Translanguaging pedagogies and power: a view from the South

Abstract

For more than a decade, many studies around the world have discussed the advantages of translanguaging (García, Johnson and Seltzer 2017), and trans-semiotizing (Lin 2015) practices for pedagogical purposes. They have shown that these kinds of practices can support students to engage with and comprehend complex content, texts and vocabulary, and develop linguistic practices for academic contexts. These practices can also activate the students’ prior knowledge, position them as knowers and enable maximum participation. Furthermore, they can support students’ socioemotional development and bilingual identities by displaying them as capable, resourceful and competent bilinguals in a non-threatening space. In general, they can ensure bilingual language and literacy development. The articles from this special issue confirm, once more, that translanguaging pedagogy can do all of the above. The four articles from this special issue analyze the situation of minoritized students (children or youth) who are often positioned in deficit terms as ‘challenging’ and ‘problematic’ learners who perform poorly on national standardized tests. The studies seek to problematize this, and all of them do it through the notion of translanguaging and the idea that communication not only transcends named languages but also involves diverse semiotic resources (Canagarajah 2013). Ollerhead conducted research at an Intensive English Centre in Sydney, Australia, where all students from a refugee background were emergent bilinguals aged between 13 and 16. He found that translanguaging afforded semiotic mediation to multilingual learners and apprenticed them into the discourse of academic English allowing the meaning making process more inclusive. McKinney and Tyler discuss how moving beyond the constraints of current boundaried language ideologies enables bilingual isiXhosa/English students in a South African high school to use a wide range of resources from their semiotic repertoires for learning science, which does not only include features of local named languages but the registers of ‘everyday’ discourse. Prinsloo and Krause look at a township school site in Cape Town where teachers use translanguaging with their Xhosa-speaking students from intermediate phase classrooms for helping them cope with centralized assessment requirements. Finally, in contrast to the three studies cited above, the last study featured in this special ARTICLE HISTORY Received 7 May 2018 Accepted 24 August 2018