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- Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
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Between question and answer
Author(s): Oliver St Johnpp.: 334–360 (27)More LessAbstractIn Sweden, tutoring in the mother tongue is a form of special educational support to enable pupils with non-Swedish language backgrounds to follow Swedish medium instruction and succeed at school. For pupils who risk failing to meet minimal curricular requirements, it is an educational right. This study investigates tutor-mediated interaction with Somali newly arrived pupils and subject teachers in oral examinations at the ninth year and asks how translanguaging may be relevant to speech performances in this multilingual setting. Both tutors and pupils translanguage advantageously to accomplish pedagogical objectives. Translanguaging proves subject to the personal aspirations of speakers, the organization of interaction as well as wider pedagogical goals. Following Bakhtin, discrepancy between tutor translingual interpretation and the other participants’ interpreted utterances is accounted for as the responsive engagement of a second consciousness that supplements other voices creatively. Central aspects of translanguaging are challenged through a dialogic lens. The implications of treating translanguaging in mother tongue tutoring as dialogic action include positioning translanguaging in an interactionist framework, the importance of a discourse of constraint as well as affordance, a dynamic epistemology and the need for teachers and tutors to be aware of the inherent meaning-making processes in translingual interpretation for pupil assessment.
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Translanguaging revisited
Author(s): Kirsten Rosierspp.: 361–383 (23)More LessAbstractThis article takes a translanguaging perspective and is based on linguistic-ethnographic research. It investigates the participants’ interactional engagement with their linguistic repertoire in two multilingual Belgian primary classrooms and the pedagogical potential of these practices. Analyses demonstrate that teachers can transform translanguaging as a pedagogy into practice by permitting pupils to interact, thereby co-constructing knowledge and valorizing their own and others’ translanguaging. The article also shows how translanguaging practices are influenced by changes in evolving constellations and dynamics of a group, by content, and by socio-situational, cognitive and linguistic factors. At the same time, the article highlights challenges for translanguaging research, policy and pedagogy. With respect to further studies in this area, reflection is recommended on the definition of translanguaging and the integration of speakers’ attitudes in research. In terms of policy, the article considers as to how best to reconcile a multilingual reality with a monolingual educational ideology and reflects on the relationship between macro level interventions and micro-interactional practices. For pedagogy, four challenges are highlighted: the degree of acceptance of translanguaging practices in schools, the commitment to developing the school language for academic tasks, the need to pay attention to the unequal treatment of languages, and the implementation of an innovative approach with a focus on teachers and the creation of a powerful learning environment.
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Multi-modal visually-oriented translanguaging among Deaf signers
Author(s): Karin Allard and Deborah Chen Pichlerpp.: 384–404 (21)More LessAbstractTranslanguaging is often regarded with great skepticism in the context of Deaf education, as an approach that has already been tried, with disastrous results. Already in the 1960’s educators understood the critical importance of allowing deaf children to exploit their full linguistic repertoire for learning: not only listening, lip-reading and reading/writing, but also sign language, fingerspelling, gesture, and other strategies that render language visually accessible. The resulting teaching philosophy, Total Communication (TC), quickly became the dominant approach employed in Deaf education. Yet despite its progressive stance on multilingualism and multimodality, TC ultimately failed to provide deaf students with full access to a natural language. This chapter contrasts the ineffective multilingual practices under TC with characteristically “Deaf ways” of multilingual meaning-making observed among skilled Deaf signers. Excerpts from life story interviews illustrate the impact these practices have for scaffolding learning among Deaf students newly arrived in Sweden. We conclude that prioritizing visually-oriented practices and supporting both students and teachers to become skilled signers offer the best assurance for successful translanguaging in Deaf education without engendering the problems that caused TC to fail.
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¡Luego, luego!
Author(s): Holly Linkpp.: 405–421 (17)More LessAbstractThis article is a reflection on my experience as a researcher and bilingual educator based in the United States who works, teaches and conducts research with the Latinx community in an area with large numbers of Mexican immigrant families. In my reflection, I draw from my work at a non-profit center dedicated to the empowerment of the Latinx community to consider how bilingual community education can serve as an ideological and implementational translanguaging space. I argue that acknowledging ideological and implementational aspects of translanguaging practice and pedagogy can be an early step on the path of social transformation in, for, and with language-minoritized communities. I end by calling for increased collaboration among educators, researchers, and community members in order to develop and explore translanguaging spaces with and for immigrant families, not just in the United States, but globally.
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Entering the Translab
Author(s): Alexa Alfer
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