A state-of-the-art paper on translanguaging (TL) that I co-authored with six other emerging scholars in the field of TL has been published OPEN ACCESS in the top journal TESOL Quarterly. “State-of-the-art” means summarizing the development of a field (e.g., translanguaging) from its inception to present debates/concerns and future research directions. “Emerging scholar” means up-and-coming researcher. “OPEN ACCESS” means free and available to all. In this post, I summarize that paper as first author and give some recommendations for researching translanguaging in educational settings, particularly in primary and secondary education. You can download the OASIS summaries of the paper in Spanish (by Laura Hamman-Ortiz), Chinese (by Zhongfeng Tian), Nepali (by Pramod Sah), and English (by me) below.
Mendoza, A., Hamman-Ortiz, L., Tian, Z., Rajendram, S., Tai, K. W. H., Ho, W. Y. J., & Sah, P. (2023). Sustaining critical approaches to translanguaging in education: A contextual framework. TESOL Quarterly. Early view. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3240
This post will be in two parts. The first part will summarize the key theoretical and methodological points in our article, for those who identify as researchers/scholars of translanguaging. The second part will give my personal opinions on how to research translanguaging in educational settings, based on points my co-authors and I made in the article. In this post, I define “translanguaging” as using students’ whole language repertoires (or all their language knowledge) to teach and learn a target language. You can read about the history of this concept here.
What did our article say?
The beginning of our article calls for greater attention to HOW translanguaging is going on, in the educational context where it is happening, because translanguaging by itself is not necessarily socially inclusive, linguistically equitable, or pedagogically effective. This is often because not all students’ languages enter the classroom on equal footing. For example, in Spanish-English dual language immersion in the U.S., students may translanguage between English and Spanish during “Spanish time,” but speak English only during “English time.” In an English-medium classroom in Norway, students may translanguage between Norwegian and English but not immigrant languages and English. In a class of children on the Greek side of Cyprus, students may be afraid to use Turkish in translanguaging. One might also be wary of translanguaging in an indigenous language revitalization situation, because then how will you create space for that indigenous language to thrive, or ensure students get enough vocabulary in the target language through both immersion and explicit vocabulary teaching? When it comes to EFL contexts, as shown by my co-author Pramod Sah, people tend to translanguage only between the national language and English, and forget local, regional or tribal languages. Therefore:
While translanguaging aims at “liberating the voices of language minoritized students” (García & Leiva, 2014, p. 200), Poza (2017) points out that some studies take up a translanguaging lens without the accompanying critical orientation to challenging and transforming language hierarchies. Some scholars, such as Jaspers (2018), caution against “inflated expectations about the effects of language learning” (p. 5), while others argue that translanguaging may not always be viewed by students as liberating (Charalambous, Charalambous, & Zembylas, 2016). Additionally, Block (2018) points out that education independent from socioeconomic redistribution may not be able to affect the kind of societal change advanced by translanguaging scholars.
Others have questioned the “adequacy” (Guerrero, 2021) or “sustainability” (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017) of translanguaging for all educational situations, particularly those aimed at teaching or revitalizing minoritized languages.
Mendoza, Hamman-Ortiz, Tian, Rajendram, Tai, Ho, & Sah (2023), p. 3
In other words, this paper by emerging translanguaging scholars calls for going beyond celebrating translanguaging to investigating it IN CONTEXT. That is our article’s thesis statement. But what exactly do we mean by this slippery word, “context”? Drawing on the Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) framework about the three levels of context in language use and acquisition—MICRO, MESO, and MACRO—we define context as follows:
The micro-interactional context is constructed through moment-to-moment interactions. Auer (1996) proposed that anything can become a context in interaction, but not everything that has the potential to be a recognized aspect of context will do so… Communication, verbal and nonverbal, must make relevant or invoke contextual factors: in some cases, physical surroundings are recognized while in others they are not; sometimes, age, gender, race, class, or linguistic differences between participants are salient and sometimes they are not. Auer points to John Gumperz’s work on contextualization (Gumperz, 1982) as key to understanding how people make contexts/identities jointly recognized through contextualization cues, linguistic or paralinguistic, with varying degrees of explicitness.
Herein lies the difference between brought along identities that pre-exist the conversation and brought about identities negotiated in the conversation (Zimmerman, 1998). Even if participants have shared knowledge of brought-about identities (e.g., teacher, student, “(non-) native” speaker of Language X, African-American, Muslim, indigenous, Latinx), these identities must still be evoked for social purposes, no matter how implicitly: “turned from invisible (and interactionally irrelevant) dispositions (potentialities) into commonly available grounds on which to conduct the interaction” (Auer, 1996, p. 20).
Mendoza, Hamman-Ortiz, Tian, Rajendram, Tai, Ho, & Sah (2023), p. 5
In other words, you cannot claim that a linguistic identity is relevant in research participants’ interactions without empirically demonstrating in the data that it is! This proof can come from the conversation itself, or triangulated (combined) with other data collected at a different time. This is why researchers need to spend a great deal of time—many months, if not years—getting to know their specific settings and participants, to know what the language use by certain people, at any specific moment, points to in terms of discourses and identities; what brought-about identities are happening. Moreover, researchers should do their best to check their interpretations with participants (e.g., by doing emic interviews, or secondary research about the institution or community) if these interpretations are not adequately supported by the audio- or video-recorded interactions alone.
Then, we come to the MESO-INSTITUTIONAL context.
The second level of context is meso-institutional. School leaders and teachers create their own small cultures (Holliday, 1999), serving as “engaged mediators between policy and practice” (Cohen & Hill, 2001, p. 70) as they interpret federal/state/district policies and societal discourses (Johnson, 2009). Teachers and students also act as language policymakers in curriculum implementation (Bonacina-Pugh, 2020; Menken & Garcıa, 2010). There are school- and classroom-specific language norms, standards, and inequalities that may or may not resemble those in the wider society (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck, 2005). …
Wortham and Reyes (2020) argue that the evolution of the small culture (e.g., a school or classroom) must be studied through ethnography and cross-event discourse analysis to see how ideologies and identities emerge across linked events, which span different timescales from a school day to a course unit to an academic year to a student’s educational career to group histories of educational and sociohistorical oppression (see also Mortimer & Wortham, 2015; Wortham, 2008).
Mendoza, Hamman-Ortiz, Tian, Rajendram, Tai, Ho, & Sah (2023), p. 6
We highlight the necessity of shaping meso-level school cultures so that they develop alternative norms and practices to those that would happen if things were just laissez-faire, or left to be, which would almost certainly not be in favor of societally minoritized students. (This is why my PhD dissertation, which was re-worked into my book, had “laissez faire translanguaging” in the title.) When you let things play out as they would most naturally do, it is not guaranteed that the classroom linguistic social order would be centered around White native speakers; however, it might just reproduce that linguistic hierarchy on another scale (e.g., the class majority’s English being more “standard” than the class minority’s, e.g., if you have a Hawai’i Creole- or Filipino-speaking majority). Because people experience linguistic oppression, they tend to pass it down; therefore, true emancipation involves effectively dismantling such relations of power (e.g., a growing critical consciousness and questioning of English monolingual classroom interaction orders and/or “standard” English). My co-author on the paper, Zhongfeng Tian, invited me to give a talk for TESOL International on how to address such relations of power and effectively dismantle them; the PPT for that talk is here and you can watch the 36-min. talk here.
Now we come to the MACRO-IDEOLOGICAL context, which we are all probably familiar with. For this one, my co-authors and I write:
“Small cultures” do not carry the clout of governments and mass media when it comes to shaping public discourse. These powerful entities often select one particular view that exists among many stakeholders, which is then used to silence dissenting voices (Tsui & Tollefson, 2004). … Valdes (2020) highlights that all language programs must be aligned with educational policies and graduation or credit requirements at the regional, national, or international level, such as high school exit examinations or standardized tests for globally prestigious languages. Teachers and local curriculum designers are not free to simply respond to (perceived) student needs but are constrained by these large-scale forces…
As these macro-level factors impact translanguaging, we recognize that there will be underutilized resources in the classroom: whether these are languages, dialects, cultural forms of knowledge or forms of literacy (e.g., more/less valued forms of language and literacy on the continua of biliteracy, such as decontextualized over contextualized knowledge or print versus oral literacy; Hornberger & Link, 2012), or even more/less “accepted” forms of translanguaging, such as those between English and the national language versus those involving immigrant, regional, or indigenous languages (Beiler, 2021). The reason certain resources are underutilized often has to do with macro-level societal ideologies and discourses.
Mendoza, Hamman-Ortiz, Tian, Rajendram, Tai, Ho, & Sah (2023), pp. 7-8
The rest of the article mainly deals with our own research at the three levels of context, i.e., what we found in our own studies in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nepal, Hawai’i, and the continental U.S. However, as this blog post is about theoretical and methodological issues, I will wrap up this section and move on to how I believe we should research translanguaging.
Lately, everyone has been researching translanguaging, but have we adequately thought about how to research translanguaging—letting the “why” and “for whom” guide the “how”?
In the paper, we argue that research on translanguaging should follow three principles: (1) it should not be apolitical, or ignoring the macro-level context. On the other hand, if you focus solely on the macro-context, you can end up not paying enough attention to specific individuals (students, teachers, researchers) at the micro- or meso-level, in order to analyze how they can better shape what they and others actually experience in the classroom. (And yet, they have to be aware what is going on at the macro-level, because that is likely what will get reproduced if people don’t deliberately shape it otherwise.) Therefore, in our abstract, we state:
In our framework for researching translanguaging in context, we propose three principles. The first principle is obvious: (1) not to do so apolitically. The other two principles describe a synergy between ethnographic research and teacher-researcher collaborative research: (2) ethnographic research can assess macro-level language ideologies and enacted language hegemonies at the micro- and meso levels, and (3) teacher-researcher collaborations must create and sustain inclusive, equitable classroom social orders and alternative academic norms different from the ones documented to occur in context if left by chance.
Mendoza, Hamman-Ortiz, Tian, Rajendram, Tai, Ho, & Sah (2023), p. 2
When I peer review papers about translanguaging, the studies generally fall into three broad categories: (1) mixed-methods, (2) ethnographic or (3) interventionist. The last two are the more common kinds, and the ideal relationship between them is what we describe in the quote above. Briefly, in mixed-methods studies, research participants complete surveys and/or interviews about attitudes towards TL and their own classroom policies and practices. In ethnographic studies, the researcher observes a teacher (or teachers) teach but doesn’t intervene. Because this type of study is longitudinal, once the class becomes accustomed to the ethnographer, what is documented is close to what naturally happens, even if the presence of an observer may have a slight impact on occasion. In an interventionist study, which can be divided into two kinds—activities between university instructors and pre-/in-service teachers in a university course, or activities co-planned with teachers in an actual primary, secondary, or tertiary classroom (“on the ground”)—there is a planned attempt to shape translanguaging in certain ways, in an ongoing process (García, Ibarra-Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020). Of course, participating in any research can raise teachers’ awareness of TL and have an impact.
Let’s start with interventionist studies. If you are shaping TL, it is important to be aware of how you are going to do so. Just promoting any kind of TL, as discussed above, will not be guaranteed to be more pedagogically effective, inclusive, of socially equitable. You need to be on the lookout for what normally happens to know how to shape it further. Look for underutilized resources in students’ translanguaging—whether these be less valued forms of translanguaging, linguistically minoritized languages in the class, less valued forms of literacy, or particular students avoiding using a language because they are second language (L2) users or heritage speakers, or speakers of a stigmatized dialect. As I write in my book (2023) based on my PhD dissertation (2020):
When all the languages in one’s repertoire are legitimized, and one’s ways of speaking those languages are legitimized, and one’s ways of translanguaging are legitimized, only then would one be comfortable drawing on one’s whole language repertoire (i.e. translanguaging) in any situation, including a classroom situation.
Mendoza (2023), p. 177
Apart from shaping translanguaging in directions where it does not naturally occur (i.e., underutilized language resources or practices), how else should we shape it? Well, a common misconception is that translanguaging is just for understanding content, or making ideas accessible to those who would normally not understand if only one language were used—when actually the term translanguaging comes from Merrill Swain’s construct LANGUAGING (Swain & Watanabe, 2013)—which means you use language to think and talk about how OTHER language should be phrased, for an audience. This is called the “metalinguistic” function: you use language to talk about language; you “language around language.” Translanguaging therefore has metalinguistic and not just ideational functions. In addition, as Swain clarified in this recent interview, languaging has another important function besides the metalinguistic function. It is also used to grapple (individually and collectively) with ideas that are still coming into being through dialogue, rather than to express ideas that are already formed. Swain noticed this when working with elders who were struggling with memory loss, and she extrapolated it to students learning in a classroom. (Languaging, as Swain understood it, is related to Vygotskian theories of learning and cogntion, which you can read about here if you are an edcuator; see also Swain, 2009.)
Therefore, in interventionist and classroom ethnographic research, I would urge teachers and researchers to be on the lookout for, and to promote, (1) areas where TL could be expanded further, e.g., underutilized forms of TL such as not only TL between English and the national language but TL involving immigrant, indigenous, and tribal languages, as well as marginalized dialects of all languages, and (2) TL for metalinguistic functions, or increasing language awareness, languaging around languages to figure out how to phrase things, and (3) TL to help people, individually and collectively, grapple with ideas that are still only partly formed, coming into being through dialogue. I would also add a fourth use of TL to be on the lookout for: at AAAL 2023 this past spring, I argued that (4) TL should not just focus on scaffolding content and language knowledge, but on social stylizations that have a positive intent and effect, for example, when teachers in Hawai’i use Hawaiian and Hawai’i Creole (Pidgin) to remind all Malihini (visitors/temporary residents) where they are, and everyone takes up certain Hawaiian and Pidgin words not as disrespectful linguistic appropriation but to honor that locality, whether or not they are Hawaiian or locals themselves. When you have a positive classroom atmosphere due to stylization and other strategies that evoke positive brought-about identities, people invest so much more in the class as individuals (they work harder, they try more); also, they help each other out a lot more, which improves everyone’s learning immensely (Faltis, 2001).
In mixed-methods research (e.g., Mendoza & Ou, 2020), I would urge researchers to design instruments that are “assessment-as-learning” instruments. “Assessment-as-learning” is defined as students themselves assessing how their own learning is going, and that in itself is a learning experience. (This is different from “assessment-for-learning,” in which the teacher assesses how students are doing in order to decide how to go on teaching, or “assessment-of-learning,” which is the final assessment to see how much students have learned.) Working with Shakina Rajendram (another translanguaging researcher who is a co-author on the paper) and Andrew Coombs (who has created many assessment-as-learning instruments for primary and secondary teachers), I created an instrument called the CACTI (Classroom Approaches to CLIL and Translanguaging Inventory) that focuses teachers’ attention on translanguaging in particular classes they have recently taught. This allows them to be their OWN assessors of what goes on in their classes. Through dialogue with the interviewer(s), they can potentially experience changes in how they perceive and act on different situations:
It is a truism that teachers make decisions based on many contextual factors, but this is not the full story. As our teachers’ explanations for their language practices show, there is often no direct causal link between the reported context/situation and the reported action. Rather, teacher actions are grounded in the teacher’s assessment of the context/situation, blurring the line between teacher attitudes and practices. These can involve teachers’ noticing of students’ lack of metalinguistic awareness, and whether it means that students are unready for metalinguistic discussions, or whether that is all the more reason to have them; teachers’ assessment of what counts or doesn’t count as academic language (e.g., hybrid coined terms); whether they are teaching for appropriacy or also agency when asking their students to discuss what language forms they are choosing to put down; whether their class is linguistically homogeneous (e.g., whether those who are proficient in the class majority language still count as linguistic minorities); whether linguistic majorities and minorities should engage in one- or two-way adaptation; how much time they have to do certain activities, and whether these even exist; whether the school language policy is ideal, and if not, whether it is floutable; whether their students are old enough to understand discussions about linguistic inequality in society, and if so, whether such discussions can be recast in language children can understand, and whether it is the teacher’s role to do so; whether language hierarchies that are so normalized as to be invisible should thus continue to be received as normal or whether that is all the more reason to question why we normalize them; and whether teachers should wait for critical topics to explicitly appear in the curriculum or search for relevant connections between the curriculum and critical topics.
Mendoza & Ou (2022), p. 11
What we are saying above is that context is not just the intersection of contextual factors like geographic location, type of school, student demographics, etc., but can be defined as how the teacher perceives the contextual factors and how the teacher acts on them. This is why mixed-methods instruments need to be of the assessment-as-learning kind: to help teachers understand different ways of seeing the context. These ideas are “languaged” into existence through dialogue with researchers or more experienced colleagues or more open-minded colleagues, which can prompt changes in language policy, pedagogy, and classroom interaction at the micro and meso levels.
To sum up: We are not here just to do research. We are here to do research rigorously and ethically. That means doing high quality research that has an impact on practice, in the directions that matter.
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annamend 