Co-editors’ introduction: Translingual practice: Creating access for those who do not speak the majority language

Abstract

The rich individual and collective resources of a growing multidialectal and multilingual populace impact the roles of teachers, learners and the local and global economy. Dynamic movement between languages and the blending of multiple codes of communication can be naturally occurring (or not) practices in educational as well as workplace settings depending on social and political interests, perceptions of proper and improper communicative conventions, and inclusive or selective orientations towards language planning. There is little doubt that locally or globally, in public or private domains, language has power reflected in competing ideological and theoretical lenses that influence access to and usage of native languages and dialects. Translingualism is a theoretical lens friendly to native, bilingual and multilingual language use that encompasses “translanguaging, translating, and dwelling in borders” (Cushman, 2016, p. 235). Such a view encourages linguistically and culturally diverse individuals, particularly those who do not speak the majority language, to use to the fullest extent possible all of their linguistic and communicative repertoires for social and academic purposes. Such a view also disrupts monolingual bias in research and what Matsuda (2006) referred to as the “myth of linguistic homogeneity (p. 638). Translanguaging theory is examined extensively through research findings presented in language journals and, in the last decade, is a key construct discussed in many articles published in the Bilingual Research Journal. In this expansive discussion, translanguaging, translation and translingual practice invites researchers, practitioners, employers and policy makers to examine contexts where speakers and writers move between language codes and beyond monolingual approaches for improved communicative outcomes. In the case of translation of discourse this means laboring to communicate beyond exact equivalents from one language to another because (re)representing interactional talk, audio/video recordings, writings, or multimedia compositions in transcripts is a political act (Green, Fránquiz and Dixon, 1997) connected to larger historical, social, and disciplinary conventions. Advancing a translingual perspective, then, is to question the separation of languages and to acknowledge and understand difference and hybridization as the norm rather than deviation from the dominant norm. Canagarajah (2013) defines translingualism by “focusing on the prefix.” He probes in to what the prefix “trans-” does to language and posits that “the term moves us beyond a consideration of individual or monolithic languages to life between and across languages” (p.1). In this BRJ issue we provide evidence of traditional as well as shifting conceptions regarding languages in contact, languages, and language users. Volume 42, Issue 2, is organized in three sections of research articles: Bilingual Research and K-12 Education, Bilingual Research and Teacher Education, and Bilingual Research and Adult Bilingualism. A total of eight articles discuss linguistic ideologies and practices in a variety of bilingual contexts: a first grade elementary class, a seventh grade middle school class, a second grader in an after-school program, two pre-service teacher education programs, an in-service teacher education program, a Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, and Asian bilingualism in the labor market.