Translanguaging: What challenges does it address and pose?
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This presentation begins with an overview of some of the main ways in which translanguaging has been conceptualised in the literature in recent years (Williams 1994; Baker 2003, 2011; García 2009; Creese and Blackledge 2010; García and Li Wei 2014).
In this discussion I identify three broad themes under which translanguaging work has taken place: 1) Translanguaging as a pedagogic tool 2) Translanguaging as a state of personhood and 3) Translanguaging as a moral/social justice issue. From here, I move on to discuss ethnographic data collected from an on-going case study of a primary school in the East of England to explore where languages are positioned within the day-to-day context of the school, and to look at the different ways in which teachers are able, or not, to draw on translanguaging in their classroom practices. I end with a discussion of the different affordances and constraints translanguaging perspectives offer us in terms of understanding and responding to the teaching and learning needs of this particular educational context.