and fostering a greater sense of possibility, freeing ourselves from habitual thinking, and building empathy for others involved in the process; or in Hawkins’ (2021) words, ‘the multiple and interwoven layers of emplacements and positionings that are entailed in communications which cross and transcend the boundaries that have historically shaped our thinking about the world and its inhabitants’.
The role of the learner's first and prior languages in additional language learning has been a topic of debate for generations, in second language acquisition. To be very honest, I never quite understood why one's knowledge of language(s) that had already been learned in childhood and in families and communities should not be actively exploited as a resource in learning new languages. But it seems that many people still believe that one's first and prior languages are the main source of learner errors in the target language; the so-called ‘transfer’ from L1 to L2 is viewed largely negatively; and the best way to gain proficiency in the target language is assumed to be to forget one's L1. I worked closely with the late Vivian Cook, whose ‘multi-competence’ idea reconceptualised the language learner and advocated an approach to second language learning that aims to develop one's multilingual capacity, not to replace one language with another, and to utilise their communicative repertoire in learning. I can see many commonalities between multi-competence and translanguaging, which I wrote about in my chapter in our co-edited handbook (see Li, 2016).
I am also very concerned that the monolingual approach targets minoritised and racialised bilingual and multilingual students in particular. It has to be said that not all named languages have the same social status. There is an old story about a sixth form (i.e. senior high school) admissions tutor at a high-achieving school (meaning that it sends more students to reputable universities) in England: The admissions tutor brings one candidate into the Head of Sixth Form's office and says, ‘This is xxx. He is very good at Latin.’ The Sixth Form Head says, ‘Wonderful. You can go to Oxford.’ The tutor then brings in the next candidate and says, ‘This is xxx. She's very good at French.’ The Head says, ‘Jolly good. It's a very useful language if you want to study literature or an arts and humanities subject at university.’ The tutor brings in a third candidate and says, ‘This is xxx. Apparently he speaks fluent Punjabi.’ The Head says, ‘Oh dear, what do we do about him?’
But I do want to emphasise that translanguaging is not about simply allowing the students to use their L1s in learning; they do that naturally anyway. It absolutely is about social inclusion and justice. It is about respecting the learners as who they are. We made these points and more in Li and Garcia (2022) in this journal.
The key theoretical challenge is to reconceptualise language, knowledge about language, including language proficiency, and language learning. When people talk about language, we tend to think of named languages immediately – for example, English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil. Named languages are political constructs; they are not realities of the natural kinds. There is a vast body of literature on I-language versus E-languages, and this is not the place to go into that. I pointed out with regard to the Universal Grammar (UG) approach that if UG is supposed to be about all languages as Chomsky seems to want it to be, then it cannot be conceptualised as a natural, biological, genetic endowment, as particular languages, as we know them (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish), are historically evolved social conventions; and if UG is about something entirely natural, biological or genetic, then it cannot be a theory of actual languages that human beings use in society. (Garcia and Li, 2014: 7)
The translanguaging perspective reminds us of the socio-historico-ideological nature of named languages and urges us to take that seriously in researching language learning and lived experiences of bilinguals and multilinguals. The naming of sets of linguistic features as language, or dialect, or something else, has serious social, political and, of course, educational consequences. Bilinguals and multilinguals are absolutely aware of the socially constructed differences between named languages, as part of their sociolinguistic sensitivities. Again, these need to be taken into consideration, seriously, in research design.
There is a confusion between knowledge of language as a universal phenomenon that Chomsky focused his work on and knowledge of named languages. For the latter, Vivian Cook and I, along with others, have argued that it is impossible to have complete knowledge of any named language. I refer you to this video clip from [UK TV series] Blackadder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuDquo76490. In applied linguistics, however, the ‘native speaker’ norm still dominates much of the thinking and research design, even though people pay lip service to the critiques of the ill-thought notion. The ‘native speaker’ is assumed to be monolingual, of course, hence the prevalence in bilingualism research of comparing bilinguals to monolinguals. How many studies in second language learning still compare a learner's language proficiency to a monolingual native speaker norm? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘far too many’.
Language learning is a life-long, long-wide, and life-deep learning experience. I want to remind people of the two basic sociolinguistic principles: no language user uses language in the same way all the time; and no language user uses language in the same way all their life. Applying them to bilingualism, we know that no two bilinguals use their languages in the same way all the time throughout their lives, even if they use the same named languages.
The methodological challenges of doing translanguaging research are many. I have addressed some of them in my recent short article in Research Methods in Applied Linguistics (Li, 2022). Interested readers can read the text in full.
Translanguaging research has always been addressing policy and ideology issues. Policy and ideology contexts differ in different parts of the world. To begin with, all so-called minority languages are majority languages in some contexts; they have been minoritised, and it is a social status thing. Translanguaging scholarship from South America and Africa, and parts of Asia, is growing rapidly. Scholars and practitioners embrace the term readily because it seems so natural to them; their everyday life goes beyond the artificial and political boundaries between named languages. Most significantly, their scholarship brings in Southern theories as well, which will have a fundamental, transformative impact on language research.
It is true, though, that the scholarship on translanguaging in Western countries has always been led by researchers who are either minoritised and racialised themselves or have a professional and personal affinity to minoritised and racialised groups. Their contributions are invaluable.
Translanguaging as a concept has disrupted much of the thinking about language, bilingualism and education. It has also raised some fundamental questions about human cognition and communication. It has encouraged closer and deeper dialogues between researchers from the East and West, North and South, which is a highly significant achievement. As to the impact on policy and practice, including pedagogical practice, we are already seeing some evidence of rethinking and reframing. A key dimension of the translanguaging perspective is to respect context: policy context, historical context, technological and material context, etc. Learners’ as well as teachers’ agency and creativity must be given priority. Dogma has no place in a translanguaging mindset. The language classroom can be and should be a translanguaging space for equitable learning, social inclusion and justice (see Li, 2021).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Inclusion of Identifiable Human Data
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